All grown up, but still in our house ...

Does anyone have advice about what rules to set for an 18-year-old "child who's not a child anymore" living at home? It's a strange thing having a daughter who's an adult but who still lives with us, and therefore can't come and go at all hours of the night. I'd love to hear what other people have done.

Why we're parents ...

Why am I a parent? I mean this in a general way. Why are any of us parents?

Do you ever ask yourself this question while you’re lecturing your child about leaving dirty socks on the floor? Why do we commit our lives to the pursuit of raising children? It’s a lot of work!

Maybe if we keep our eye on the big picture, we’ll better understand the small, messy, complicated picture that we deal with on a daily basis. Here’s my philosophical, over-thought explanation for why we do what we do.

We’re here as tour guides to help our children acclimate to the world.

It’s not that we’re wise or knowledgeable about a lot of things. We’re bumbling through life just like everyone else. It’s just that we’ve been here for a long time and we generally know the terrain. We know the best restaurants, which seedy areas to avoid and how to say “Where’s the bathroom?” when you really need to go.

Valuable information for a newbie to the world.

It’s like when you go to another country and a tour guide tells you, “Don’t drink the water, you’ll get sick.” That information saves you a lot of tummy aches.

So every time we nag about the socks left on the living room floor, we’re really telling our children, “In this world, people like cleanliness.” “You’ll be better accepted if you know how to pick up after yourself.”

Okay, we’ve figured that out.

Here’s the hard part. Why are we parents once our children have fully acclimated to the world? What’s our role then?

Parents often try to act like tour guides long after their children already know the surroundings.

“Don’t drink the water. It’ll make you sick,” we say.

“I know, Mom,” our children answer with an eye roll.

The problem is that we’re kind of confused. We don’t understand why we’re parents anymore. If we’re not passing along information, what good are we?

Here’s my theory. We’re here as confidence boosts for our children.

Once our children are fully acclimated to the world, they become part of the massive, homogenized crowd that is society. They fit in. They blend in, you could say. And in doing so, they often forget all the reasons that they stand out from the crowd.

It’s kind of heartbreaking to think that a stranger would pass our child on the street and not realize that they’re the sweetest, cutest, most brilliant person in the world.

You’ve heard the saying, “A face only a mother would love”?

We’re here to remind our children that no one has ever meant more to anyone than they did to us when they first showed their tiny, wrinkled faces in the world. Seeing them for the first time was like meeting Madonna, Elvis and Ghandi all at once. Our children are like rock stars to us.

We think they’re magnificent.

Who else but a parent will go on a shopping spree just because you’re coming for a visit? Who else can sense when you desperately need a care package?

Children need parents in the world to remind them of their uniqueness. We’re parents because we know that our children are special. What better reason is there?

Our children are "other people"

It was the day I dropped off my teenage daughter for a disciplinary class that it hit me. Hard.

Our children are other people. You know, just like all the other “other people” we deal with all day.

After giving birth to them, we see our children as extensions of ourselves. We cuddle them, coo to them and nurse them. They have our noses, our spouse’s ears. They drop their “r”s the same way we did when we were little.

Don’t be fooled. Our children are not us. They’re not connected to us. They’re not our twins. They’re just other people that we happen to love as much as we love our own left feet.

They will go out into the world and do what “other people” do. Whatever the heck that may be.

We spend our lives in fear of the actions of “other people.” We hear about them on the news. Other people do so many things. They save trapped animals. They go to the park. They kill people. They cheat on their wives. They let us cut in front of them in traffic. We often feel at their mercy. They’re unpredictable. Unknown entities who make life stressful.

We watch and wait for them to do something that might affect us in some way. It’s the same with our children.

As “others”, they make their own decisions. As much as we guide, teach and set up strong boundaries based on discipline and love, we can’t control what they do. We can’t control them anymore than we can control any of the other “other people” we encounter each day.

Confused? Me, too.

Back to my teenage daughter. She’s sweet, beautiful, from a “good home” if I do say so myself. Taught the lessons of life. Disciplined so much in these past few years. Loved even more.

And yet, here I was driving her to a disciplinary class for a stupid decision she made that so many “other people” make. And I don’t understand her any more than I understand those other people.

Her decisions feel as foreign to me as does the idea of having an offspring whose age includes double digits.

So I sit in the car with my “other person” and wonder how to make her an extension of me again. How to meld and blend. Why can’t the bond always be like superglue? Why can’t we share one brain and one heart?

Or at least exist within the same universe of reason and responsibility? Why must she be so “otherly”? So otherworldly?

It’s with great helplessness that I realize my own limitations.

My “other” has choices in life. I can lay out the options, spell out the consequences and offer love and advice. Then, my “other” gets to choose between Option A, B or C. One thing I can’t do is make the choice for her.

Another thing I can’t do is accept the guilt for her choices. Because they’re hers. The choices of another.

So I send my other person out into the world to blend with the rest.

Maybe my best option is to introduce my other person to some other “other people” of quality. People who do the good things I hear about on the news.

Saving animals, etc.

Let those “others” have their influence. There may be no other possibility.

Drawing out your inner artist

This weekend, someone was talking about the fact that if you go into a kindergarten classroom and say, “Who can draw?”, every hand goes up. “Who can sing?” Again, everyone raises their hand. It's a classroom full of creative minds.

Go into a 7th grade classroom and ask the same question and hardly any hands go up.

By adulthood, only Picasso will raise his hand when asked, “Who can draw?”, and even he might question whether he should. What if someone says he stinks?

What happens in those years between kindergarten and middle school that stifles our self expression? Somewhere along the way, we learn that if we’re not the best at something, we just shouldn’t do it at all.

Whatever takes hold of us, it’s completely ingrained by adulthood. We would never think of drawing a picture and showing it off unless we believed it worthy of a museum. Sing in public? Not unless we’re Mariah Carey.

At some point, we start doing things for other people more than for ourselves, and we stop doing anything that anyone might criticize.

I thought about this the other day when my daughter spent a half hour forming a turkey out of a hand print, then wrote the words, “Happy Thanksgiving!”, at the top. Obviously, this was a decoration for the holidays. I suggested she hang it on the wall. She said, no, she’d just put it away in her room.

I was confused. Why would you make this picture unless you wanted to show it off? She shrugged and went on to her next project. For her, the joy was in the making of the picture. She’d done it for herself.

How often do we adults ever take time to make something just for the joy of making it? We’d consider that a complete waste of time.

The question is, what can parents do to make sure their children are still the ones who raise their hands in 7th grade when asked if they can draw, dance, sing or write? Maybe it’s as simple as this - we should stop attaching praise and grades to every act of self-expression. We’re so quick to say, “That’s a beautiful picture!”, “Wow, you’re getting really good at drawing!”

Maybe we should just say: “Did you enjoy drawing that turkey? What made you think of it? What do you like about turkeys?”
It also wouldn’t hurt if we set a good example by writing a poem just because we’ve had a spontaneous thought, or doodling a funny image that pops into our heads, or dancing around the living room just to be silly.

For most of us, this isn’t in the schedule, but wouldn’t it be fun to pencil it in? And while we’ve got that pencil in our hands ...