Twenty-five years ago, after minutes less than fourteen hours from first pang to last push, I held in my arms the greatest gift I have ever been given. Four hours later, placing my newborn babe into by brother’s arms, I said. “It’s anybody’s guess, now: in 25 years he’ll be in some shrink’s office saying ‘…she nursed me too much; …she didn’t nurse me enough; …she forced me to have piano lessons; …she wouldn’t give me piano lessons…’ BUT regardless of the triumphs and the mistakes….he will know that whatever he is, or will turn out to be, he is greatly and deeply loved by me.”
Intuitive as I am, this didn’t take the use of any intuition at all. When we start out as parents, none of us knows how it will all turn out. We do what we
know, we learn new things, and let our hopes (and sometimes our fears) guide us in raising our children.
When my son was three I became a single parent and my dream of how I would parent became a different reality. I knew that the basic tenets of what I wanted to teach him would never change, but the circumstances under which I would be able to do it certainly did. He was suddenly thrust in to the reality of the confusion of two homes, doubt, pain, and the guilt of a young child wondering if it was his fault that Daddy left. To help him through it all, I made up a bed time game we called “Three and Five”. We would each list off the three worst things about the day or the time we had been apart. Then, we would list the five best. Some things were very simple, some emotional, and all were telling. For both of us. After some time, he said that he didn’t need to list three bad things anymore. So we changed it to only one, and three of the Very Best Things. By the time he was in middle school it was the opening discussion over favorite food after a vacation spent with his father. Birthday celebrations always included the year’s One Best Thing.
When he turned eighteen, I asked my son what were the worst and best things about having been raised by me. A chancy thing to do, I realize, but I trusted him to deliver his viewpoint with compassion. Thankfully, the Best was “everything”; the Worst was that I didn’t hold my disciplinary boundaries with him and let him off the hook too easily. I have to say, that was a surprise only in that it was so completely true.
On the occasion of his twenty-fifth birthday, I asked him to explore the parent-child theme with me further. I wanted to know how it all really did turn out. I know what I see in him, but there is always so much more than what we can see as parents, especially as children become adults and settle in to their own rhythm of life. I asked him if he would answer some questions for me in order to write this piece. This is the summary of my interview with him.
My son describes himself as an apprentice blacksmith and a pawnbroker who is happy, extroverted and quirky. I had a certain amount of relief at the word “happy”. It has allowed me to put to rest the nagging maternal question of “Is he really okay?; is he happy?”
The spiritual teaching I gave him was a combination of Vedantic philosophy, Celtic mysticism and First Peoples ritual and ceremony. His godparents are
medicine elders from the Huichol culture. Throughout his childhood he attended
ceremonies, knowing how to receive smudging, listen to the voices of nature and
respect the Earth. At the age of four, he wanted to see “that whole big Mother Nature out there” and we set off for a trip across the country for the summer. Together we learned a lot about the land and the people living on it. We spent a couple of weeks up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia where he was tutored in the art of taking care of the land by his grandfather. Returning to Montessori school in the fall, he would describe my dad to his teachers as someone “who takes care of Mother Earth”. When my son referenced his work ethic in our interview, he acknowledged how it came to him from his G’pa, “I think he took great joy in what he did, not only because it had to be done, but because there was joy in the completion.” He sees it reflected in me, despite his reluctance as a child to see the joy in having completed the task of cleaning his room.
His spiritual path has led him to become a self-described “open-minded Norse Heathen who is following an Earth-based, polytheistic, multi-world culture”. He
acknowledges me for giving him the sense of right and wrong, of honor, of the
idea of what spirituality is, and of putting one’s “all” in to what they do, as
I had learned it from my father. For my son, his spiritual path allows and encourages him to plug in to his Northern Scottish heritage, his sense of place in the universe, his sense of honor, of home, of belonging, and his ideas of how the world is. He summed up his feelings of ease in his spirit, “You should feel like you’re coming home, not going to work.”
I was in sixth grade the first time I read in Gibran’s On Children that they are arrows from which we parents as the bows send them flying in to their future. I don’t understand all of what my son practices spiritually, but I have attended and been honored at his ceremonies and I honor him for following what his spirit seeks. The first time we discussed this, he said he was concerned that I couldn’t agree with it, and my response was that I had taught him spirituality, not religion. He must find his own path, even as I walked my path away from my parents’ very liberal, not church-going but still Christian-based viewpoint. (I am sure my dad was a Druid, though; but that’s another story.) My son is kind enough to translate for me when necessary: “Wyrd would be Karma to you, Mom.” The point for me is that he has found his community and they love and support him as he does them. They have made him their LawSpeaker, which is no surprise since he has always been one to be both energetically calm and fair-minded.
We talked about the love and support that he felt as a child. It was no surprise to me that he did not feel much of it from his father, whom he hasn’t seen since his sixteenth birthday. They talk on the phone for the obligatory special occasions, but there seems to be more effort involved in that than joy received. He says that he has learned to communicate well from the fact that his father did not communicate well at all. He has worked hard to release himself from the idea that money equals love that his father instilled in him. He says he “didn’t get much from him”. I spent his whole life trying to compensate for that with my son. No wonder he sees me as “sometimes overbearing”, it’s hard to be two parents at the same time. He also sees me as “extroverted, multi-tasking, multi-talented, and a wanderer”. Personally, I question the extroverted part, but the rest rings true. May I continue to strive and live up to his expectations of me.
I was surprised when he said he didn’t think he was artistic. Starting at a young age, he was writing, drawing and playing the piano by ear, much to his teacher’s frustration. From my perspective, he is quite talented, but the place and the way for him to express that talent have yet to form in his life. There is time; even though I celebrate here the ending of his child- and young adult-hood, at twenty-five he is beginning his adult life, and there is much of it to live, to study and to grow in to.
As a summary, I asked him the good/bad question, I asked for an over-all assessment instead of the Three-Five lists of his childhood. He said that
overall there was much more that was good than bad. Not surprisingly, the most
confusing was the split between his parents, especially the issue of having a
favorite. His favorite thing was all the traveling that we did and the fact that he and I did “some really cool stuff” and he got to “fully enjoy” those things.
And, what would he change? “Nothing. Sure, there’s stuff I wish hadn’t have had to happen, but if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be who I am now.” He says that attitude is his own, “not particularly brought forward”. I find that interesting because when people have said to me that they wish they knew what I know, or they could be doing what I am doing, my answer is always that if that were to be the case, they would have had to live my life, and that wasn’t always an easy thing to do; but despite the tribulations of my childhood and the trials of my growing in to my adulthood and finding my way, I like who I am. My father said the same thing to me about himself the last time I saw him just before he passed away. The other thing Dad said to me was that my son was “an extraordinary young man” and that I had “done a remarkable job of raising him despite great obstacles”. It was then that I began my letting go of my Motherhood, and placed my son in the arms of his life and his destiny.
