Nothing ever stays still, does it? I remember a Robert Frost poem we read in high school – Nothing Gold Can Stay:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
As this year draws to a close, I’m so aware of the rocky ride between joy and pain that life brings us. Children succeed and are happy; suffer, argue, question and, as adults, make huge decisions whose consequences are no longer our business. Others we love face illness, work stresses and moments of spiritual angst. And we ourselves struggle. With our own pain. With the knowledge that the best times — the gold — never last and must be cherished for the time we have them. And with the realization that the job of parent includes a form of built-in obsolescence, that rescuing, even those we love, is not always a gift to those we try to help.
I’m still learning how to be the mother of grown men. They have been and continue to be a joy to me but the best gift I can give them, struggle to give them, is to be available but never more than that. I’ve done pretty well, but in moments when I worry – health issues, love issues, work issues, life-changing issues – I have to hold my breath and hope. To remember that over the years we’ve provided one another with many moments of "something gold" and that now, as their parents have, they must pass through their own moments of sublime and ridiculous, gold and dross.
There’s an old saying that "you’re never happier than your least happy child." I struggle not to allow that to be true. The best gift I can give our boys – and for that matter my husband as well – is to separate, to trust them in their journeys and crises, joys and troubles. To love them, listen to them, and respect them enough to allow them to live their own golden moments and mourn their loss – hopefully with enough experience over the years to understand that even as a moment of joy departs, another is forming just around the bend.
The younger kids are the easier it is to make everything better for them. As they get older it is so hard to just let them have experiences (within reason), and I can only imagine what it’s like when they’re adults and you have no more control over it at all.
You’re right. My father used to say “Little children, little troubles; big children, big troubles.” But the difference is that if you’ve let yourself learn to trust them – and understand that if we try to rescue them we tell them we think they can’t take care of themselves and that’s the message they will get, it’s a bit easier. After all, we all made mistakes and we’re still walking around upright and sassy, right?