We recently celebrated my youngest baby’s birthday; he’s 24.
I guess it’s past time to face the fact that my children are children no longer. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of having children is that one day they have to grow up, but I can see now how wrong that is.
Young children are, undoubtedly, a special gift from God. Even taking into account their propensity for tantrums and stubbornness, they are simply power plants churning out positive energy. Also, their helplessness and neediness flatters us; we become heroes in their eyes, almost gods. I remember my now 24-year-old at age 6, anxiously searching the t-ball stands for my face after making it to first base.
He is now several years beyond that phase. He has the wry cynicism about his parents that his older siblings had before him. I’m well used to feeling tolerated as much as loved. I have not found that easy – his transition from true believer to profound skeptic was especially painful, perhaps because he was the baby.
But it is a different kind of relationship you have with grown children, a more genuine one, rooted in a greater reality about who both parties are. There’s often a difficult bridging period to go through – the teenage years – in which children separate from their parents. We were lucky with our baby; unlike most of his older siblings, he wasn’t particularly different from who he was as a child as he negotiated adolescence. But the sense of your child becoming a real person rather than “your child” is something that produces mixed feelings, an experience the parent no doubt shares with the child.
My baby is now rather less tolerant of my perceived faults than his older brothers and sisters. He is nevertheless someone whose company I enjoy greatly. I feel deep down that he considers me a friend, and I take pleasure in his company because he provokes me and challenges me and makes me laugh even when he’s putting me on the defensive. This friendship is only possible because he doesn’t see me through rose-tinted glasses.
I see so much good in him and so much promise for his future. He is feisty and has a good dose of youthful righteousness, but he is above all kind.
When I look at him, though, I don’t feel “job done” and pat myself on the back for producing such an impressive son. The older I get, the more I realize I had almost nothing to do with producing his character. He was who he was from the start; he just became more so. I tried to give him a stable upbringing and a strong moral compass, but he is his own work. I can only say that I am very happy that he has done that work well.
Christina Pierce is the publisher of The Pine Belt News and Signature Magazine.
