All Experience is an Arch

 

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.