My mother had a plaque she'd hang in each of the homes we lived in. I no longer remember the background graphics (probably some cheezy sunset), but I do remember what it said:
There are two things we can bequeath to our children: one is roots; the other, wings.
When it came time for me to make that weird-ass decision to become a parent sixteen years ago I felt constant guilt for all the things I did provide my child. Am I giving him too much? Should I be letting him learn this particular lesson on his own? I should quit buying those ten cent Matchbox cars at Goodwill; he might get greedy. I'd feel guilty for what I could not provide him. Thought bubbles would percolate to the conscious level constantly: Real families do not live in a one-room studio apartment, nor do they delight in the fact that the one extra non-room (a narrow walk-in closet) will fortuitously double as the baby's room. Good parents do not buy bunkbeds in order to share them with their children. Good parents don't have to fill out piles of paperwork each new school year to prove they're unable to pay for lunches. But I tried hard to remember the timeless words on my mother's plaque and I tried to relax into my parental role.
My curly haired tot is now a good 3/4 of a foot taller than I stand. He's got sideburns, for petessake. He's not finished being my child, nor is he done being A child. Nor am I done parenting him. We still have driving lessons to screech through. We still have PSATs to decipher. He has his basic form and personality; these next few years are just the final brush strokes to the canvas he will be when he leaves my house for his next set of adventures.
The thing is -- in many ways he is who he will be. All these years I have been tending to him like one of my garden perennials: nutritional feedings, consistent watering, weed pulling, and the little seedling starts growing his own set of roots. They weren't something I could forceably attach to him; they just sort of got there on their own each time we met up with an encounter.
The days I let him figure out his own way to school because my two wake-ups and an alarm clock didn't outperform his sleepiness from staying up too late the night before? Scrrrrich! His tiny feeler roots grew millimeters, barely noticeable but there they were.
We've had discussions about trying to have a balanced life and how anything - drugs or alcohol or shopping or a friend or reading or fishing or cars - can so easily tip the balance out of whack. Little roots grew.
And when I embarrassed him beyond belief yesterday at Best Buy for speaking to both a clerk and a manager about my opinions re: what the Geek Squad's repair team did and did not do to his broken Ipod, he didn't really want much to do with me the rest of the afternoon. But on the way home I explained why I felt the way I did, I apologized for having embarrassed him, talked about why I expected integrity from those people, and why "it's fixed, isn't that's whats important?" really was not the point. And his roots grew.
At sixteen he has the majority of the roots he'll need for early adulthood, but he desperately wants his wings, this boy. He wants to work so he can save money to buy nifty cars and gadgets for the cars and tinkertoys for the gadgets for the cars. He takes pride in the fact that his friends all think he's weird because he is the only one among them that actually likes to save money. Now - I'm not sure where his joie de savings came from exactly but - it heartens me to know that he's got a remarkably steady head on his hormonal shoulders.
De-cocooned, he has discovered friendships worth maintaining and, together, they fly hither and yon each day. I'm told the very basics ('we went to the mall/park/garage'); I'm told all he wants me to know.
He wants dry wings. He wants a good clean breeze and a steady lift. And one day - probably sooner than I'd like, like most creatures in the natural world and just like the way it should be, he'll fly away from me.
