March and April bring a veritable frenzy of birthdays in our family. We haven’t even recovered from Christmas and the next round of presents and celebrations are upon us. For my 1980s babies, their 2010 birthdays land them all squarely in their twenties; low, mid, high. This makes me officially old and them, inescapably adult.
But they were not always so. I was reminded of this today when I received an email from a friend. She always writes with acerbic wit and opened “God, it’s hard to be you!” and continued,“I’m stuck in suburbia with grunting adolescents and a bad haircut”.
The fact is, I have survived the grunting adolescents and bad haircuts will come and go. The odds are better for me now. I am free to come and go as I please and mercifully, grunting is no longer a preferred form of communication. Nevertheless, my adult children remain my children and still tug at the heart-strings and the purse-stings. But they’re adults. Separate. Autonomous, mostly.
I am truly grateful that they are not being sent off to fight in wars like generations of young people before them. I am perplexed by the complexity of their lives and hope they can find joy in simple pleasures. I am proud of their endurance and persistence. They are all good people. Amongst other things, I love to hear one sing, one laugh and the other to tell me about the weather.
And yes, I’ll always feel protective. I’ll worry and I’ll hope for the best for them. I can’t change the biological fact that I’m their mother and they’re my offspring and for me, a vested interest comes with the territory. But I can recalibrate my involvement and my proximity. I guess Sweden is about as far away from Australia as you can get! I love not knowing everything they’re up to. And I’m sure they love that too.
Good luck with the recalibration, though I suspect the readjustments are neither as scientific nor as mechanical as that term makes them sound.
ReplyDeleteMy mother gave me a slightly dodgy flip-chart of questionable quotations a year or two ago; I wonder whether she'd read quite all of them, given the language in a few. One quote has a 1950s couple smiling out at you, saying "Children are a blessing - you never know when you may need a blood transfusion or a spare kidney." For those of us who live in an offspring-free middle age, the prospect of not having a compatible organ available in our time of need may not be such a dreadful one, compared with the exertions of loving the adult offspring. Maybe their motto is "parents are a blessing - you never know when you may need a babysitter or a ride to the airport." (Though Scandinavia-based parents may be the ones begging for airport runs, especially if the kid gets custody of the car keys while you're away!)
I'm very glad that I left home at 18 to study and to live in various forms of "household" with people who were not family. I'm not sure it made me a better sister or daughter to the people who ARE family. But it certainly reduced my social and relational clumsiness by several orders of magnitude during my 20s. I wonder what today's stay-at-home 20-somethings will be like in their 50s... Perhaps having their parents disappear to the other hemisphere will be their salvation.
Ooooh. How slow am I? ejswa? *slaps forehead* Was wondering who the literate profound one was. Delightfully neutral connection - and I suspect her mother did read the calendar before she passed it on, despite the language! It's certainly the element of being childless that will keep me awake at night in my twilight, transplant desperate years!
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