Many of us have scars from childhood. Literally. 🩹 I have one on my eyelid from playing with our dog Sam. 🐕 Two on my forehead after being pushed off the back of a pick up truck (it was parked) by a ‘friend’. 🛻 And one on my lip, falling down a huge sandhill, face first. Playing was playing. 🤷🏻♀️
Last week, after Day 1 at the University of Toronto, our teen came home completely overwhelmed. The campus is pretty much an entire chunk of downtown. My sister suggested that on the weekend we walk the campus with her. Acclimate her. My best friend’s husband had done this with his daughter. I cannot even imagine my parents doing this. 👀 Then again, I barely survived the first two years -- a disaster academically, socially, emotionally.
Joan Didion writes in her memoir Blue Nights:
“...we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say into adult) life, to... let the child go. If a child wanted to try out his or her new bicycle on the steepest hill in the neighbourhood, there may have been a pro forma reminder that [it] descended into a four-way intersection, but such a reminder, because independence was still seen as the desired end...stopped short of nagging. ...we now measure success as the extent to which we manage to keep our children monitored, tethered, tied to us. [In] an op-ed piece in The New York Times...[the author] mentioned the father who had taken a year off from his job to supervise the preparation of his daughter’s college applications. She mentioned the mother who had accompanied her daughter to a meeting with her dean to discuss a research project. She mentioned the mother who had demanded, on the grounds that it was she who paid the tuition bills, that her daughter’s academic transcript be sent to her directly.”
We believe all of this involvement to be “...essential to their survival. We keep them on speed dial...expect every call to be answered, every changed plan reported...fantasize unprecedented new dangers...“It’s different now.” “It’s not the way it was.”
Is it?
Well, right or wrong, we took our daughter. Maybe this is one way we give what we did not get -- as we slowly “let the child go.” 🦋
Comments