LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 8: Letting Go With Love
Page 25
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Continuation of Chapter 8 of Letting Go of Our Adult Children, in which you learn how to truly let go with love.
We expect our friends will respect our desire not to discuss certain topics and we allow our friends to keep some topics off-limits.
If you and your child have diametrically opposing views on certain issues, such as abortion, it is understandable that talking about them is not going to change either of your minds. If either of you insists on bringing up the subject, you will both continue to feel you are getting nowhere. Avoiding such pointless discussions only makes good sense.
If there are topics that cause you pain, it is perfectly okay for those topics to be out of bounds until you are ready to discuss them. In fact, you can do more than hope that these topics won't come up; you can ask your child, directly, not to bring up subjects that have proven divisive in the past.
Similarly, if your child asks you not to discuss some topic, you must honor her request, even though you may be sorely tempted to give her one more "lesson." After all, would you force your friend to talk about something if she didn't want to? Well, maybe you might, rarely, if you had a particularly good friend who was avoiding looking at something that could cause her a great deal of grief if it weren't faced, even though it was a sensitive issue. But my observation of parents and adult children is that parents frequently insist on initiating topics they know their child doesn't want to discuss with them in the hope they can steer him away from trouble (the I'm-only-saying-this-for-your-own-good method of controlling our children).
On the other hand, in choosing to have some subjects "off limits," be careful you don't decide to avoid talking about any difficult issue. Some topics need lots of airing for understanding and negotiations to occur, even though they are not comfortable subjects to discuss. But there can come a time when you may realize that more talking isn't going to resolve the issue, especially one that does not require mutual agreement or negotiation but is only a ploy to get the other person to change her mind. Give yourself and your children a break.
We do not expect friends to be the only source of connection, learning, love, and nurturing in our lives.
There are two ways in which we can apply this characteristic of friendships to our relationship with an adult child.
First, unless we work at maintaining lives that are rich and rewarding apart from our role as parents, we will find it difficult to release our children.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun, a professor at Columbia University for more than thirty years, addresses the need for women to use this time of life as an opportunity "to take risks, make noise, be courageous, become unpopular." The same can be said of men. In other words, we need to design our lives so they have meaning and purpose. In an article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1992, Heilbrun notes that at a certain age, "there is no longer time for meaningless conversations, for social events where time merely passes, where obligations no longer important are merely fulfilled. One leaves one's space to take part in something that, if ever so slightly, changes the world."
When we no longer count on friends, or children, to provide the basis for all our social needs, we not only experience a richer and fuller life, we have more to share with our friends — ; and with our children.
Second, we must keep reminding ourselves that our child may only be able to learn what he needs to learn after we have let him go. There are other sources of learning besides the home.
Consider the case of Jerry, who used drugs during most of high school, dropped out, and showed no inclination to "grow up" while he was living at home. I heard of Jerry's interesting odyssey in maturity when I interviewed his parents, John and Elizabeth. John said that when Jerry was nineteen, he sold the car his parents had given him and went to Hawaii to work and to "find himself." It didn't seem to John that his son was likely to mature when bumming around without parental control, although he and Elizabeth hadn't had much success up to that point in steering him in a different direction. In any case, there was nothing Jerry's parents could do about it.
When he returned two years later, however, they were in for a surprise. John quickly realized that the time away had been well spent. As Jerry walked into the kitchen, where a bowl of fruit was sitting on the table, he asked, "May I have a banana?" John says he knew right then that his son finally saw himself as an adult, not as a child with automatic rights to take from them whatever he wanted. Events since then have reaffirmed the value Jerry received in leaving home when he did.
Find a Metaphor that Works for You
Some parents consider children clay they must mold into a specific shape. When their children are young, that philosophy may sometimes work. However, conflict arises when the parents discover the clay has a mind of its own and resists their attempts at molding. Others see babies as cute toys designed to provide them with pleasure. Again, when their children are quite young, that philosophy may be okay for awhile, but what happens when the toys rebel and resist the role of plaything for narcissists?
The metaphoric way in which we experience our children has a great deal to do with the difficulty or ease with which we can let them go.
If you regard your children as appliances that come with a warranty and must perform as expected, you may want to discard them when they start costing a bit more to support and don't function the way you thought they should. And if you see children as cars you have carefully maintained for years and assume that their performance will reflect on how well you maintain them, you may feel especially responsible if they don't work in top condition when you sell them to someone else eighteen years later.
On the other hand, do you share the view of Erma Bombeck who sees children as kites? Throughout their childhood you keep trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you're both breathless and still they crash. You patch them up and run again, adding a longer tail. They hit a tree and you climb up to retrieve them. You patch once more, adjusting for their growing size, and caution them about the perils of unseen wind. When they are ready to try their final flight, you let out the string with joy and sadness because you know the kite will snap the line that bound you together. But you also know the kite will fly as it was meant to fly, alone and free.
A slight modification on the kite motif is one that I saw in the home of parents I interviewed for this book. In the kitchen hung a poster of a hot air balloon with the caption, "There's freedom in loving. To love something completely you must be able to let it go." At the bottom of the poster she had attached the high school tassels of each of her children. She believed their basic character was set by the time they were eighteen. By then she realized she had to let them go, watch what they would make of the character she had worked to instill in them, and stand back to see where their balloons would land.
It is difficult to let go of the kite or balloon that is our child if we doubt our child's ability to steer a course away from electric wires and other obstacles waiting to snatch the unwary. But unless we keep our child tied down and imprisoned, we don't have any other choice than to let go.
All Your Children Are Equally Important
Several years ago my daughter and I paid a condolence visit to the home of friends whose son had been murdered. After the visit my daughter was very upset with me — ; and for good reason! I had once again talked about David more than I did about our other children. She accused me of spending more time thinking about him than I did about her or her sister and brother. I knew that in the past I had focused much of my energy on him, but I thought I was over that phase. Apparently not. As other parents have noticed, it doesn't matter how satisfied you feel with your other children, when there is one that is having trouble, that one will preoccupy your mind.
After my daughter's comment, I reflected on what happened during our visit. I realized that talking about my pain was an attempt to convey to my friends that I understood their pain in losing a child. But the situations are very different because my child is alive. My only "loss" is the loss of my expectations. I may have reached the fifth stage of healing in a number of ways, but during that visit I certainly slid back into a previous stage. I decided from then on to be more conscious of how much "air time" I would give to the subject of David or to his siblings. He deserves to be mentioned in conversations about our family, but neither more nor less than the others.
All of our children are important. They all deserve our attention.
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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