Engagingmy80s to Lovingmy50s:  Kids grow up real fast.  So what is your plan for yourself when they leave home?

Perhaps tellingly, I initially mis-read the question to be: “…when YOU leave home?”  I ‘left home’ (your home) at 18, for College And The Wide World (swearing, of course, never to return; “BTDT,” I said – leaving it all behind).  But of course I very delightedly pranced my way back (all full of the World, and happy – for a while – to leave it behind) in order to raise my own two kids exactly where I’d been raised.  It all felt very right.  So far (right on the imitative trajectory), Ms. 14 tells me frequently these days about how far SHE is going to go when HER moment arrives.

Anyway, when I leave home for the second time (health and finances willing), it will be with my beloved partner, heading for known places (shared soul-memories of the former solo), and new places too.  We have a while to settle on the exact itinerary, since it’s still seven years (assuming all goes right) before Ms. Now-11’s HS graduation.  And of course finances will be tight with two college tuitions to consider. But we love having fun doing good, so that’ll be part of whatever happens.

photo from: http://www.photographyblogger.net/16-adventurous-open-road-pictures/ 

In any case: travel is on the agenda.  And (lots and lots of) writing.  As long as my mind doesn’t go (and/or as long as the bits that are rusty find soothing oil through instant digital answers to forgotten info) – the happy thing about my chosen passion is that tales age well.  And sometimes they only ripen into full flavor with time.

Don’t you think?

Engagingmy80s to Lovingmy50s:  What advice to your kids about preparing for their adult life, which will be ever so different from mine and yours?

I’ll start by acknowledging that although it might be a bit (or more than) of a cop-out to mention: according to all the experts, I may already be done preparing them.  With Ms. 14 and Ms. 11 seguing this spring, respectively, from their first year of high school and last year of elementary school, even though I am still focusing on them, ferrying them, feeding them, and correcting them when they err: they’ve probably pretty much imbued all the basis for Who They Are and How They Will Proceed, even now.

So what did I try to do?

There are a couple of basics that underscore my half-century’s-worth of experience, and I hope they ‘got it’ when they were amenable to the getting:

• Develop a flexible worldview.  By ‘flexible,’ I mean – don’t bend with the circumstances, but learn from them.  And don’t assume the same rules apply to every circumstance.  Treat everyone as you would be treated, and be simultaneously wary of being taken advantage of.  But always (always, always): be careful.  Full of care.  For yourself and others.
• Employ your natural good fortunate and skills to your advantage and to others’ advantage.  You were born into relative privilege and comfort, but the person sitting opposite you, looking just like you, might very well not have been – and that will color everything about how you interact.  It will also color what you can and should do in the world, to make it that better place that your Poppy always believed was perennially possible (and was his personal obligation).

Overall, though, my advice to my kids was and is: Consider power.  Consider it a lot.  Who has it.  Who doesn’t.  Why.  What it means.  How it is used.  In the home, in the office, in  the city, in the nation, in the world.  Think about it all the time.

Closing Anecdote: Ms. 11, coming skip-footed and light-hearted from her final day of her (good-fortune-privileged) take-out TAG class, told me they’d all written essays on power and read them to each other during a walk to the College Green.  She added that the nearby mower drowned out their words, and she herself made a paper fortune-teller out of her essay while not listening.  I paused to appreciate the symbolism of a fortune-teller created on the back of words of power.  Then, more prosaically wondering at the worth of the lesson, I said:  “So what do you think about power, honey?”  She tilted her head: “Hmmm.”  I added, half sardonically: “Do you think absolute power corrupts absolutely?”  She took a very long time to answer, during which I almost, but not quite, told her what I thought (I did, though, after she answered). 

After this lengthy and considered reflection, she said: “No.”

Ambiguous perhaps, but I’d like to think it’s a good sign.

Lovingmy50s to Engagingmy80s: Can we begin with the end?  When we were all in the hospital a few Fridays ago, you drawing difficult breath in the bed and us family-and-friends types alternately Googling the latest weird condition the docs claimed to have found and whiling away the wee hours as best we could, I think we all had that heavy sense of:  “Is This It?”  Which was sort of the impetus for this dialogue.  So my first question is: how does Death look, from where you stand now?

Engagingmy80s to Lovingmy50s:

“Well, frankly, I don’t spend much time looking at it. 

And I like the attitude of that famous philosopher, Woody Allen:

“ Do I believe in life after death?  No, I believe in death after life- makes more sense that way.”

I have died a few times already……” 

    (click to read the rest)