THE END…
…A BEGINNING
My final mistake is a story that Jamie is more qualified to tell. It’s slightly ironic that, at the end of a book filled with words, it’s a mistake that proves we often would be just as well off without words.
I had driven around the back driveway at the high school reaching the tennis court just as practice was over. Jamie was visibly upset. Her coach was walking with her as I approached, and she was counseling Jamie to try to conquer her frustration on days that didn’t go well. With good intentions the coach moved her attention to me, explaining that Jamie tended to wilt under frustration. And just like the Ms. Supermom I have tried to assassinate with this book, I donned my red “SM” cape and began to explain Jamie to the coach, “Jamie’s life has been…. Jamie usually does…. blah, blah…well-intentioned blahs…,” finally bringing tears to my daughter instead of comfort. Stopping my words, Jamie asked to go to the locker room. On her way down the sidewalk she paused to blow off steam with a friend who gave me one of “those” teenage stares as they entered the locker room.
Once again, I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong in my motherly “moment of compassion.” When Jamie finally joined me in the car, in an uncharacteristic verbal tongue lashing, she let me have it, deservedly so, “I just hate when you do that. You always explain me to everyone. You describe me just like you know what I think and how I feel. Well, you don’t! You don’t know me; you don’t know how I feel!!” I lost all my words. She was right.
It should have been obvious to me long ago. If I have been spending years reading books, writing and thinking, to get to know myself, just what makes me think I have any right to understand Jamie?
It has been a long road for me to walk, trying to undo all my best efforts to be an understanding parent. Jamie taught me that I improve as a mom as I become more mystified and confounded by the uniqueness of my children. That’s when I am finally open to seeing them as they are and not as I try to mold them.
And after years of getting reacquainted with these teens who share my home, I realize I have only one gift left to give my children. It’s the hardest gift to give anyone, especially your own children, which is probably the reason we parents give up and turn to lectures and words. Well, Jamie and Justin, if your minds have turned to the hope that my ultimate gift will be a raise of your allowance, new clothes, or a European vacation, you will be doubly disappointed. My ultimate gift might seem incomprehensible, but it is what I hope to dedicate the balance of my life to achieving. I give to you my personal effort to live my life with integrity.
I am struggling, as all parents must, to take my focus off of you and direct it inward. This book started as a collection of stories. But early on, I realized I had a problem because I didn’t know how to end it. I realized that I had started to weave a personal philosophy of life, my life, and I only had half the yarn. Gradually, as stories came back to life on the page and as stories were illuminated by the ideas of my favorite authors, a strong conviction developed in me of the kind of person I should be. I have had to finally quit “molding” you because I see how much of myself needs to be shaped and molded according to the ideals and beliefs that I have set out for you and me to see.
I have talked big. Lots of words. When I put the final period after the last word and press control-save on the computer, I will be sitting in a quiet house staring at the keyboard and thinking about the long stretch of years to come when you both will be able to watch me and measure the value of these words I have written. You now have 21 chapters, and 141 pages. I have declared my opinions and paraded my heroes through these pages. Now, what kind of parent will I be?
Integrity is the only thing of value I have left to give. Already, as I get ready to move away from the keyboard, I know I will fail. I wish I had the kind of integrity that would allow me to honor Ghandi or Mother Teresa with my actions instead of my words.
Money isn’t everything…show me.
Love your enemy…show me.
Help the poor…show me.
If my life were one of complete integrity, words would not be necessary.
I won’t sell my home for the poor, I won’t give all I have to serve others. But how big of a failure will I be? I have a life to live and find out. I put your lives into your hands now and set my sight on the challenge that is left for me, when I have pulled all the yarn together to weave my philosophy, completed in this book to you. The only task, the biggest task, is left to me now in silence at the keyboard: “Do I have the integrity to live it?”
Love forever,
Your Mom
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GOODBYE
In 1967 I read and copied this poem as a teenager with my eyes on my parents.
In 1997 I read and copied this poem as a parent with my eyes on myself.
Kahlil Gibran
1883-1931
AND a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have thoughts,
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Gibran, Kahlil, The Prophet, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986, pp. 17-19.