As parents, we all go through that spell when our kids feel they know everything, and realize you don’t. You’ve been laid bare, defrocked of your cape, stripped of your superpowers.
It’s in the fading awe. Reverence relegated to tolerance. You’ve been measured in a new light, and found to be merely human.
It’s in the timber of conversations. Their words trumpet confidence. Yours pitch-bend to hums and sighs.
It’s in the exasperation manifest in their rolling eyes where bated anticipation once dwelled.
It’s in the loss of tower-ness that erodes the need to be leaned on like before.
Until…
It’s in the disappointment at having missed supper, and with it, their opportunity to narrate their day, the highs, the lows, and everything oscillating in between, knowing they will never have a more captive audience.
It’s in the dogged determination to maintain the rituals that anchored their youth, the observances that elevate the passage of time into life time.
It’s in the passion with which they defend their upbringing — code that you’ve gotten it mostly right and that yours is the blueprint they plan to adopt to shepherd the lives of their own children.
It’s in the comforting knowledge that as your insecurities surface, theirs cave in under the weight of the unmitigated self-worth you’ve helped shape and nurture over the years.
It’s in the infinitesimal details that speak volumes, like expecting everyone to gather around the TV at the end of the day, because that’s how families spend their evenings together. So classic, it never gets old.
When your family is the sun around which your world revolves, and your kids grow up, the fear of becoming parentally irrelevant invariably sets in. In the house where invincibility once resided, inadequacy and ineptitude are the new squatters. You find yourself navigating the border between their growing self-sufficiency and your diminishing significance. You pat yourself on the back for abetting the former, and could kick yourself insensate for having contributed to the latter.
That is until you realize that if you have been diminished over time, it is so they could flourish, because this is their time; that those wrinkles in your armour are less about your declining ability to protect them, and more about the character and resilience you helped forge.
There is this tiny space that exists between the amount of control we ultimately have over our lives and the overwhelming uncertainty we must live with. For parents who choose to not underestimate their influence on how their kids turn out in adulthood, that tiny space teems with opportunity that stretches as wide as the universe to impact that outcome.