Wall Street Journal (June 28, 2004).
A Delicate Dance.
How does one let go of -- and
stay close to -- adult children?
Cutting -- or at least
loosening -- the cord binding me to my grown daughter is an intricate dance,
and neither she nor I have yet mastered the steps.
My mistake was imagining
that the emotional vicissitudes of parenthood would somehow vanish once
day-to-day child rearing was behind me. With our only child out of college and
on her own, retirement loomed in my mind's eye like a serene, unrippled pool.
What was I thinking?
Fretting on the
Sidelines.
The same dread that settled
over me when Julia was 16 and late for curfew still strikes with annoying
regularity. The difference is that she is now 26, lives a thousand miles away,
and my husband and I have no real authority over how she leads her life.
I resisted the impulse to
forbid such a trip, even as my mind raced with lurid images of carjackings,
accidents and breakdowns. Instead, I ventured: "I hope you don't encounter
icy roads." She shot back sarcastically: "Let's start worrying about
that three weeks ahead of time, shall we?"
Driving "straight
through" -- without stopping at motels -- made for a short trip. Short,
but terrifying for me, as I hung by the phone waiting for her calls en route.
"It's a generational thing, Mom," Julia says of Kerouac-style road
trips that young women of my day were spared. As she tells it, the interstates
are clogged with women her age driving alone with U-hauls in tow.
You have to let your adult
children go, the experts say. Fine. Just tell me how to turn off the spigot of
maternal concern once your kids reach the magical age of 21. After all, isn't
emotional detachment just another term for indifference? Unless you're
stonehearted, a child's turmoil is highly contagious, whether they are toddlers
or twentysomethings.
And Julia, for all her bold
and belligerent stabs at independence, still clings in her own way. The other
day she called to report that she had been bitten by a flesh-eating brown
recluse spider and faced a steep bill for the doctor and antibiotics. So much
for my serenity that week.
Financial
Vulnerability.
As I fret about Julia's
insecure future, I console myself that cultural and economic trends have conspired
to delay adulthood well beyond what was deemed appropriate a generation ago.
The New York Times recently reported that fully 30% of 22- to 31-year-olds in
the New York City area live at home with their parents. Getting started is
especially difficult for those, like Julia, who haven't followed a career path
into science, finance or the professions. The new economy provides few berths
for fine-arts majors like her. And graduate school is today too expensive for
academic dabbling. Better to wait until her goals are clearer.
Meanwhile, Julia's doctor
bills are no small factor keeping us entwined in dependency. Back in the 1960s,
even my clerk-typist jobs came with generous medical benefits. Not so today:
Five years after graduating from Tufts University, Julia has yet to work
anywhere offering health insurance. She has purchased coverage on her own, but
with her chronic ailments like asthma deemed "pre-existing" and thus
unreimbursable, her $265-a-month premiums finally seemed a waste of money. So
she recently became one of the 43 million uninsured Americans.
This leaves us, despite our
own ample coverage, as vulnerable as those without. Julia's wages as a server
in an upscale sushi restaurant are low enough to make her $145 monthly asthma
medications a stretch. We pay out of pocket when she can't, and have nightmares
about a catastrophic illness.
It's been said that mothers
can count themselves successful when they achieve their own obsolescence. Why
am I not surprised that this idea was advanced by the mother of a couple of
preschoolers, Muffy Mead-Ferro, author of "Confessions of a Slacker
Mom." Talk to me again in 20 years, Muffy.
In my experience, we mothers
don't abdicate willingly, even when it means we've done our work well. A
Kentfield, Calif., reader, Gerri Caldarola, writes of her shock in suddenly
realizing she was no longer the hub of her large family, all now grown with
children of their own. "It became all too clear to me that I had done my
job of working myself out of the motherhood role when I looked at our latest
family picture," she writes. "In past pictures, I was center front.
This year I was off to the right, a little detached. It hit me like a ton of
bricks -- am I irrelevant to the family? What is my place in the universe?"
Who's the Boss?
On a recent visit with our
daughter, I had occasion to ponder just such questions. As guests in Julia's
tiny cottage in Key West, we realized that the chain of command had shifted
when she briefed us on the house rules: Easy on the A/C and lights -- utility
bills, you know. Don't leave so much as a teacup on the porch, lest it be
stolen. Close doors tightly so the cats don't bolt outside. At times we felt
like bumptious, barely competent teenagers interloping on her orderly adult
world.
My husband and I, meanwhile,
offered gobs of unsolicited advice. He fixated on financial solvency (Isn't
your rent awfully steep?); I obsessed over safety (Should you be riding your
scooter around town at all hours?). I never slept soundly until I heard her key
in the door at night.
Left unspoken, in the
interests of family harmony, was the question perpetually bedeviling us: What
is your plan for obtaining meaningful work -- with benefits?
Amid the hugs and kisses,
I'm sure it was a relief when we departed. Yet as we put miles between us and
Key West, a bittersweet exhilaration set in. My urge to guide Julia's destiny
remains unabated, but I had to give our free-spirited daughter credit for
courage. Yes, for now she's dangling on a trapeze without a net. But some
people chain themselves to a desk for 40 years in order to retire the way Julia
lives now. She works in a picturesque small town, where good friends drop in to
visit on her front porch, where she manages nicely without a car, putters with
her tropical plants and walks to the beach to swim and fish year round.
On the road, I began to
sleep soundly again. And, as requested, we called Julia every night to check
in.