Advice for real moms by real moms

It never ends – parenting, that is. I mean, you know that going into it. Once you become a parent, you will always be a parent. Even if one or all of your children dies, you are still a parent.

A former co-worker once pointed out to me that, when a spouse dies, we can convey both their status and the pain that got them there instantaneously with the words “widow” and “widower.” But we have no similar language to identify a mother or father who has lost a child – as if being a parent ends with the child’s life.

It doesn’t. Ever.

I was watching a movie the other night, a really touching piece starring Hilary Swank called P.S. I Love You. It’s about a young woman whose husband dies. It follows her as she wades her way through the first, very difficult year. As the movie winds up and she’s finally ready to get on with her life, she sums up life as a bunch of contradictions, one of them being, “It’s short and it’s endless.”

That’s pretty much what parenting is, too. Two out of three of my children are adults now – 24 and 22. They know how to take care of themselves. One has finished university, lives with his fiancée, and they’re both trying to get into medical school. The other lives in a suite we’ve created for her in the basement while she works her way through a BA. They’re both so responsible! They work and they study, they try really hard to be good people, and they succeed far more than they fail.

They’re so grown up and yet my  memories of them are as clear as if they happened yesterday – my son at age 5 with a shock of red curly hair, standing at the top of the stairs in his little blue soccer pants and slip-on shoes, one blue and one red. All the grown-ups said to him, “I bet you have another pair just like that at home,” and he always smiled so patiently at hearing the same silly joke over and over again.

And my daughter – a friend of mine called her “a little ray of sunshine.” For the first eight years of her life, every picture she drew had hearts in it and every story she wrote was about love. Trying to describe her unique character, one teacher said of her, “She’s just such a … such a … she’s just such a Jayme!” (That’s her name.) And that was exactly right. She was a Jayme, and there was no one else like her.

And now they’re not children, they’re adult children, and they don’t need their parents anymore – except when they do.

Parenting adult children is very different from anything that came before. We bring these little beings into the world and it’s our job to love and protect and guide them and we give and we sacrifice and we do it gladly and they give so much back that it’s all worth it.

And then they turn into adolescents and they don’t want that anymore and it’s hard for parents, and it hurts like hell, and yet it’s right for them to rebel because that’s how they become adults.

But then they are adults, and you’ve just learned how to let them go – and they come back. And it’s confusing because you don’t know exactly what they want now. You don’t know how to parent someone who doesn’t actually need parenting anymore but still wants it sometimes.

You don’t know how to tell when they do want it and they don’t. You don’t know when to step in and say, “Wow, you’re really going to regret that!” and when to slap a big piece of duct tape over your mouth. And even though they’re all grown up, they still get angry when you don’t tell them something that really would have helped, or you do tell them something they really didn’t want to hear.

And what makes it even more confusing is that, as much as you sometimes want to tell them to just grow up, you don’t want them to. You want them to be little again – little red-haired boys in blue soccer pants, and little ray-of-sunshine girls presenting you with pictures of hearts and flowers.

But, of course, they can’t be little again, so the next best thing is for them to keep coming back, keep coming home, keep telling you their problems, keep expecting you to know when they want advice and when they don’t, because, after all, you should know that – you’re the parent, and parents know.

Parenting adult children isn’t anything like parenting young children or teenagers, and yet it’s everything like it. It’s frustrating and confusing and joyful and sorrowful. It’s short and it’s endless.

You become a parent and there’s no looking back. That’s what you always will be. Thank goodness.

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