The arc of life lessons
As a parent, you are lead to believe that part of your job is to impart wisdom. You quickly realize that curve of wisdom climbs upward snugly alongside the curve of your progeny’s ages.
With a jolt, I realized the other day that I had time-traveled in this writing space somehow from 2011 to 2019. Eight years. I was writing about the events of the six-year-old set when I started, and now in four months I’ll have two college students and a high school sophomore.
It’s one of the oldest cliches, but I’m doing it anyway: What the hell happened to the time?
There’s both an easy and difficult answer, but what has happened as well, in a blurry, indistinct way, is that the directive, do-it-cause-I-say-so parenting of the early years has evolved into indirective, wisdom parenting, through which, because you know your effect on your audience becomes increasingly limited (that is, your kids stop listening to you and in fact primarily see you as a misguided traveler who has survived the cosmic journey through bizarre luck), you try to frame things through the lens of wisdom.
Directive is “Do this.” Directive is “Don’t touch!” Directive is “Don’t do that.” Even during my directive years, I still tried to frame my comments with some reasoning, but sometimes, dammit, there’s a shower to be had and you’re gonna have it! You wanna argue? Go sit in the time-out chair!
Being indirective, dispensing wisdom, requires more time and some nuance. It requires appeals to pathos and logos. It requires kairos, that ideal moment for words. Take a shower, you say, because not just of the significant hygiene implications but because of the potentially horrific social implications of showerlessness. You express your own showerless times and subsequent implications, perhaps relating a sad story about unrequited eighth-grade love.
One of the many challenging aspects of wisdom-based parenting is that you don’t always have wisdom at the ready, even though–life is so twisted!–you begin to perceive wisdom-bearing lessons pretty much everywhere.
My boys are responsible for cutting the grass. They have worked out an inefficient, highly argument-filled method through which one cuts one half and the other cuts the other half each week.
My senior in high school, Nate, who is a great child, still suffers from boy-dom: He rarely does things in a timely manner. The grass, of course, is no different.
Over the recent spring break, it was his turn to cut the back grass, but he lagged in completing that task. Well, it rained for several days, so a routine suburban grass-cutting turned into a farmer’s chore as the grass went from a couple inches of sod to near-towering fields of grain.
At the end of spring break weekend, I came home to see he had finally cut it. I went in the house and found him, all sweaty, lounging in the midst of a FortNite session.
“How’d it go?” I asked.
“Whew, it was tough!” he said.
I saw the opening. “You know,” I said, “there’s a life lesson in there.”
He turned from the screen and said, in an amused way, “What is it with you lately? Everything is ‘Life lesson this, life lesson that.'”
I staggered into kitchen. He was on to me. As despair set in, I glanced around quickly to see if, for possible future use, I still had a suitable time-out chair.
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I had to chuckle as a parent now of three kids over 20 —it is not easy to parent the adult child, there is no rule book and we just have to wing it that’s all I can say!!