I’m flattered
she had loved me so much. Out of
curiosity, I decided to test her to see how she felt about this today. But I
posed the question a little differently. “If I’m poor when I retire,” I asked,
“how would you feel if I lived with you?” “Well,” she hesitated, “if you
absolutely have nowhere else to go, I suppose you’d have to.”
What
happened to my loving, trusting little girl? What a difference a few years
make!
When kids
are young, they can’t imagine life without their parents. When I was young, I
thought children died when their parents did. I obviously hadn’t thought this through,
but that didn’t matter. I had no concept
of myself independent of them. We were completely symbiotic: if they die, I
die. It did occur to me that, by this logic, if they died “tomorrow,” I would
never grow up. This puzzled but did not worry me. I thought that’s just how
things are.
But my
parents did not die, hence my ability to write this post! It’s the paradox of
parenting: you want your children to
love you, and to some extent, need you, but it’s your job to teach them to live
without you. The truest act of love is to drive your children away! Maybe that’s
why my parents gave each of their children a suitcase as a high school graduation gift.
As my
daughter intrinsically knew, parents and adult children in Sweden and in the
United States do not live together unless they have to. So she needed the
excuse of poverty to continue to live with me as an adult. She did not yet know
she can have both self-reliance and a live-in mom, if she wants.
But now she
does, and she’s no longer as keen on the mom part. Paradoxically, the better I
do my job as a parent, the less my children need me. Yet, the more I need them.
I’ll miss
her when she moves on. But maybe she’ll miss me, just a little, too.
© 2012 Kvick Thoughts. All rights
reserved.
