Thoughts On Children

My grandson, Aubrey, and his wife, Becky, both of whom are in the Airforce currently stationed in Hawaii, are visiting this week. I picked them up at the airport in the early morning and after breakfast dropped them off at the car rental office so they could pick up their wheels of “independence.” I say independence because they have a long list of places to go and things to do, so I will probably only see them a few times during the visit. One place we are most likely to visit together is the Washington Park Zoological Gardens. (One has to check in to see how all the “relatives” are doing, you know!)

In between my attention to emails and other computer activities I began to think about children. As I did, I immediately focused my mind on one of my favorite photos of my son and daughter when David was five and Jennifer was two. It is this same photo that most often comes to my mind when I think of them. There is something so innocent, carefree and appealing to our children at those early ages. All their dreams are just beginning to take shape and the most important thing they have to do is have fun with their imaginings.

I cannot speak for all parents, of course, but I think many of us always hold on to a favorite image of our children, one in which they always are children. There is no intent to not recognize that they have grown up and are now living their own lives, probably with their own children and the memories that are just beginning to be stored away for later recollection. Rather, it is more the realization of how life unfolds from childhood, to adult, to parent, grandparent and maybe to doting patriarch or matriarch of a proud family. As I ponder this wonderful family pattern I am reminded of a favorite passage by Kahlil Gibran:

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

It takes great effort sometimes to really let our children go, to let them grow and become who they are destined to be, with their own set of values and priorities. Hopefully, some of the positive efforts we make as parents will assist them in the process of building the foundation for their lives. Remember, They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. As such, they have their own dreams from which they will build unique lives that bring blessings to all of us that would not exist without them.

Are We Children of Our Children?

I had one of those WOW moments the other day as I was talking with a long-time friend about our relationships with our children. She had just returned from visiting her daughter, who is a very successful professional. She had experienced a lack of clarity in her conversations with her daughter. The daughter seemed impatient and unwilling to talk about the unpleasantness both felt.

My friend called me, first to inquire about my well-being, since she was aware of the difficulty I was having with my own children, especially my son. Then she shared her own experience with her daughter and asked the question, rhetorically, “Why do they act this way toward us?”

As we mature and as our bodies change, becoming a little less agile, hearing a little less clearly, and our responses generally a little slower, we may be seen differently by our children. While we were raising them we may have been seen as all-powerful, all knowing and as a protecting refuge from the difficulties of life. Now, suddenly, our own vulnerabilities are exposed. Where we may have been seen as strong, now we appear weak. Where we appeared to be wise, we may now be seen as foolish. Our children may not be prepared for this. Unconsciously, most children realize the time will come when their parents begin to decline in some ways. I suspect, however, that there are few who are really ready for it when it happens.

As I look back on the last years of my mother’s life, especially after I had asked her to move in with me so I could better provide some care where she needed it, I now realize I was unprepared for the experience. My sense of who she was and how she had managed her life and provided for her children turned out to be quite different from who she was now. Or, was it that I just didn’t know her as I thought I did? Without attempting to judge her or myself it is clear that I was impatient because she could not seem to respond as I expected her to. She was not able to do or be at that late stage in her life the same as in younger years. I was not clear about these changes and I just did not manage well the effect that brought about in our relationship.

There is an inverse scale to the relationship between adult children and aging parents. As the child matures into his or her own life the parent is beginning to experience a decline. At the crossing point of these two lifelines everything is still copasetic. However, at the same time our experiences begin to grow apart and differences begin to appear. I do not think this is as fully understood by either the parent or the child as may be necessary if challenges in the relationship are to be successfully handled.

That WOW moment that I experienced was this realization: Our children suddenly feel they are “raising” us and they are impatient because we are no longer, in their minds, who they thought we were. We are not perfect. We are not invincible. Even though we may be functioning perfectly well for our own lives, we may not be seen that way by our children, who now have their own value system, their own priorities, and their own needs for fulfillment. These will inevitably be different from our own.

For me, it was a moment of enlightenment that helped me to understand not only my relationship to my mother, but also my relationship to my son. Though I cannot be certain as to what is going on in his own mind in this regard, it seems clear to me through our discussions (or lack of them), that the measure of his impatience and critical view of my behavior is largely influenced by the “sudden” realization that I am not who he thought I was. I am in some degree of natural decline, which he may not be prepared for or willing to accept. My own values and priorities may not be what he assumed they were. It is also true that his emerging values and priorities are not what I assumed they were. This changes the whole dynamic of a relationship. For the relationship to survive there must be a willingness to consider these possibilities and to find ways to communicate about them. As these differences develop without the benefit of conversations we may be getting farther apart than we realize until some strategic event explodes in our faces.

We need to understand the broader issue of individual growth and our growth as a society. If our children do not surpass us in their understanding, in compassion and in creativity, then our whole world experiences the beginning of a decline. As parents we must let our children be who they are becoming. The major period of our influence over them may well be past and they must build upon the foundation they have been given. At the same time our children must realize that we, as their parents, are now in the process of taking on the next phase of our lives—enjoying the fruits of our labors, seeking new freedoms to do things differently than we might have been able to do as we raised our children.

Just because we are 60, 70 or 80 years of age or older, we are not necessarily through learning or growing or enjoying life. We may simply be finding different ways of doing that. Certainly our relationship as children and parents can continue to develop positively into these new life conditions. It does require an awakening individually to who we are becoming and who our parents/children are becoming and a willingness to accept those changes.