A dance recital, a middle school ceremony, and the brief gift of childhood.
I was struggling to find a follow up to my Old Roads essay series. As I said in the last one of those, I wrote them out of my own desire to discover why I felt the way I did and now I understand why.
As there is far more of my life behind me than in front of me, I still find myself looking back more often than forward. While I admit that having grandchildren allows me to do some hopeful forward-looking they alone are not enough to keep me looking ahead.
That being said, grandchildren are what brought me to this particular essay. Not mine, but someone else's.
Yesterday we attended the dance recital for our friends' granddaughters. They are six and four. It was a dance recital, and if you have ever had a child in dance (we had two ourselves) you know exactly what I mean by that. As far as recitals go, this was one of the better ones. The kids wore costumes that were not overly revealing or racy. The music was good (though they had some very strange and jarring edits), and the dances seemed well choreographed. As always the littles were heartwarming to watch, and there are always the one or two littles you feel so bad for because they look like they would rather be anywhere else but on stage.
But this isn't really about that particular recital, or any recital really. It's about the kids who were in it, and the kids who weren't.
Our daughter danced for over a decade, and one of our sons for a couple of years. This was at a different studio than the recital we attended this week but, in my own humble opinion, it was at least as well run, and likely a little better. No offense to either studio intended.
We attended many recitals, performances, and shows over the years. All of them good, from a parent's perspective anyway, and as professional as possible on a small studio's budget. Each one a distinct memory. Each memory like a warm hug from my children. From the moment we sat down in the high school auditorium, it all came flooding back. I had not realized how much I missed the whole production of it all, and I do mean production. The rehearsals, the costumes, the auditorium setup, the refreshments, the hair, the makeup, the chaos, all of it.
I remember our daughter, small and excited, in costume up on the stage following the moves of the older girls or teachers at the sides of the stage. I remember her older, talented, tapping away to the lively songs they always chose. The flowing ballet moves, the bouncy jazz numbers. I remember my son in his jazz and tap numbers, one of the very few boys in each year's production.
The reason I bring all of this up is to contrast it with my experience at this year’s middle school awards/graduation ceremony.
The contrast is astounding. There are so many children, and let’s face it even in eighth grade these are still children, who are in such a hurry to grow up. So many were dressed in ways I cannot imagine letting my children dress for a dance, let alone a school event. Both boys and girls, mind you, I am not just picking on one or the other here. Even my daughter, whom I was talking to on a long trip down from her home in Houghton Lake to our home for a wedding she is in this weekend, commented that she cannot imagine dressing like some of these girls were dressed, even now, at thirty, let alone in middle school or high school.
And it isn't about the clothes or the style either. I know these things change, even in the decade since my sons graduated. I am talking about the attitude, the desire to be twenty while they are still only thirteen.
Too many parents are either uninvolved (and I know many like this) or would rather be friends with their kids than parents. They allow them to act grown up, to be autonomous as if they are adults, all while they are still kids.
I have said it before and I will say it again. If your kids are not unhappy with you pretty much of the time, you probably are not doing something right.
We made the choices for our kids that we thought were best for them, and of course, no one is perfect. We made mistakes, likely a lot of them, surely some we don't even know about.
As has been said many times, there is no manual for raising children. You do the best you can and you hope you don't mess them up too badly along the way. However, the key part of that phrase is raising. You can be friendly with your children, for sure. You do not have to have a contentious relationship with them, but you do have to raise them. You have to do what you think is best for them, not for you, and not so they like you, but so they know how to be a person.
One of those things that needs doing, to raise kids, I strongly believe, is letting them be kids while they can. Adulthood is a long and tough job. There are no summer vacations, no spring break, no do-overs, and certainly no protections from criminal prosecution like minors have. For the most part anyway, I did mention my teenage hacking career, right?
There was a web series back in the late 2000s, The Guild, and in it one of the main characters (who seems to be in his middle teens) runs up a bunch of charges on his parents' credit cards buying presents for a girl. His parents make him get a job to pay back what he spent, working in a restaurant. After spending a couple of weeks at this he says one of those lines that just sticks with you forever: “Working is soul-crushing. I can't believe adults live like this.”
Remember those words when your kids try to get a job at thirteen or fourteen.
We made some choices that were quite unpopular with our kids. I don't really want to get into specifics, but one of the main compass points we had was this: do they need to do this thing now, or can it wait until they are actually an adult? Responsibility was a big one for us. They would have to pay their own way for anything they wanted to do that was, by its nature, adulting. For example, if they wanted to drive, they had to pay for the bump in insurance that their being on our policy created; they had to pay for their own gas, etc.
We would gladly drive them anywhere they needed to go, we were going to every event they had anyway so we took them to every game, recital, concert, or whatever other shenanigans they got up to. We wanted them to be able to play sports, be in choir, go to dances, and just be kids while they were in school rather than working at night to put gas in the car and pay the insurance.
But. They got to be kids. They got to play sports, dance, have fun. They did NOT have to start working at thirteen like I did. Mind you, I chose to, which is an important distinction if my mother is reading this. When you are fifty-eight, looking back at forty-five years of working, those extra five years before the soul-crushing starts look really nice.
Even now, only ten years after our youngest two graduated, they already appreciate having been able to compete, go to counties, go to states, and enjoy being a kid while they could. They have not come around on everything, and maybe they never will. As I said before, we made MANY, MANY mistakes (I just cannot get away from this lazy tool of the weak mind), and there are for sure things that, looking back, I likely would have done at least somewhat differently. But with their best interests at the forefront of our decision-making paradigm, any errors we made were at least from the right place and not from selfishness.
All this really, just to say: let your kids be kids. They grow up fast enough on their own (just ask our son, whose son just turned two; how is that even possible already?). Don’t let it rush by any faster than it has to.
Till next time,
-John
