Dear Parent,

Please. Relax. Let go. Open your hand so I can grow.

I want the freedom all children deserve.

Please, emancipate me from the expectation of meeting your adult, ginormous needs.

Your need-to-succeed as a person, a parent, all centered on me, is a burden far too heavy for me to carry.

I am a child.

I cannot deliver you from the pain of the unfulfilled expectations of your own childhood. 

My childhood is not a recovery act for yours.

When you regard me as proof that you, the adult, have made it, we get entangled in ways that trip both of us up, and confounds us both.

Such covert expectations kills the joy that can unite us.

We are separate people.
It’s been that way from the very beginning. I know it and I’ve known it almost from the very beginning.

How come you don’t?

Why is this so much more difficult for you than it is for me?

While you regard me as an attachment, an extension of yourself, a banner announcing your success or declaring your failure, things get rough for both of us.

I am your child. I am not a trophy. I am not a ticket to greater happiness – although I do want you to be happy. I am a child. I am not endowed with special powers to make your life meaningful.

Of course I am special, and I am special to you, uniquely gifted, endowed with a God-given calling – but I am also, in many ways, just like millions of other children.

We both must remember this. Please don’t make me into something I am not and cannot become.

I am as unique as a proverbial fingerprint, AND, as common as any child ever born — ALL AT THE SAME TIME. I am a unique painting, a loving product of the Divine Hand – and yet, and yet, I am baptized into human condition, and as much like all humans as any – ALL AT THE SAME TIME. 

While you expect more than I am designed to deliver – we both feel the pressure and miss out on the real miracle we can know as parent and child.

With deep, appropriate love,

Your Child

My daily parenting challenge which I hope you will also adopt…

• Be the adult you’d want your child to become. 

• Negotiate deals, resolve conflicts, compromise on disagreements, in exactly the manner you want your child to emulate when he or she is an adult. The most powerful learning happens by watching – and by much more than watching. Such living will transform you, and the transformation you undergo will transform your family. 

• Use money, save money, leverage all your resources in exactly the manner you hope your child will one day utilize resources. Attitudes leak. How you behave becomes the norm. 

• Treat your parents in exactly the manner you hope your children will treat you in your advancing years. Modeling endures. 

• Love and serve your brothers and sisters so your children will have absolutely no ambiguity about what love looks like in immediate and extended families. Authenticity prevails. 

• If you want your child to be a reader, be one yourself. It might not “take” in the immediate, but chances are it will in the future. Some things take time, not nagging. 

• If you want your child to be well-mannered, courageous and kind, allow your every interaction with lover, friend, or foe, to be well-mannered, courageous, and kind.

May you….

• Be unafraid, unafraid to dream great dreams for your life and to work every day at making it exceptional. World changing and exceptional people do not wake up one day and discover they are key figures in the betterment of the world. They work at it every day. They work at it for many years before it becomes a reality. They design blueprints that stretch years ahead.

• Be adventurous and embark on some new area of discovery, be it some area of personal research or on some literal journey to a new place. May you go somewhere you have heretofore been reticent to venture. In so doing, may you find some degree of fulfillment or even of healing, healing you may have not known you needed.

• Love in ways you have not loved before. May you reach out in fresh ways to those whom you have loved for years in ways that surprise you and others. May you also find love for the stranger, the men or women whom you have previously excluded from your social circles, the “them” and “those people” – may they hear from you (and from me) in ways none of us expect.

The Mercury

Written and published with permission – I learned a long time ago NOT to write about immediate family (or even distant family) without permission. 
On a personal note…

Almost every night I before I go to bed I reduce a handful of greens and fresh fruit into a delicious drink using a powerful liquidizer. I wash the jugs, clean the blades, and get it all ready for a similar ritual in the morning. I know I leave the liquidizer plugged in the wall-socket. Every morning when I come downstairs it’s unplugged.

This very slight annoyance grew mostly because it made no sense and because both my sons were asleep when I faced this minor irritation and I’d forget to ask after the day got rolling and my attentions were focused elsewhere.

This week we have all been home in the mornings and so I asked.
Thulani (19) said that of course he unplugged the liquidizer every night as a “safety issue.”

He enlarged:

Well dad, what if you walked in your sleep, came downstairs, put your hand into the liquidizer, turned it on and you lost your fingers? You won’t be able to play the piano anymore.

I pointed out that none of us sleepwalks and that I never put my hands into the liquidizer even when awake. He agreed.

I asked if he’d be unplugging the dishwasher and washing machine in case I drowned and I think he said I was being ridiculous.