Spreading Their Wings

I knew I was in trouble when my then 17-year-old son called from France to say that he was faxing me a permission form to sign that would enable him to travel across the country and stay in a hostel by himself.  I pointed out that I would not think of allowing him to travel to say, Boston, and stay in a motel by himself.  "M-o-o-m," he whined, "this is FRANCE, not the United States."

Precisely.

Well, he survived it, although a year or two later I learned that he omitted a few of the more lurid details about the isolated train station in Marseilles.

Many years ago a friend and I had a long discussion about what we really wanted out of our later life.  What I wanted, I concluded (and she concurred) was to purchase three of the houses on my block and install each of my children and his or her respective spouse in one of them with, of course and most importantly, my grandchildren.  I wanted them all to come around for family dinners and movie nights, and to call me up to go out with them occasionally.

Of course, we had already blown it.  Summer camps in North Carolina.  Soccer tours and language camps and school years far, far away.  A family trip pretty much every time we scrounged up enough money to maybe think about curtains or carpeting.  Of the six children between my friend and I, their colleges represent or are about to represent four states besides our own.

I have a number of friends and acquaintances who drew a circle with a radius of a couple of hundred miles from home and told their kids, "That's it for college."  Just not my style.  And, even if it were, the aformentioned friend has commented more than once that her first child, who went to college about an hour away, was thoroughly miserable for four years.  "Distance, or lack thereof, is just not a factor," she says.  Her youngest, and only girl, is headed to the west coast this fall; mine is headed to New Orleans.

There's another really, really important reason for my foolish shove of  my chicks out of the nest.  When I was nine, and off at summer camp in the south for two months, I grossly offended another young lady in my cabin by my use of the term, "you guys."  And I couldn't help it.  "Y'all" just didn't glide off my tongue. "You guys" was my way of being friendly and open to strangers.  I can still remember that girl, a skinny little thing with a head full of curls, stalking off with the disgusted pronouncement, "I am NOT a guy."  I have never forgotten that lesson in how easy it is, despite the best of intentions, to offend utterly another human being.  A powerful insight for a nine-year-old.

Forty years later and I still don't apply it too well.  But I think it's important to know that you can live with all kinds of people, and it's equally important to know that it can be difficult to do so.

I did set out, intentionally, to offer my children the opportunity to become independent citizens of the world.  I'm only the slightest bit disapppointed that they seem to be taking me up on it.  They do these things -- like heading off 1500 miles to see the Yellowstone sunrise -- without me!