I've belonged to wonderful listservs online, full of women of joy and, well, women of misery, too.
Nearly always, the joyful women are the ones who've created a life outside, and apart from, their adult children. The women of misery? Oten they cannot let themselves believe that raising children was only a portion of their life--not the whole thing.
Long ago, I sat on our couch in our yellow California house while watching a 6-year-old Naomi singing softly to ten or more stuffed lions, cats and dogs spread over the living room carpet. I remember hearing a voice whisper, "Look up from your book, see Naomi as she is and memorize her. She'll not always be six. Someday she'll be far away, grown-up,so memorize her just as she is in this moment so you'll have a picture memory to keep."
Always, there was that knowing inside.
A knowing that mothering a child is a transient thing, fleeting. I consciously attempted to slow Naomi's childhood down--tried to savor moments around the house while I sunned myself outside on the porch and we sat across tables in the ice cream parlor in Nevada and--
But as I sit here, the mother of a daughter who will be 27 this month, I'm amazed how quickly it all flew. No matter how I tried to slow it down--I couldn't. The hourglass sand steadily spilled.
But that voice, that knowing also told me while Naomi was in high school, to start building something of my own. A life just for me, something which I could switch over to after Naomi left the nest. A place for my creative energy and dreams.
And all too soon, Naomi flew away--and oh, I needed that place! And wow, was I ever grateful I'd built it, that its creation began early, not late.
***
The happiest parents I know? The ones who allow their adult children to live their own lives and breathe and act and make decisions as adults.
The most miserable parents I know? The ones who grasp and pull and treat their adult kids like old children in a sort of time-warp.
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