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Have you ever been asked to capture
important insights in a pithy phrase or two?
My son begins his senior year in high school shortly. It is a heady time. He revels in being at the top of the social food chain while I prepare myself for the onslaught of sentimentality that will bombard me in the next 12 months, faced at the end of it with that cliched moment where you send your child off into the world with a few paltry words of wisdom.
For him it is exciting and fun and a time for him to be filled with himself, fully content that the power of his charms will take him wherever he wants to go. I observe and muse, hoping for him that this youthful arrogance lends itself more to the plot lines of a Shakespearean comedy than the hubris of a Greek tragedy. And while I know it is a fruitless comparison, I can't help but think back to the time when I was his age and how I felt about my imminent departure from my parents home and into the start of my own life.
I have joked before about the rules for living that my mother sent me off to college with. As the primary parent to four teen-aged daughters, in the midst of both a financial and a marital crisis, her thoughts were none too spiritual, philosophical, literary, or even sentimental. She was struggling with all her power and energy and wanted to steer her daughters away from such a future for themselves. My mother's rules for life at this time were thus blunt instruments that didn't particularly flatter even as they laid out a foundation of support:
1. What ever you do, don't expect anyone else to take care of you. Make sure you can take care of yourself. I was not to be looking for an M-R-S Degree as I set off to explore the world of higher education. As someone who had to leave college after her first year because of a lack of funds and who then married shortly thereafter and worked to put her husband through school, my mother did not want me to take a college degree for granted. Now, the coda to this first and most important rule for life-sung with a 60's back beat-was always Don't get swept off your feet, my sweet, because you'll need them firmly on the ground...
2. I don't care how smart you are, keep up your typing skills, because you'll always be able to earn a living. My mother was a solidly working class woman. While she valued education and the power of her daughters' intellectual capabilities, she never could shake that working class sense of insecurity that travels with a world in which jobs can and do end. So back-up plans and skills and schemes (think Jackie Gleason here) were a major dimension of survival in her world Even though I was supposedly leaving that world behind by being the first female in my family to go off to college, she didn't want me to leave its lessons behind. At a time when the feminist movement was telling young women to expand our horizons along with our skills, my mother instilled an equally feminist work ethic which declared, Don't be afraid of honest work if you need it, because it isn't beneath you, no matter what your skills
3. Keep a handle on your expensive tastes. I know you're a sophisticated girl, but there's nothing wrong with a good bargain at an outlet shop. I dunno, but it seems to me this one needs no annotation. I grew up in a world of bargain hunting women. You can't shake that, ever, I don't care how much cultural capital you amass. The thrill of the discount will never, ever diminish.
4. Always remember this: you are smart; you are beautiful; you are special to us and we matter. This was my mother's way of telling me what she had always told me, what she had always told us. What we still know, even 15 years after her death: You are loved. Why, I wonder, was this rule the hardest to live up to?
I can't really compare myself to my son, or to his situation, but I can compare myself to my mother. And so, mired in the sentimentality that my son's looming adulthood brings, leads me to wonder if I can be as pithy and profound as she. I've been struggling with what rules I would offer my son, and find I am falling woefully short. The rules I come up with so far are ephemeral at best and cynical at worst. Given that my economic experience offers little in the way of teachable moments, I think it best that I leave that advice to his over achieving, affluent, professional, middle-class dads. I don't know that boys listen to their mothers the same way that girls entering into the second wave of feminism were invited to listen to their mothers anyway. I'm floundering. The best I can come up with at the moment are these three pitiful rules:
1. Try not to fall in love in the aftermath of a major terrorist incident
2. Do not forget that learning has no end
3. Know that you make my heart grow
I'm hoping I'll get better at this as the year progresses. This is one of those areas where I feel sorry for my son, since he doesn't have the advantages I had, in the mother he got. Nor did he get to have her as a grandmother. So I think I need to strengthen my game here. Help me out, please.
What about you, do you have any rules 4 life
that you would pass on to someone younger?
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