Father's Day: a case for pushing kids out of the nest

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These orphaned robin's eggs that Don found on the ground while he mowed around the spruce tree are normal in the earth's economy. If everything survived, the world would be overrun. Yet I tend to side with the prey, not the bluejay who knocked the nest out of the tree while he raided and stole eggs. There is a mothering instinct in me that wants the defenseless to be protected, and survive.

It's Father's Day in the U.S., and I am feeling grateful that my husband and father of my two children agreed with Goethe: "There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings." I work with college students, and I witness the growing trend of "Velcro" parents to stay involved in the daily (or hourly) comings, goings, successes and failings of their college children. Truth is that the kids are half of that sticky Velcro and seem to want to be in touch many times a day by text. The roots are strong, the wings not so much. (I couldn't wait to be off on my own.)

There is a fantastic article about breaking up with parents written by Terry Castle, the literary critic and professor at Stanford (Susan Sontag called her the most expressive literary critic alive today). I felt something shift when I read it. She uses literary orphans to demonstrate how strong and resilient humans become when they are forced to survive on their own (so many! "Witness Little Goody Two-Shoes, Pollyanna, Heidi, Little Orphan Annie, Kim, Mowgli, Bilbo, Frodo, Anne (of Green Gables), Dorothy (she of Toto and Auntie Em), Peter (as in Pan), Harry (as in Potter)". The article is "The Case for Breaking Up with Your Parents" in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is long. It is excellent.

Of course we live in times of economic hardship, and some of our adult kids have to live with us now and then until they catch a break. The real point of the article is that we must raise children to think for themselves. Imagine a society of independently thinking people.

Happy Father's Day!
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Summer storm

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William Butler Yeats said,

"We can make our minds so like clear water that beings gather around us, that they might see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even fiercer life because of our quiet.”

I remember one summer night lying in bed at the cottage in the big bedroom upstairs in one of the two double beds encompassed by open screened windows on three walls. I was fourteen, and I had my small FM radio playing quietly so only I could hear it from the nightstand a few inches from my pillow, the only light in the room from its linear dial. It was a hot Michigan night, and a storm was building around us, the way they always did at that place. One storm would come, the clouds would burst, and then another would follow it in a circle of storms. I loved sleeping in that room and waking to the rain on the tin roof, an occasional acorn falling with the rain. Quietly that night when I was the only one awake, my mom and dad in the bedroom downstairs, over the radio came keyboards, thunder, rain and Jim Morrison singing “Riders on the Storm” and I knew the luxury of sound. I did not understand who the “killer on the road” in the song was, or that Jim Morrison had just died of a heroine overdose. I had not yet studied Yeats in college, or visited sites of Dublin's Easter Rising. I did not know much at all, come to think of it.

I still relish the luxury of that emptiness in a thunderstorm, surrounded by a sky brimming with power, and so much depending on how we listen.

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Poem: Bamboo in Winter

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Bamboo in Winter

Wind blurs the bamboo branches into 
     spinning ribbons of two-toned sage.
It is a singular being with root-stalks rattling
     out of the snowed and heavy ground.
Or is it the other bamboo sticks' chiming I hear?
     The ones the children tied with shells and twine
when Summer jumped the wind with lissome limbs?

Winter bones now rattle the wind, unfastened
     in tatters. Skeletal bells from porch hooks
keep flapping. What did we carry from Summer,
     in the hands of the children?
Keep on, keep on, call the bamboo chimes
     to their living kin across Winter’s yard.
Bend quietly, dear sons and daughters.
     Bend lithely, while you can. And the shells clap
their hands like cymbals, hearing
     Summer's tide in the sound of the wind.


February 2012

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Poem: Departures

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I am on vacation (stay-cation) and am 'supposed' to be working on my book this morning, a self publishing project that I hope to have ready in the fall for anyone interested. Well, I came across this poem in that partial volume, written in 1994, and I thought I'd post it. I am the youngest of eight children. This is about my next older sibling, four years my senior. He doesn't read my blog, but even if he did, I'm not sure he'd find anything in this poem that is untrue or unfair. He was my best buddy growing up. He tried to teach me to laugh at myself when I struck out at neighborhood baseball. He didn't succeed, but I love him for trying.

Departures

He arrived home like a Fenian
in his long-haired sheep coat,
dirty from bus sides, the smell of English
cigarettes a celebration in his hair,
maroon patent platforms cracked
from two lavish weeks on London sidewalks,
fulvous Lennon wire-rims the keystone,
his mark of triumph.

At 18,
he had pocketed his tuition money and cast
the coins over his shoulder into the Thames.

I noticed him camber slightly
as they stepped from the station wagon,
then straighten to the same height as Dad,
the first time my brother ever appeared
a stranger in our town, combating the gravel
of the driveway, so unlike Dad, even calumnious
in his gait, the jingle of foreign currency
audible above the restraint of our welcome.

It was then I knew he had entered a mezzanine
decade or century or maybe an island
where he began to linger
away from us, although 25 years later
he still lives in the same town.
He approached my mother and me on the porch
and, looking me in the eye,
departed across the channel, oars cocked.

Listen to a podcast of this poem here.

Photo still of London in 1970 from the movie "Follow Me" found here.

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