Our younger daughter, the YD, has just completed a
walking tour of part of the coast of Turkey. She sent us an itinerary and we
have been enjoying the photos as she tramped through, over and down the
mountainous coast. She did it solo, a bit of a worry for her father and me, but
she is not only competent and prepared, she is also lucky, and this combination
has taken her through many treks in strange, wonderful and sometimes dangerous
(Namibian desert, solo) places. Some of these adventures have been on foot,
some on a bicycle and many in a white-water capable boat. The time that she
sent a photo of canoeing down a waterfall comes to mind.
The reassuring thing about
these photos, however, is that she has had to live through the experience in
order to send them.
Whether we live through the thought of what she is
going to do next is a different matter. Parenting is a strange and wonderful thing. You are
handed a fragile bundle weighing in at three kilos with a shriek that would shatter glass and
no instruction booklet. (Forget Dr Spock and all the ‘What to Expect’ tomes. No
matter what, it is not going to be what you expect.) And so, no matter what,
you manage. The shriek turns into varied noises that can be interpreted in a
general sort of way. The varied noises turn into words … and ‘NO’ arrives very
soon after ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’. The bundle becomes mobile and grows out of its
clothing at short and regular intervals. Before you are ready for it, the adorable
moppet is hanging from trees, wielding paring knives and coming home bleeding
from a fall off a skateboard. And before you recover from that, the offspring
is looking you in the eye, passing a driver’s test and applying for post-secondary
courses in far-flung lands. Plus, it is convinced that you are both dumb and
old-fashioned.
And of course you are old-fashioned. Your parents and
your era formed you in many ways and each generation needs to push off from
that and conform to a new reality. Or not, but that is another matter. If you
are lucky, your child becomes an adult friend – sort of – who remains part and parcel
of your life. You may get a phone call from another continent asking for a
recipe. You may get a phone call most days from a mobile phone at drive-home
time. You may get a phone call asking for an emergency baby-sit. You will get an email to warn you when a grandkid is arriving for a stay or a granddog
needs a temporary home. You may be gifted with potted plants, with refugees from the
kitchen cupboards or refrigerator or be tasked to sell a house. You may need to get
a cell phone to monitor a grandkid. You will certainly find that the grandkid
knows more about the cell phone than you do. And you are going, no matter what,
to feel not just old-fashioned but a century out of date.
Or so has been my experience.
Friendship, in my experience, comes in two levels. One
level is shared experience. I have one set of friends from right
back to childhood. My closest friend from that group is a woman who grew up
next door; we shared school days, a university double room, parallel marriages
and almost parallel childbirth. I have other friends from different sources, one the wife of
a friend my husband made in grad school. Again, common experience. I also have
friends I have made from living in the same place. The second level grows out
of the first and the friendship becomes one in which not only experience but
also thought and emotion are shared. We make a coffee date and fulminate about
the last annoying thing our husbands did or how our age affects our health and
ability. We laugh at the same things and share opinions about books we are reading
and current events. To an extent, the friendships are shaped by location – the ties
can be in letters and phone calls or face to face meetings. Friendship with
adult children can be one or the other or both, sometimes distanced, sometimes
close.
I believe that I am very lucky in that my children
like me. Or I think they do. I have just come off a Whatsapp digital discussion
(new process for me and I become a mouth breather as I try cope with the phone
keyboard) with the daughter who is presently in Turkey. She visited a museum
and sent photos and a link to a website that discusses what she saw there. It
is a source of great contentment to me that she wants to share that experience. The
other daughter, the elder (ED) was here on the weekend with her partner to pick
up an exercise bike. We got caught up on the doings of the grandkid in a quick
conversation. We cheated on the Covid required distancing with this daughter
and her family to celebrate her birthday. Shared experience in both cases.
There are a lot of photos of festive meals over many celebrations to be treasured.
In fact, there is a shared photo website with this daughter (also at the upper limit of my
computer skills to access) full of shots of places and things that
have caught her eye. She takes marvellous photographs. It is a source of great joy that I have access to this sharing of her life. Here is a sample - a photo she took in our woodlot of the grandkid - with dog.
When this daughter's daughter was born, I was asked to stay for a couple of days
to start off the parenting experience. I have never been more flattered or
happier to oblige.
In my experience, my children have not been the only source of joy and satisfaction in my life
but they have enriched it beyond words to describe.
