I just learned something from my son. He’s older and wiser than me now.
We had a public disagreement on Facebook, and he really let me have it. It hurt, though that wasn’t his intent. The details don’t matter; they’re just between us. The point is that he taught me something.
For the sake of this essay, I’ll call my son Jeremy because that’s his name.
I’m 73, and Jeremy’s 47, but sometimes I still think of him as a kid.
I do, but I don’t. It’s complicated.
I knew he was an adult when he went off to college nearly 30 years ago, but that’s where most of my personal memories of him end. That’s where we started to grow apart.
The tricky thing about parenting is that you have two lifelong relationships with your children: when they need you and when they don’t. It’s the whole point of parenting, right? Give them what they need and then let them go on to live their own lives.
Forty years after this picture, Jeremy has a long, happy marriage and a brilliant adult child of his own. In many ways, he’s the finest man I know. And sure, I take some credit, but just a bit. He also has a mother, a stepmother, teachers, friends, and a thousand other inspirations I know nothing about.
Children grow up and fly away from the nest, but as just one parent, your relationship is grounded in the past of birthday parties, Christmas mornings, and teary, skinned knees. You try to hold onto that feeling but reach a point where your heart can’t follow.
We stay in touch, but sometimes I need to be reminded that my son hasn’t lived with me for well over half of his life.
“You have nothing in common but his childhood.”
My wife of 37 years lovingly explained that to me a few nights ago.
Jeremy and I still love and respect each other. We just told each other so. And in the wisdom of age, we’re probably closer now than ever.
February 11, 1977 – When my son, Jeremy, was born I phoned my father from the hospital to give him the news. The baby was his first grandchild and my dad said something unintentionally funny.
“A boy, great! Our name will continue.”
“Dad,” I replied, “Williams is the third most common name in the English language. The name is safe.” We both laughed. It was one of those special moments between a father and son that I knew I would remember forever.
28 years and ten days later my son had a son and today is his 19th birthday. It’s a big day for him, bigger than he realizes.
I’ve always thought moms deserve the annual birthday celebrations for having done the physical and emotional work. Creating a human inside of yourself is quite literally an unimaginable miracle.
Fathers are bound to their children, too, but physically less so. We have to work a little harder at finding our way into the spiritual connection mothers create naturally.
“My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.” – Clarence Budington Kelland
Parents and grandparents talk a lot about how quickly time passes. It’s true but what we don’t acknowledge often enough is that the time we’ve spent with our children and grandchildren, fast as it seems to pass, is also infinite.
I’m 72 and I think often of my grandfathers, though I wish I knew them better. I marvel at the similarities between us. I appreciate the lessons they taught me through their sons and daughters.
My father died 22 years ago but I think of him daily. He is still my hero but I couldn’t tell you why. We just have that bond.
“A father’s love is like your shadow, though he is dead or alive, he will live with your shadow” – P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar
Tyler Goold Williams, I love you for your birth, for who you’ve become since, and for who you will yet be. I celebrate each day of your existence. I wish I could hug and laugh with you more often. I hope we’ll spend more time getting to know each other but I assure you this: you are the result of thousands of generations of mothers and fathers who loved one another deeply. You belong in the chain of families whose love created you.
Through all of that, through all of time past and future, you are the only Tyler Goold Williams who has or will ever exist.
That’s why we celebrate birthdays.
Be happy, stay healthy. Live your life as you wish it to be.
Love, Grandpa
PS. Call us sometime. The phone works both ways, ya know.
Viettia Newcomb is the younger sister of my wife’s late mother. In the 31 years CarolAnn and I have been married Viettia (the second i is silent) has been a happy part of my life and I consider her my Auntie, too. I love her dearly.
At 84 she is a no-nonsense manager of a Northern California mobile home park. She doesn’t suffer fools and will put them in their place but she also laughs all the time and has the most pure and loving heart you will ever find.
Viettia has known great joy, tragedy and hard times in her life and taken their lessons to heart.
She’s also damned smart. She posted the following piece of advice on Facebook today, tagging and addressing specific members of her family but posted for the world to read. With her permission I am sharing it with you here.
This is the best, most down-to-earth parenting advice I have ever read and it doesn’t require a whole book filled with psycho-babble.
Children and parents of all ages, live and learn…
I proudly give you Auntie Viettia:
_____________________
For all my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I have advice. Remember always – advice is free, and you can take it or leave it.
Sing to your babies. Tell them stories, read them stories, and give them your love and attention.
Dry cornstarch is better than any over the counter baby powder you will ever find, and much cheaper.
You do not “spoil” a baby with love. The spoiling occurs when you allow your child to be unruly, or a bully.
Teach your baby love, concern for others, and teach him or her that while you love them, you will not allow them to be unruly. Our basic concern for our children should be that we raise them to be people others will like and admire. We should not allow our babies to be the kind of people others do not want to be around. This training must start early.
To realize the wisdom of this, look at the children of your friends and relatives, and think how you feel about them and how you would wish people to feel about your children.
This advice comes from Grandma aka Great Grandma aka Big Grandma.
I sincerely love all of you, my dears, and I care every day of the world.
This past week our youngest grandson, Tyler, started high school. His parents are shocked by how fast he’s grown and I find the whole thing amusing.
Been there, done that.
I was a single parent from the time Jeremy was four years old. The term “single parent” isn’t accurate, of course. Our son had two parents who adored him regardless of our inability to continue living together. Maybe more so because of that. He was the glue that secured the broken bond I had with his mother and he still is. Karen and I remain close because our little boy is 42 now with a rapidly aging son of his own.
I’m just going to say this once because I know he’ll protest and because I don’t want to come across as a nostalgic whiner:
Sometimes I think my son is a better dad than I was. I want a do-over.
Wait, hear me out.
I’m not saying he loves his kid more than I did. Not possible. It’s just that he’s more deeply involved in his son’s daily life and activities than I was when he was little and I’m sorry about that.
Jeremy & Tyler Theatrical nuts don’t fall far from the tree.
Aside from the obvious, that one-parent-at-a-time thing, there is a difference in us as people.
For one thing, Jeremy has a sharp mind for mechanics and can build stuff. I’m a mechanical idiot. I will offer that as an excuse for never building him the tree house I always wanted him to have. (That and the fact that we never had the requisite tree, but it still haunts me.) I didn’t have a tree house when I was a kid and I wanted one for both of us.
Jeremy and Emily are scout leaders. I actually tried that when he was little but his Tiger Cub pack of four kids broke up after two or three outings. That group was led by all dads, no moms. Go figure.
More than anything I just wish I had taken my kid to see the world when he was old enough to appreciate it and to give him cherished lifetime memories of the great times and big things we did together.
We didn’t do those things and I’m still kicking myself.
CarolAnn reminds me of all the things we did do when our boys were growing up. We took them on a cruise, we took them to Disneyland and the Grand Canyon; Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone — certainly far more in the way of adventure than either of us had when we were growing up.
Still, there are regrets and I suppose that’s true for every parent who ever watched his or her child leave the nest far too soon.
I should have taken him to New York for Broadway theater, we both love that stuff. Why didn’t I ever take him to London, for that matter? Or to Boston, the cradle of American history?
Regret is just a memory written on my brow, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. -Beth Nielsen Chapman
Missed opportunities never fade completely but like everything else you get over them, you learn to appreciate what you have and reluctantly shrug off the things you just didn’t get around to doing. Sometimes I still want a do-over but these days the thought barely passes my mind before a soothing explanation follows:
Your son is a better dad because you set the bar pretty high and taught him how to clear it.
It took me a long time to spin that story and I’m sticking to it.
Jeremy and me, the early 80s, Fairytale Town at Land Park, Sacramento..
One of my favorite movies is Defending Your Life starring, written, and directed by Albert Brooks. It’s about a man who dies on his birthday and wakes up in Judgment City, a purgatory-like waiting area where he must justify his life in order to proceed to the next phase of existence. It’s warm and funny and will keep you examining your own life for a very long time.
My son Jeremy loves this movie as much as I do and today is his birthday.
On my birthday 17 years ago, shortly before he died, my dad told me he couldn’t believe he had a son who was 50. I know the feeling.
Jeremy was born 42 years ago today. Like all loving parents at this age I understand that he’s an adult with a family of his own and our relationship has grown with us. But like all parents, in my heart he will always be my little boy.
You have to be careful about that when you talk to a middle-aged child. Occasionally I still have to stop myself from calling him, “Kiddo”.
I’m not going to wax poetic about Jeremy and me. Many fine words have been written about ideal father-son relationships and the bonds of love that can’t be described. I have nothing to add. We know how we feel and how we’ve enriched and informed each other’s lives.
I will say this, however:
I am a far better person for his existence than I would be without his love, influence and instruction.
Parenting is a two-way street. You get as much as you give; you learn at least as much as you teach, probably more.
If you’re happy with who you are today you can thank your children in large measure.
When I arrive in Judgment City I will point fearlessly to my boy down on Earth and testify, “This man is my justification for everything.”
I learned nothing from my upbringing about aging gracefully. Mother’s only advice about the passing years was to encourage the use of more moisturizer so boys will like you.
– Anita Garner
My friend Anita wrote those words in her blog earlier this week and it made me think about my own upbringing.
Dad showing me how to use a slingshot
My parents taught me small things about washing dishes and how to work a slingshot. Mom taught me to scrub my face with Phisohex to wipe away teenaged pimples. Dad taught me to stand up straight and look a man in the eyes when I shook his hand.
Neither of them talked to me about girls or careers and retirement. I didn’t even get the birds and the bees talk.
There was no talk, not one speck of advice about fulfillment, about health, about work, about relationships, about how all of that changes through the years. – Anita
My parents, like Anita’s, left me to learn the deep, quiet lessons of life in my own good time. They taught me to be honest and respectful and that was pretty much it. Matters of my future and relationships were not theirs to teach.
These days parents seem to be much more hands-on. They plan their kids’ lives from sunup to sundown, from birth to college and beyond.
For all the stuff we read about helicopter parents and everyone-gets-a-trophy I don’t think parents today are doing anything wrong. It’s not mine to judge. The world seems much more complicated now than it was 60 years ago, though I don’t understand why.
I do wish my grandsons could spend their free afternoons building forts in open fields with no grownups around. I wish they could ride their bikes home at sundown dirty, sweaty and wearing a freshly scabbed knee and simply be told to go wash up for dinner.
I’d like you both to know that though I don’t get to be with you very often I think of you every single day. I really do.
When I wake up in the morning my first thought is to be grateful for a new day. I thank God for it. If you don’t believe in God that’s your right but you should give it some serious thought before you dismiss the possibility that you are alive for a good reason, not just by accident.
Either way, you should start each day happy to be alive. Be grateful for sunrise, blue skies, cold rain and for puppies and bugs.
Be grateful for the people you love.
That’s when I think of you, first thing each day.
Start your day happy.
When you’re happy it makes everyone around you happy. It’s contagious. They spread their happiness to other people. We need more happy people in the world.
As you get older you will learn a great many things about life. You’ll learn most of them from experience but you can get a lot of good tips from your parents, grandparents and other people who are older and carry your life in their hearts.
I’d like to share some of my life lessons with you. I’ll just do one at a time.
My dad taught me what I think is the single most important thing in life:
“If you don’t love yourself you’ll never be worth a damn to anyone else.” – Don Williams, 1981
If you can’t love yourself, who will?
I’ll have some more of these from time to time. You can take them to heart or just consider them and decide later what you think.
We never know how much time we have left so I’ll give you the end of these lessons here and now.
This is the point and purpose of life, in my opinion:
“We are game-playing, fun-having creatures;
we are the otters of the universe.” Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
With much love,
Your Grandpa Dave
Copyright 2018, David L. Williams. All rights reserved.
Researchers have warned that the prospect of leaving home has left ill-prepared millennials feeling anxious and panicked.
A recent study of 2,000 young people about to enter college has concluded that millennials are unprepared for the realities of life in the real world. More than half don’t know how to pay a bill or how much they should expect to spend on rent.
61% of these young people are scared to leave their parents. 58% have trouble sleeping. 27% have panic attacks when they think about moving away from home.
These blossoming adults go off to college nervously in need of “trigger warnings” for their studies and “safe spaces” in which to live their lives. Many don’t want to learn how to drive a car.
Some expect to get a trophy for merely participating in life.
Recently on our Dallas morning radio show on KLIF my partner, Amy Chodroff, and I talked about this study and tried to figure out how young Americans went from being excited about inheriting their own lives, as we were at their age, to being seemingly terrified by the prospect of growing up and leaving the nest.
Amy, a Gen-Xer with two well-parented and supremely prepared and confident children of her own, decided her generation is to blame for coddling these kids.
We talked about so-called helicopter parents and the everyone-gets-a trophy entitlement era of today’s society. It made sense to us and we left the blame there, on the Gen-X parents of Millenials.
Something about the discussion nagged at me and it wasn’t until I got home that I realized what it was:
Amy’s generation of helicopter parents are my generation’s free-range kids.
We Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, were the beatniks of the 1950s and the hippies of the 60s. We worshiped at the altar of Do Your Own Thing in the Church of What’s Happening Now.
We had a wonderfully carefree childhood during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity and yet we rejected every notion of our own parents’ culture from the Hit Parade music they loved to our haircuts and the clothes they wanted us to wear.
We even rejected the uniquely American idea that liberty came with a price worth paying, though that’s easy to understand if you consider our perspective.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall – Washington, D.C.
Politicians of the 60s sent us to a war of their making. 50,000 of us died in Vietnamese rice paddies ten thousand miles from home.
I frequently think of my high school buddies who had their lives blown away before they were old enough to grow a beard or fall in love for the first time.
Those of us who dodged the draft warned each other to never trust anyone over thirty and shouted, “Make love, not war!”
Now we’re in our sixties and seventies wondering why our grandkids are so nervous and we blame their parents, our children.
Just look at the society we Boomers left in the wake of our cultural revolution.
In some ways our kids are more traditional than we were at their age. Growing up as the children of free-range parenting they’re over-correcting our mistakes by inventing their own, insisting that every spare minute of their children’s lives be scheduled, structured and under constant supervision and by insisting that the road to happiness begins at birth with eyes fixed on the prize: a scholarship to Harvard or Stanford.
Our children’s children are leaving home, entering those schools confused and scared. And who can blame them? They were never taught that they would be challenged and sometimes they would fail. Nobody ever explained that they aren’t really bulletproof, bound for glory or as exceptional as they were constantly assured.
Nobody ever explained they’ll be paying off those student loans for the next twenty years.
We love our children. We don’t want them to ever be scared or disappointed. And yet we know they have to suffer to succeed.
Or did we forget to tell them that part?
Sometimes parents make mistakes. We can’t avoid them. We can only try to minimize them and try to make them teachable moments for ourselves and our kids.
As my Carolann likes to remind her Gen-X son: “You didn’t come with instructions.”
*Source of quoted material: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4666794/Millennials-aren-t-ready-reality-life.html
If people were born with warranties we’d all be guaranteed a certain number of years of good to reasonable health. Untimely death by accident or an act of God would be the only exemptions.
This week my son returned home from the hospital, a week mostly spent in the ICU.
He was very sick. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we could have lost him and they still don’t know why. Jeremy’s doctors were skilled enough to revive his failing internal organs, reduce his fever and send him home, yet vials of his blood are still being spun in small centrifuges and smeared onto slides in a lab at the CDC in Atlanta.
Jeremy and me, 1982
A couple of weeks from now my kid will turn 39 and while we all try to make sense of the numbers that log our own existence and constantly inform of us how much time we may have left to live, the number of years of JT’s life are completely meaningless to me. I’m his father and all my son’s birthdays are equal from my perspective. They are all scattered moments of his life, the nearly four decades of memories of him that I keep in my heart, timeless and eternal.
Jeremy and Emily, 1997
He’s still five days old to me, five years old, the teenager, the joyful college student; the remarkable husband and father to his own son that he has grown to become.
He’s still the young man who stunned me by asking that I stand beside him as Best Man in his wedding. When I choked back the lump in my throat and stammered, “Why me instead of one of your buddies?”, he answered as if it was obvious, “Because you’re my best friend”.
For the past week I’ve tried to understand why our children’s lives, regardless of their age and ours, mean more to us than life itself. I suppose it has to do with our own survival instinct, the fierce insistence that above all else we will live forever or at least, in the end, to have mattered.
Jeremy and his son, Tyler.
It’s a spiritual rabbit hole that I can’t enter and that’s probably a good thing.
All I know for sure is all that will ever matter to me:
“Your sons weren’t made to like you. That’s what grandchildren are for.” — Jane Smiley
The boy is seven.
He hangs his clothes on the floor with no regard for whether they are clean or dirty. He leaves string cheese wrappers in the family room, never learns to turn off the TV, frequently forgets to flush the toilet and makes his own breakfast, leaving half of his chocolate milk on the kitchen counter and Cheerios splayed across the floor.
He’s only seven.
As grandparents we are constantly reminding ourselves to be patient. He’s still trying to learn things his father never quite got the hang of. Or maybe he’s not trying and that’s the problem.
But it’s not our problem, it’s his dad’s.
I was pecking away at my computer one early morning recently when Isaiah came in wordlessly, picked up the phone from my desk and rang his dad’s room on the intercom.
“Dad? Would you come get the peanut butter for me? It’s too high in the pantry and I can’t reach it. — Okay, thanks.”
“Isaiah,” I said, “I would have gotten the peanut butter for you.”
“I know, Grandpa,” he said with a new, impressively mature tone to his voice.
“I just figured Dad needs to get up and get ready to take me to school.”
Whether you call that learning the art of diplomacy or of manipulation it is something that gives grandparents a special sense of appreciation.
