New Parents Please

In what is probably the hardest thing for me to confess, I want to let my dear friend Kari know that I have always wanted different parents. Let me say that I love my parents. But that love has changed and developed over the years as I hope it continues to do. In my needy years I loved them unconditionally, because to be infallible meant to provide me with the necessities of life - a full lunch box, a bunk bed, and play time. As I got older, I started having my own milestones (first day of kindergarten was hers, as was my baptism at 8 for that matter).

My Eagle Scout court of honor was a big one for me and I would have given anything to have anyone else function as my parents. My mother was so eager to pin my badge on me that she rushed up, pulled me by the hand and denied me the dignity of walking up as I needed to do as a 17 year old young man. She shrieked and tears rolled down her cheeks. This was a milestone of MY life. I felt like a clown of a kid with an overbearing mother who didn’t know how to respect her sons boundaries. I wanted a different mother who would go to PTA meetings at my school; who would remember after the 7 billionth time that I don’t like tuna fish. The mother in my imagination could have looked the same and talked the same but she would do more for me, more to make my future life be easier. She would be better at personal finance, at follow through, at getting things organized. I guess I didn’t want a different mother so much as another mother whose skills would augment mine and who I could learn from in a different way.

I’ve always wanted a different father. But for better or worse, they are who I was stuck with. I am grateful for the bond that I’ve made and continue to make with them. But is it wrong that I will want to make a bond with my in-laws (whenever that’s going to happen)? Or that I want my friends Andrew and Shelby to be at my wedding as much as my mom and dad? Maybe I’m a little more heartless than most. Perhaps I am too independent. Without going so far as to say "out of sight out of mind," there is a lot to be said for "love the one’s you’re with." I think that the people in our lives are the ones who shape us and make us and it is how we interact with them that truly forms who we are. My mom is a different person then when I was five. Our relationship is different and she and I have both had to adapt and change to meet the changes we both have gone through.

Do I miss my old mom? Yes, of course; but only as much as I miss being in kindergarten again which is more about romantic reminiscences than an actual desire to relive that time. As time goes forward it takes us with it either with complicity or kicking and screaming (that’s part of five that I don’t miss). I try to assess each day and what its challenges are. I try to access the joy of each opportunity to grow and make the most of what I have right now. Tomorrow it will only be a memory.