Son number one is nineteen now, and he has been attending ETSU for the past year, due to begin at the University of Tennessee in just a few weeks. I have been learning a great deal in the past year when thinking about being the parent of a grown up. I had, of course, gotten some of the information from my own parents, and my brother, who became a father a couple of years before I did, has been giving me up-to-date comments as well. Going through this experience has not been that easy. I am excited for the opportunity Firstkid has, and his prospect of being engaged in a major away at university reminds me of the real pleasure of being a university student. I wouldn't swap places with him, but I wouldn't mind being a full-time student again with the background I now have.
This past couple of years, though, my wife and I have had to deal with the other adult in the house, the neo-adult who has started developing a life pretty much separate from our day-to-day lives, with a number of friends we are not likely to know past names and faces, and activities we would not be likely to pursue, and a sense of "normal" that we are not likely to share. I would like a general bit of information about these things, but I really do not expect an exhaustive report. Sometimes, I would settle for synchronizing supper schedules. On occasion, I guess what I want is for Firstkid to try the old trick of offering too much information, thinking that I will ask him to taper off the detail. It wouldn't work--I am patient as a rock--but it would be fun to watch him try it for now, my knowing full well that in a few years it will be more of his offering information as a means to make an indirect request for advice.
My friend Michael Cody has gone through this process twice, and he is still lucid and vertical. So I hope to be. In the meantime, I have two more younger kids at home, and I will just have to see how I fare in these two more attempts to get it right. While Firstkid has suffered from having novice parents, he does not seem all that much traumatized by the experience. Maybe parents don't see through their own trauma from parenthood. I still look into that angular, whiskered face for the pie-faced toddler who still surfaces, just briefly, in an unguarded moment.
I am grateful for the thought that perhaps, at times, he looks for an earlier me to surface in my eyes, too.
My own first kid turns 16 in a few weeks. I find myself losing count of exactly how many times I have learned to be a parent in his life. You should be an old pro at this adult child thing be the time we reach that stage. I'll be counting on you!
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