"Distinctions have a short half-life, and need to be recreated
from time to time."
...
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters
of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."
... Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
"Therefore a man shall leave
his father
and
his mother
and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."
...
Jesus Christ,
quoted by both apostles Matthew and Paul
This essay,
Father Teacher,
is the companion piece to
There's one immutable, unavoidable, incontrovertible biological fact of
life, which is: if you're successful at having children, then raising
them while working to make things possible for them with which to start
their lives, they will leave you. Unlike other endeavors, there's a
different kind of return on investment here. With the birth of babies,
life demands
a certain focus,
a new responsibility, a selfless
commitment
to the well-being and raising of children, which may or may not match
even your own for yourself. And then, just when they're mature enough
and savvy enough for you to enjoy newly as adults, they'll leave the
home you
created
for them, at least physically if not psychologically too (and it would
be
considered
colloquially to be a failure to launch if they didn't).
There's
nothing wrong
(stay with me on this) with that. I'm neither protesting it nor am I
complaining about it. That's just the design. There's only a sense of
something's
wrong
if you haven't factored it in from the get-go. Having children for me
was carefully considered / meticulously planned ahead of time. I knew
going in that at some point soon,
my life
would no longer be my own. That's what surely and inevitably would
happen - unless I had abjectly refused to be responsible for my own
offspring. I was ready, set up, locked and loaded, prepared for what was
to come. But for the stage I entered twenty years or so later, I
realized I wasn't quite so prepared. Taking on / starting
parenting,
was relatively
easy
for me. The letting go /
completing
it, wasn't quite so
easy.
What I got clear on is that letting go and
completing
as "not
easy"
was something I added - an
attachment
essentially, to a beautiful,
marvelous,
wonderful
chapter of life, the chapter titled
"Parenting".
And you graduate (if you will) from that particular
chapter, by giving it and all of its sweetness and all of its
wonder,
away. That's
the play
of it.
The paradox
of it is that it's essential to give it away in order for it to be
totally accomplished and
complete.
In the other areas of life, you get to keep that which you want by
committing
to keep it; in this chapter however, you get to keep that which you
want when you give it away. Its test for success ie its
litmus test
is more than you were able to
create
great lives for your children, but rather that you were able to let
them go.
The question is: would you rather be someone for whom that ability is
there only occasionally by itself ie some of the time, or someone who
has
discovered
how to
create
it for themselves whenever it isn't there? In both, the outcome is the
same: your children will leave you. But in the latter, you hold
the power.
That's not a new
observation.
Yes it may be
transformative,
but I've noticed that anything
transformative
only persists as long as I
create
it persisting. Left to its own devices, it will surely,
inexorablydisappear.
The stage I entered twenty years or so later, proved to me exactly how
attached
to my children I had become. Letting them go wasn't going to be
easy.
Yet crossing that Rubicon of
attachment
and letting them go, was appropriate, called for, timely. Was it
easy?
Not a
chance
- not until I
re-created
it for myself as appropriate, called for, timely / not until I
reminded myself it was appropriate, called for, timely.
Now obviously, being a parent goes on forever. I have children, so I'll
always be a parent. That can never change. What does change (indeed,
what must change) is my relationship with my children. The
best way to articulate this may be to distinguish it as transitioning
from being a father to being a teacher.
