No matter how long I’ve been a parent, I’m still capable of being astonished by my own adult children. And let nobody tell you that “adult children,” that ultimate oxymoron, aren’t still works in progress.
Recently, I was startled by the hunger of our three daughters, now two 40-somethings and one 50-something in lives of their own, to know more about their parents.
They want our stories — and not the fairy tales and fables we now tell to their children. What they seem to want these days are clues to who we were — and are — so that they can better understand themselves.
Simple? Not really.
It’s as if these daughters suddenly woke up and realized that before we were their parents, we were a man and woman with histories, biographies, lives.
I’m touched by the shift in focus. Not that many years ago, when they were moody teenagers, our daughters didn’t want to be seen with us in public, and frankly, found us annoying bores with too many rules. But then they grew up, left us, and found us far more intriguing at a distance. Who could have guessed?
Recently, our daughters handed each of us a remarkable gift. We received blank journals that we are to fill with our memories.
Initially, the idea felt overwhelming, and even a bit sad. It affirms what we all know: that we won’t be around forever. And even though this is the age of videotaping, these grown children want our words on paper. It seems richer and somehow more permanent to them, and I’m glad.
So their father and I are sifting through our individual memories, and of course it’s overwhelming.
I hope to tell Jill, Amy and Nancy — and now, our grandchildren, too — about the house I lived in as a child. I’ll describe its rooms, the way their late grandfather filled that house with books, what it was like to have only one bathroom and how we listened to the living room radio on weekends.
I can’t adequately describe the way it felt to lie in my bed at night and hear the noises that were woven into our household, or the special tree I sat under when I was 16. But I’ll try to “tell” the journal everything that has mattered to me. I’ll describe friends like Joyce and Margot, Merle and Helen. I’ll resurrect handsome Harvey and Billy the heartbreaker, characters who slid from childhood into maturity with me.
But how do you begin to describe learning to trust, laughing until your sides hurt, crying until you earnestly believed there were no more tears in the world? I’ll try. I’ll try.
How do you reconstruct how it felt to meet the man I would marry, and what our earliest dreams were?
Is there any way in the world to describe to them what it was like to carry them into our little Cape Cod house, knowing that in our arms was the most precious cargo in the universe?
And how can I possibly describe to them how it felt to meet the children of their children? To become grandparents, and welcome a new generation. New inhabitants of Planet Earth who share our blood and carry us into the glorious unknown of the future.
I am awed and humbled by their interest. Those empty pages are waiting for our stories, distilled out of jumbled memories.
And I know that in the telling, there will be sudden bursts of insight for their father and me. Sudden collisions with the joys and sorrows that form life’s tapestry. The pause to reflect on it all is both wonderful and awesome. And a little scary.
Like most parents, I want desperately to give my children the gift of myself: of memory and experience and insight and hindsight.
And like most parents, I wonder how I’ll ever manage such a feat. ••
