My eldest is 18 and about to graduate from high school. As I contemplate her "commencement" of a new stage of life I find myself wishing I had taught her more. I remember books, many Victorian, which I read as a child wherein the parents seemed always to be intoning wise platitudes about life to their appreciative offspring. Sort of like living Aesops. I have tried at times to think of something pithy, some jewel of wisdom which I have learned from my (long!) life to impart to my children, but nothing ever comes to mind.
I think, "Surely I have learned something in my life that I should tell my daughter before she leaves the familial nest," but I always draw a blank. I have thought that a lovely and fitting graduation gift would be a book of letters of motherly wisdom, things to always remember as you go through life, but, once again, I come up empty.
Why is this? Is it something about my generation that we just don't express ourselves that way? Is it because deep down inside I still don't feel like a grown-up? Is it that I forget everything I learn? Is this a serious weakness in a parent?
Actually, I feel that my daughter has taught me far more than I have taught her. Everything I know about being a parent I learned first from her. She was a kind, gentle, forgiving teacher, and she never berated me for being a novice. She taught me what it is like to be the recipient of unconditional love and admiration, and overlooked my failings. If she compared me to other mothers, she was careful never to say so, and she praised me often, sometimes when I knew I didn't deserve it. She never noticed when I was afraid and her trust in me gave me courage.
I don't know when she first realized she was a separate being from me. I remember clearly the awe and dismay I felt when I first realized she had an interior world I knew nothing of. That she, not I, was the center of her interior universe. That she felt and thought and dreamed and d feared things I was unaware of, and unable to apprehend. She was five or six years old and struggling to explain to me her fear of ceasing to be. To tell me that she lay in bed at night and felt terror at the size of the universe and her smallness in comparison. That she had understood her own finiteness in the course of time and eternity and that she felt how alone each of us ultimately is, even when surrounded by friends and loved ones. That no other human being can really know what it is to be "me."
I knew from that point on, really knew, that she was not an extension of me; that although she was my child, she was also in a very real way my equal, my sister, my fellow traveler through this world - another wayfaring stranger, another pilgrim, another sojourner, another eternal soul standing alone before God. I knew then, really knew, that she would grow up and leave one day. I realized I was the instrument God had chosen to start her on her way, but that she would eventually leave me behind. She not only was not me, she was not mine. That understanding has made our time together bittersweet - all the dearer because I knew it was not forever; that I must seize the day or it would be gone.
I remember when my children were small, meeting older women in the market or the park who would look wistfully at my babies, sometimes with teary eyes, and say, "Enjoy it while it lasts, dear." And I would desperately enjoy it - as hard as I could, because I knew "it" was only for a season.
I have been blessed with six other children; four of them daughters, so I have many more sweet hours with little girls and middle-sized girls and teenaged girls. (In fact right now I have a gorgeous little 5 year old "queen" in dress-up clothes and a paper crown waiting to tell me her story.) She and her sisters will teach me many things, I know. But there is something indelible about the quality of the relationship with the first child - maybe not unlike one's first love. There is only one first.
So, Happy graduation, honey. Thanks for all you've taught me.
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