it's rainy and windy out--such a crappy contrast to yesterday's warm, sunny, crisply fall beauty. the baby is perched on my lap because he is unusually fussy due to the impending eruption of his first two teeth through his tender gums. all morning i dreamed of college and how i didn't go because my dad couldn't help me pay for it and i was overwhelmed trying to figure out how to get funding and decide where to go and what to do. my dad was burned out on being a single parent, i think, and didn't help or guide me. instead of going to college i dropped out of high school after moving into my own apartment with my boyfriend. i got a job at burger king. eventually i had vesta, followed two and a half years later by hazel. this was the great mistake of my dad's parenting life, in my opinion (not that he didn't pay for college--he couldn't, but that he moved me into an apartment and let me drop out). not that i would change it now, how could i with vesta and hazel to show for it. but in another universe, in another dimension....maybe my dad musters up some more energy and pushes me to finish high school and go to college. maybe he sits at the table with me looking over college pamphlets and we bang it out. i forgive him for not doing that, even though i can't imagine--really--why he didn't. i say: he was tired, he was a single parent, he was busy, etc etc etc. but even so, i can't REALLY understand it. i was his child and he let me go before he should have because that was easiest for him...and parenting is most definately not about what is easiest for the parent. he was getting married and she and i didn't get along...it makes me sad to think about it.
now he's married to a different woman and her daughter is starting college this fall, that's why i'm thinking about it. i'm jealous in a totally not personal or mean way. she deserves to go to college and i'm stoked for her that her mom has saved and prepared for it. i am just sad for my own tired and second-rate youth.
well. i've drunk my tea and been morose for a few minutes and now it's time to go hang with the girls. they have the day off school today for vetran's day and we're going to rent Ratatouille and make soap and enjoy each other's company.
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This is Gary, Megan's dad -- the one featured prominently in this post! I remember well the time Megan dropped out of high school and moved out on her own, despite my attempts to dissuade her. I remember feeling, sadly, that those decisions seemed to be out of my control, though I agree they shouldn't have been. I agree that I failed her as a parent but, even though today, 11 years later, it's not clear to me what I could have done differently to achieve an alternative outcome. Megan was headstrong and wouldn't listen. In hindsight, it seems that I did have much positive influence on how she turned out; just not, at the time, on the decision to leave school. I also agree with Megan that there's no point in exercising a lot of energy on analyzing the past and wishing it could be changed. It can't, and even if it could, it would alter the present, which I presume neither of us would want. No, I think it makes more sense to focus on the present and the future. Megan, who is an amazing and wonderful mother and role model for my grandchildren, has wonderful dreams and goals. If anyone can achieve them, she can. She's a better writer than I am, is more creative and talented, and, I'm confident, will achieve her dreams. I am enormously proud of the womam she has beome. -- gary (Megan's dad)
Being a friend of Gary's and also the father of headstrong daughters, I empathize. not just with Gary, because I recall a brief period in my adolescence when I knew everything and none of the adults did, especially my boring parents.
What could they ossibly know about love and sex and changing the screwed up world I was beginning to encounter and I just wanted to make new friends and why couldn't they see that? In their world, all I was getting was homework and chores and who I wasn't permitted to hang out with.
It didn't take long to learn that I was basically mental and, to an extent, so were they, and everyone else. Only TV - and we were unaware that we were the first TV generation - offered us the reassurance that Ward & June Cleaver or Fred MacMurray or Donna Reed offered perfect parenting that didn't exist in the real world. But we suspected some of our friends' parents must be better than the ones we had.
Later I would realize that things I imagined they didn't do or say actually had been said or done, but I was kinda busy and ignoring them at times because ... well, I said they could be boring, right?
I also remember at 36 thinking "whatever complaints I had about what the folks could have done better in those first 18 years no longer mattered because I'd had 18 years to correct any deficiencies so afterward I could only blame myself for any remaining deficiencies. Well almost. I still could blame a lot of stuff on Ronald Reagan and other greedy and mean people. And evil corporations. And AIDS and cancer and death; I mean, who came up with that shit?
Digression. Where was I? Oh yeah, Gary and Megan.
I kinda envied them when she was a teenager. He was probably just as boring as my parents, but he talked to her and listened and didn't say "Hush, the news is on."
And since then, being a parent, both married and divorced, I also recognize that either way comes with its own demands and limitations. There's only so much of one's self to be spread around, trying to do right by your kids or a mate or a boss or a client or your friends, and just when you feel like you're a nice little gyroscope, with everything balanced and spinning smoothly, someone kicks it off-kilter or gravity and friction give it a wobble, because the only constant in life is change.
And there are no guidebooks. Doctor Spock was wrong, Dear Abby too, and God knows how bad I'd screw things up if I'd had Dr. Phil to listen to. If there ever was a perfect guide, it was probably Fred Rogers. And he was boring, too. But he was patient and loving, constantly, which really is all a parent can be.
Life is 100% on-the-job-training. We are all apprentices trying to master the craft. And if we just love and are patient, and a little lucky, our kids will turn out to be people who love and care and share and are healthy and understand that they're not going to be perfect, nor are their kids, or anyone.
Thinking you're perfect is only the domain of cats, because they rule the universe. And that doesn't even seem so great because who really wants to hork up hairballs?
Every parent who loves will regret what they got wrong or couldn't provide, but the reality is that kids only grow via all the normal ways. Sometimes their brains are engaged. Sometimes pheremones and hormones rule them. Sometimes accidents no one can prevent just happen. Other people will influence them, too. Other people influence all of us. We could all use Perfect Other People, but that retail outlet's closed.
And parents have to let kids make decisions, as that's part of growing and sometimes you take the training wheels off and cringe when they fall over. And you always wonder if you could have spared them some falls or nagged them more but really, who knows?
But good parents are rarely as self-absorbed as kids imagine. Even when they're not giving advice or nagging, they're thinking and wondering and sacrificing and plotting.
And hoping. That the kids will be alright. And Gary did okay because you are.
For a girl, I mean. Because all girls are bound to be weird, no matter what we do.
(Luc is aka Kevin)
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