Every time I visit him he's farther away, each time a longer distance.
First he moved to a nearby town and I visited him there. Then he moved
farther away to an entirely different part of the state and I visited
him there. Then he moved even farther away to an entirely different
state and I visited him there too.
It's arguably in being
a parent
myself that I realize how much
my own parentsloved
me. Any distance between us, is too far. In his case, I'm in California
and he's in Michigan. That's about nine hours total flying time on two
non-direct flights within the continental United States. In the case of
my parents,
I'm in
Napa Valley, California
and they were in
Cape Town,
South Africa.
You can't be farther apart physically than that on
Planet Earth.
The shortest way there is to drill down until you emerge
on the other side. Easy weekly road trips are out of range. At least in
his case we can still meet up in about half a day.
It's a bag of mixed blessings, this role of being
a parent.
He's not only
someone I love
a lot. He's also someone I can hang out with. I respect him. I admire
him. I like the way he lives his life - which is to say, I like the way
he plays this game called Life. I like the way he thinks. I like the
way he takes his
health
and his work seriously. I like the way he uses his iPhone to browse the
internet to expand his knowledge. I admire the way he cooks and does
his laundry.
Here's the thing: if you get your job done, your
children
will leave you. They'll be independent enough to take on Life on their
own terms - wherever that may be. What's unavoidably bittersweet is in
your doing what's best for them, you'll lose them - that is to say, in
doing what's best for them, they'll become independent and move on, and
you'll lose easy proximity to them. That's a
rough dichotomy.
And then again, now that I'm getting to know what that's like for me, I
realize what it must have been like for
my own parents.
But
baby birds
must flit the nest. And flit they will. It's all in the grand scheme of
things.
When we're in a conversation (about anything - any conversation really)
I don't mind whether he agrees with me, or not. Really I don't. That he
shares
my opinions
is unimportant to me. Really. That he agrees with my positions is
unimportant to me. Honest. I'm not looking out for that. But what I am
looking out for is that he learns to think for himself. If he offers
his own
point of view
which is different than mine, I'll ask questions designed to have him
expand his ideas and
his opinions,
rather than confront him by stating my differing
opinions
as a challenge to his. And always (in the end) I'll take time to ask
him if he can differentiate between
his opinions
... and who he really is. That's a little harder. Being my son carries
no weight with that. It's not transmitted by a genetic code. Neither is
it a legacy he'll inherit from me by default. It's something he'll have
to figure out for himself - that is, if he does figure it out at all.
Indeed being my son probably does assure us that at least some of
our opinions
will match. But whether or not he gets who he really is (just because I
say I do) is another
order of business
entirely. I have
the space
for him to get that, or not. And whether he does or he doesn't, either
way I won't
love
him any less or any more because of it. Sometimes in our conversations,
he's further from getting it. Sometimes he's closer to it. And one of
the many things
I love
about him is that he's willing to inquire, to look, to
discover for himself.
In that way and others, we're a lot alike. The further he gets, the
farther he goes.
*
Further or farther?
further: figurative distance (further research
is needed)
farther: physical distance (farther down the
road)