Commitment. Responsibility. Perseverance. Quitting.
These are the words released from my pre-dawn dream into my first waking thoughts.
They are the words in the air this week, in the texts I’m receiving and sending other moms, in the hurried how-are-you’s in front of the Y before a half-baked workout.
Why are these words plaguing my subconscious? There are times when your child doesn’t want to keep doing what they’ve done. A team, a class, an instrument. And their simple plea to stop triggers a parental-tizzy in me because I don’t know what value to impart: Be tough and follow through, or be free and follow your desire. The older my children get, the more sand that fills the bottom of our 18-year timepiece, the more significance these value-laden moments carry.
We are in one of those times with our eldest. So I do what I always do: I scroll through my life to see if I can find a lesson somewhere, some way to connect to what he is feeling. I find one: my first week in college, a class I had registered for when I was still in high school, before I knew that no one in their right mind attends a seminar with 8 students (nowhere to hide) from 3 to 6pm on a Friday. I attended the first class thinking mostly of how much I didn’t want to be there, but telling myself that I was stuck with it because I wasn’t a quitter. Quitting was weak. Quitting was shameful. My heart sank further as the professor explained there would be 200 pages of reading each week. I wanted out so badly, but it didn’t fit my perception of who I wanted to be. And then, the miracle happened: he asked if anyone minded if he smoked during class. THIS was a reason I could justify! I walked out of class, not because I couldn’t work hard, I told myself, but because I refused to breathe second-hand smoke for three hours every week. Thank goodness, or I would have been miserable, missing a lot of what freshman year was about – the lead-in to the weekend (actually, that started Thursday). Was it the right decision? Who knows? It was a decision, and I don’t think it ruined me.
Sometimes there are good reasons for quitting. A bad relationship. An abusive boss. A profession that doesn’t fill your soul. I want my kids to be able to shift course if the signs point to better paths, to follow their gut.
And yet, I want them to stick with things when they get hard. I want them to honor commitments they make to themselves and other people, and to know how to buckle down. Life will get hard and they need to cultivate those inner resources to get to the other side.
What to do?
I ride my bike down to the bluffs, where I spent many teenage afternoons trying to make sense of things. I pass a young dad with long hair, walking with his 18-month-old daughter in his arms, the profound wordless companionship of a full-grown soul in a barely-grown body. They stop at a swing that someone hung from a giant eucalyptus. I used to be the one pushing my baby in that very swing.
It’s tempting to say that things were simpler back then. But that time is when my worrying-tendencies burst alive. When decisions about myself – take or drop the class—became decisions about my children. When every question – co-sleep or no, pacifier or no, pre-school or no—became a test of what kind of parent I was and what kind of human I would raise.
I turn my head from the father and daughter and look out toward the ocean. I gasp. It’s enormous. Even bigger today than yesterday, I swear it. And — hallelujah! — the power that transformed my teenage mountain-sized problems into grains of sand works again. It doesn’t give me the answer – commitment versus knowing when to say “I’m done” — but it does give me a transitory peace of knowing that everything will be fine, that what I decide won’t determine if my children become life-long quitters or masters of tenacity.
I decide that I will tell my budding adolescent all that I was thinking about, the yin and yang of yes or no, stay or go. I will give him my best advice, and I will trust him to figure it out.
There it is.
A quick scroll through my life-reel finds this legacy all over the place, the confidence born from being trusted to know the right path for me. I give thanks for that legacy to pass down, and for the familiar shiver of ocean-gazing-plus-writing-leads-to-an-answer alchemy that has sustained me since I was his age.
Laura Nicole Diamond 