I don’t know a damn thing about being a parent, really, just like I don’t know how to go about life in general. Most of it gets made up on the fly. I’m a few steps ahead of my kids on this wonderfully mysterious adventure, so I can alert them to some of the pains and pleasures I’ve come across, but the adventure has to be their own. The odds are good that they’ll negotiate it better than I have anyway, so I try to be sparing with my counsel.
It’s a huge temptation to live through your kids. Our love makes us see them as an extension of ourselves, and there’s certainly a sense in which that is true. But failure to let them be other than what we want is a tragic mistake. I try not to picture what my children will become, or even what I want their next move to be (they’re both young adults at this point). I often feel the urge to reach for the tiller, so to speak, but I try to resist.
Maybe I just got lucky, maybe fate thought it best to entrust me with not-very-challenging offspring, but despite this somewhat nebulous notion of parenthood, my kids seem to have arrived at the threshold of the nest as well-adjusted and as well-equipped for adult life as anyone can hope for. That’s more to their credit than to mine, the way I see it.