It is the morning of my son's kindergarten graduation and I've just discovered that he can tie his shoes by himself.
I ask who taught him to do that (he had previously developed a very creative solution on his own, but never did the cross, loop, pull method before). He says, "I just figured it out. It's bunny ears."
It dawns on me that this entire first year of school has been about Colter learning to be independent of us, his parents. He has come to accept his teachers as authority figures and his peers as purveyors of fact and fiction. And for us, it has been about accepting that we will not be his only influences. We can only hope to be among the primary ones.
Colter is not just learning things that I didn't teach him. He's learning things I didn't even know he knew and things that I never learned. I heard at a PTA meeting a few weeks ago that some sixth- and seventh-graders at my son's school took the SAT for practice and scored higher than their parents did when they were 11th-graders.
I don't think kids these days are necessarily smarter than we were at their age, they're just developing a different set of skills than we did, and they're getting an earlier start, particularly at being independent.
So much of growing up is about finding yourself and loosing the shackles of who other people think you are. And so much of that process for me was tied up in losing my parents.
My mother became lost to me before I even knew her, really. When I was 6 months old, my older brother died as a result of playing with matches. My mother never really recovered, and proceeded to live a surreal sort of swinging single life, with pharmaceutical assistance.
When I turned 13, I moved in with my father (my parents had divorced years before), and I loved basking in the attention he showered on me. I had found a home, at last, and I was even willing to share it with my new stepmother a few years later, since she could give me the nightly dinners and heaping helpings of nurturing I missed as a youngster.
For years, I lived in relation to my newly-formed nuclear family, until I created a family of my own. Not long after I had finally found myself as an adult, wife and mother, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's and then dementia, and I started to lose him, too.
The losses have been gradual, and occasionally we find each other again -- my mother with a birthday call for my son; my father with a memory of some football game we watched together -- but whatever the painful quirks of my personal circumstances, the process, I now believe, is inevitable.
We must lose our parents in order to find ourselves.
As a result of this certainty, I worry constantly about becoming lost to my son, either through emotional or physical distance, death or some other force of nature. At the same time, I live with the knowledge that some day, by choice, Colter will leave home and turn the child's game of hide and seek into a new form of intimacy.
He will become someone I do not know in the interest of becoming who he thinks he has always been. And I will choose to seek out my son and allow him to hide at the same time, making sure he always knows where to find me.
This LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.
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