Letting Go and Shutting Up

Our daughter, a palliative care social worker at a Brooklyn hospital, organizes an annual memorial for those patients who have died during the past year.  Held last week, this year’s memorial attracted about 100 mourners.  Among them was a woman in her seventies, who told the following anecdote about her mother, who lived with her and who died in her mid-nineties. 

A few months before her mother died, the two of them went to an evening party.  After awhile the mother went home but the daughter remained at the party for a few more hours.   When she came home, her mother gave her hell for staying out so late.  “I had to wait up for you until you came home, and all the time I was worried!”

If I manage to live to my mid-nineties, I hope I’ll be able to go home by myself from an evening party, but I also hope that I won’t be so far gone as to talk to my children like that.  

As parents we’re responsible for the care and nurturing of our children from infancy to their adulthood, but at some point we have to let go.  We have to let them make their own way along with their own mistakes, even as we grit our teeth to keep ourselves from giving them unsolicited advice.

That old lady was worried about her daughter, even though her daughter was an old lady too.  That’s only natural.  We worry about our children and then, to a lesser extent, about their children, as long as we live.   A mother once told me that she was only as happy as her least unhappy child, and a mother of five told me that she was glad she had so many children.  She figured that at any one time at least one of them was likely to be in good shape.

Before I became a parent, I thought that once my as yet unborn children turned 18, I could forget about them.  How absurd!  Your children are forever uppermost in your mind.

“Sorry is the hardest word,” according to an Elton John lyric, but even harder is to say nothing at all, when tempted to give your adult child unsolicited advice.  When a child marries, I once heard, you should open your wallet and shut your mouth.  I’m not sure about the first, but as for the second, it’s essential, no matter how worried you are about your child.

But your children are not obligated to act the same way towards you.  Both of ours offer unsolicited advice and the older we become the more frequent the advice.  They suspect, I fear, that whatever sense we might once have possessed has declined with age to the point that we’ve become innocents in a depraved world, in need of their protection.  I don’t mind.  Their concern is motivated by love.  Besides, they may be right.






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