The Kids Are All Right
There is a movie by that name starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. It’s about a same-sex couple (Bening and Moore) who have two children who were the product of each of them plus a common sperm donor (Ruffalo). It’s a fairly contrived story that might possibly exist in a few real life situations, but is unlikely to represent the issues faced by a broad swath of the population. The topic that is widely applicable is the shift that occurs in all lives when the birds gotta fly. And birds do gotta fly sooner or later.
When I grew up, my mother was burdened by two reinforcing thoughts. There was the way she made her way into adulthood. Her mother died when she was fifteen and as one of five surviving children (number four in the line-up), she was largely left to raise herself in a house with a hard-working Eastern European father. He had a wood stove in the kitchen, but no icebox (that’s what a cool root cellar was for). He wanted nothing more from life than a Carling Black Label beer bottle, a few hot dogs and some spinach. He had made his money (or at least all that he needed) from his Prohibition rum-running days across the Canadian border. He made enough to get himself out of the Cayuga rock salt mine, where he had toiled for thirty years and now he owned his own home and farm as well as two businesses up at the corner, a road house and a gas station. What more could a man ask for other than perhaps not to be widowed too early and losing his life partner.
Her father was not an educated man, but he was a smart man who knew enough to not get in the way of his children. He had sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with his brother when he was only nine-years-old and he made his own way in a new world to a good life. His oldest had run off young to join the Navy even though it was peacetime. His second learned enough about the roadhouse business to follow that path. And my mother’s one remaining sister (Josephine had died in front of her eyes during a flash flood years before) was off to a business career keeping the books and records for others, and eventually for her own business. But my mother was more cerebral and had more curiosity and drive than others. In that way, she was more like her father, with an adventuresome spirit that would take her out into the world just as her father had ventured far from home. Her father did not understand that path as well as he had that of his other children, but he intuitively knew enough not to stand in its way.
In addition to that strong heritage, my mother had the burden of being a woman who married late in life (unusual in her era), had a career when it was not so usual, and had ended up as a single mother supporting herself and three children when few women could manage such things easily. None of it ever phased her it seemed and she just soldiered through and even soared. What did phase her was her concern that her only son might suffer for growing up without the influence of a father at hand. It gave rise to her shipping me off for an extended summer with my father (and his second family) at age eight. All it served to do was to clarify for me that my natural role model had to be my mother. I was simply too much like her and too little like him. It also allowed me the freedom to be unbound by motherly overbearing oversight. Again, she had to fly and she felt I had to be taught to fly (in my case on a motorcycle across Europe during my high school days). And then, at the end of high school, recognizing that I was on my way to her Alma Mater on my own terms, she never blinked at setting me free to fly the nest once and for all. It was the best thing that could have happened to me.
Now I am older and further along in my life than she was when I flew away. She was fifty-five years old and here I am eleven years older than that. From the age of seventeen I never lived again with my mother, but she was and is always with me nonetheless. I never had to be physically with her for me to feel close to her. When we spoke, we spoke honestly and as adults. She was still my mother, but she had learned many years ago that I had my own path to follow and would do just that. She had done her job and I feel she did it well. That is where we should all aspire to be at some point with our kids.
I have finally moved away from my kids rather than the other way around. I’m not sure that is how it is supposed to happen, but then I’m equally not sure there is a guidebook about what should and should not happen. If my mother had her burdens to carry, so do I. Mine have to do with the fact that both of the marriages from which I had issue, as the trust and estate lawyers like to say, ended in divorce when the kids were relatively young. My own lack of fatherly guidance caused me to swear to the heavens that I would not leave my children by the side of the road as my father had. While I understand the contradiction in terms of this, I consider myself to have been a very responsible and attentive weekend and holiday father to my kids. I can’t remember ever missing a weekend and usually I was fighting to make sure I got my fair allotment of vacation time. I made sure to give all of my kids the exposure to the global wide world that I had benefited from as a child, even though they all grew up in one place and one place only (the two older on Long Island the younger in Manhattan). Each of the two older have lived with me for short stretches after college and I see them (and my grandkids) as often as I can and speak to them all more often. While I try to make our conversations more meaningful than “what did you do at school today?” conversations, that is harder with the older ones who are more quiet and easier with the younger one who is more forthcoming due to fifteen years of very expensive child therapy.
I feel very good that I have been able to do as much as I have with my kids, that they are all very close to my wife, Kim, and that Kim and I include their mothers and their mothers’ families (including one live-in boyfriend) in many of our family activities. You can say it is a “modern family”, but I would go astep farther and call it an enlightened family.
And now I am 3,000 miles away from my kids and grandkids. In the past two months one has visited already and the one with the grandkids is coming in April. There is no better use of the Bank of Dad than to support such visits. I am hoping my oldest chooses to come out for a visit at some point as well. In the meantime, We are scheduled to be back in NYC about every other month. That is a bit less often than we might otherwise see them, but not by too much. Furthermore, with ages between thirty-eight and twenty-five, it is time for these birds to fly and be comfortable building their own nests. The bottom line is the kids are all right and probably better off in the long run learning to fly solo.