Talking recently with a
40-something mother of older teens—her near-adult children now off studying and
living on-campus—and I detect the semblance of irony when she laughs at
herself, “I’m out on the periphery, now!”
It’s something most parents will
relate with; that stage in life where, as a parent, we’ve done our job of
raising the child, and the child must go now and do what adults do. That’s what
we raised them for. But it’s hard—it’s hard to let go and not be more an
integral part of their life.
We only ever find ourselves out on the periphery—then we are faced with an
unplanned-for adjustment. Only then do we realise how quickly the process of
parenthood has passed before our eyes. We recoil, for a time, in disbelief.
How are we to redeem this
situation?
Accepting The Phase – Working With It
As parents we’ll know the phase is
a temporary one—lasting a few years at best. And we must simply adjust. But
there are ways we can add value to our children’s lives—even from a relative
distance.
Taking them out on a date of their
choice is one example. How many late-teens would knock back coffee or a free
meal? Especially if we work in with their schedules, we can meet informally,
one-to-one, even for an hour, and stay involved. Servicing their cars or doing
shopping with them are other options. Granted that family occasions, at least
for a little while, will be more superficial in contact, making date-time a
regular thing augurs well for this transient, self-finding phase in their
lives.
The worst thing we can do is become
demanding, trying to lay on guilt trips for a lack of contact with them. Why,
as parents, would we ever gravitate to behave like children, by being
demanding?
We brought them up to be
independent and that’s what they’re now doing. So where is the logic in our
complaint? Just the bare impression of maturity in our teens will have them
bemused at our lack of consistency.
We must work with the situation
and not against it.
Most of all, and now this is the
key within our circumstance; we have the opportunity of modelling mature adult
behaviour. Their first-class example of adult behaviour should be us, the
parent.
***
Letting go when we find ourselves
out on the periphery as parents of grown children can be the hardest of things.
We grieve for the times when our children were younger. With the kids all
grown, we wonder why life passes us so quickly. But this relative distance is
just a phase. And maintaining a presence in their lives is possible with
imagination. But we’ll need to reset our expectations.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
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