Monday, June 11, 2012
I don’t
imagine a lot of 16 year olds read my column. If my own daughters were still in
that age group I know for sure this writing space would be the last place they
would cast their eyes, because they’d be sure to find their haphazard and often
dramatic ways cloaked in feeble anonymity and spread like alphabet butter in a
600-word essay.
Today my
young women are spread across the 20-something years and they have
learned—since I began writing “The View From Here” in 2004—to tolerate their
mother’s often public musings on their messy bedrooms, unwashed dishes, and
piles of dirty laundry et al.
Still,
they may roll their eyes. I have loved and raised them as best I could. We’ve
had many ups and downs. I’m still learning how it all clicks and so are they.
But I
was reminded recently just how tenuous the parent/child mosaic remains out
there.
Even
when parents do the very best they can, 16-year-olds can pack up and leave home
under the belief that something better exists outside the four strong walls of
love and opportunity they’ve grown up in.
Memories
of yesterday flooded back to me, poked at old wounds, cast old shadows of soul
drought and of desperate times of the heart.
12 years
ago one of my own children left home just short of her 16th birthday
and although I tried to move heaven and earth in as many directions as I could
to keep her at home, the winds of her change eventually trumped me.
Most of
the time I knew where she was, but sometimes I didn’t and the stress of all of
it rotted my stomach. Thank Heaven for a rib cage or my heart would have leapt
from my chest in those distressing times.
There
was a part of my psyche that wanted to hire Special Forces to kidnap my
daughter and plunk her premature would-be independence on a remote island made
out of duct tape.
I ended
up in counseling and I learned a hard, hard lesson in what degrees of control I
had.
My
daughter didn’t return to live at home after the age of 16. It broke my heart.
I missed out, and so did she, on some good “at home” years and she knows
it.
My
daughter took the bumpy road and it was difficult. She wouldn’t dispute that.
She
stopped going to school and because of that choice alone, and the fact that she
did not hold herself responsible; the education crust in the pie of life was
unfinished.
If you
asked my daughter today she would of course agree that her hindsight is 20/20
on many levels during those tender years.
I have
never stopped believing in her despite some “tough love” choices I chose to
make and I am infinitely proud of the wiser woman she is today.
That
said, I would still go back in time and try to change her mind the day she
packed her things, because from a mother’s point of view it wasn’t the right
choice.
But as Leslie Poles Hartley penned, “The past is a
foreign country; they do things differently there.”
In spite of what I cannot change, today I am
restless to run screaming down the street with a red flag and magic wand.
I wish 16-year-olds who leave good homes would
read this and believe me when I say what a grave lapse in judgment it is.
I wish I could change a young mind just like
that. If only it were that easy.
Do the hardest, most unthinkable and most
mature thing of all and go home with your suitcase and hug your mother and hug
your father and spill your heart, tell the truth, face consequence and accept
compromise.
Home is where the heart of your young life
is. This much I know is true.
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