We’re in that awkward, oxymoronic phase of parenting.
Our children are legal adults.
Piper, our 21-year-old daughter, is a busy girl. She’s a junior in college with a full class load. Plus, she’s working two jobs. We don’t get to see her as often as we have since she came into our lives, but she still makes a point to come have dinner with us at least once a week.
Sunday night after dinner, she and I sat on the sofa to talk about her life and future plans. She was quiet after she told me she will graduate in December. I had thought she had a full year of college left. We talked about her plans to take the LSAT and go to law school — and I could see in her eyes that something was bubbling underneath it all.
She started crying — and know that I’m telling this story with her blessings. She leaned over on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her. Through her sobs, she choked out, “I’m just growing up too fast. I’ll graduate college in December. Then go to law school. Then work for every day till I’m old?”
I didn’t think that way when I was 21.
We sat there for a while and I just held her, knowing that those sitting-on-the-sofa-comforting-my-girl days are few and far between.
Finally, I said, “Well, it could be like that, but it doesn’t have to be. There are options. Adulthood doesn’t have to be a clear and clean trajectory arc. In fact, it rarely is — and it can be fun and surprising, if you make it that way. You can do lots of things. You just have to make them happen.”
We talked about ways that a person can take more control of life choices, being deliberate about what happens next, rather than just going along to get along.
Parenting comes with so many fine lines. Knowing when to get involved and when to sit back quietly is excruciatingly difficult. I’m a big fan of fun and adventure and realize that, through the years, I may have pushed my daughters too much toward my own interests. I’m trying hard not to do that anymore, but sitting there with her, I decided that now was a great time to talk about other possibilities.
We started looking at the Peace Corps website and all the opportunities there. We talked about what experiences she would need to have to be an English teacher somewhere else in the world.
I told her about BUNAC, a work/travel program that dates back to the Kennedy era when, as its website says, “Change was in the air. Two students understood that crossing borders had the power to break down barriers and build cultural connections. They chartered a plane, started running trips for other students and BUNAC was born.”
Friends from the UK and my brother have participated in BUNAC. It’s not so much a program as a means for college students and recent college grads to apply for and earn permission to work legally for a limited time in another country — including the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.
Thirty years have passed since I taught English abroad — and the experience still has a profound and positive effect on my life and perspective. Whether she will choose to do any of those off-the-beaten-path kind of experiences remains to be seen. I can hope she does, but she’s the one who has to make the decisions.
As a child, I didn’t have the opportunity to travel much. I wanted to provide that chance for my own children. I wanted them to see the world. We made various choices and sacrifices to travel a lot as a family. I never anticipated that our doing so would make my own children less hungry for travel, but it did. They appreciate travel, but not in the same way that I did. They see it as a given.
What I’ve realized is that parenting has a lot of levers.
At this point, it reminds me of a combination of a quote by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and that early computer game called “Lemonade Stand,” which proved that whatever choices you made resulted in a different outcome on the lemonade stand’s success. Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.”
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