As Time Goes By

I do love re-reading old posts. My, how much has changed, and how much hasn't. My kids are all grown up now, my last baby getting ready to graduate high school and move on to college. Though I'm not entirely confident that he'll finish. If I judge by his two older brothers' track records, he might not last through his first semester. Of course, he has had the perspective of seeing the trials and tribulations of the older two, and his parents' reactions to them. While I believe it makes him a bit more perceptive, at least to the tension in the house, I wonder what kind of impact it has.

We never learn by osmosis, of course, and I am hoping that what he's seen doesn't create additional pressure on him to make the "right" decisions. We have learned along with our growing boys that we have to let them steer their course and maybe we let our own ambitions for them get in the way of that. It's very difficult to remove our frames of reference and understand that their childhood experience wasn't ours, so their life desires are influenced differently. Writing that down seems a bit ridiculous, and extremely surprising that it wasn't just inherently known. I mean, of course their experience is different and of course that will influence what they want from life, what success means to them, what will bring them happiness. It's easy to see that - now. But the everyday motion of guiding their futures didn't make that apparent, at least not for us. It's no wonder that the baby of the family is seen as the favorite, the one that gets away with murder, privy to the laissez-faire style parenting so typical of the position. As we witness all of the struggles and difficult decisions of young adulthood, boys finding their way, we begin to find fault in all that we did as parents, where we went wrong, what we could and maybe should have done better.

With this newfound realization, along with the feeling that we still don't know what would have been the best choices,we find ourselves hesitant to offer strict guidance, and even more hesitant to offer advice that teems with our hopes and dreams for his future, lest he feel pressured to follow it to please us instead of himself. We haven't pushed him to take a rigorous academic schedule so that he could have the best chances and best college options. We haven't even pushed him to attend - maybe he should take a gap year or maybe college isn't really for him. And maybe all of this is the wrong parenting still. We won't know until it has played out and possibly not until he is a parent himself. I hope that we are in the most difficult years, but I won't be too surprised if they aren't. Life just kind of works that way, doesn't it?