Relationships: Part 2

The relationships between parents and their children are beyond words, traversing the emotional roads that sometimes have guardrails, but most times just rest on the precipice of a deep dark abyss in which our hopes, dreams and good intentions cloud the views of what has happened and what will come to pass. When children are small, we are so proud. Look what we have produced. We are godlike in our skills of creating human perfection. Then we begin to mold them, forming their beings with creative hands and open minds so they will become what we visualize, nay fantasize, to be the best example of human kind that ever walked the earth, eradicating those flaws we find in ourselves and perfecting the qualities we recognize to be redeeming. And God sits back and laughs! What entertainment we narcissistic characters are!

I have two children, brought forth in the world in the usual manner. Though married, I believe I did the majority of work raising them and probably did the most damage as well. My eldest, a girl child (and believe me, growing up with girls, THAT was the last thing I wanted) was the most beautiful, most incredible little creature with all of her fingers and toes and these enormous cornflower blue eyes surrounded by camel's lashes. What a tiny bit of perfection I had.

As she grew I taught her to be tolerant, animal friendly, artistic, open-minded, loving, understanding and good. I tried to teach her forgiveness but I did not teach her guilt as I thought I had learned that to the nth degree and didn't really like the instruction myself, so I skipped it. Little did I know, at the time, that one must feel guilt in order to experience forgiveness. So, unfortunately, that was pretty much a moot lesson altogether. I taught her not to lie by washing her mouth out with soap if she didn't tell the truth. I showed her that throwing sand in the face of another child is not a nice experience by throwing the sand in her own face. I asked her not to point at people who looked or acted differently than ourselves, and I instilled in her the values that I still hold dear, I think...to accept people for who they are and not to judge them by the standards of others. So strong was my lesson that she morphed into that which I preached should be accepted. She has multicolored hair (today... she was completely bald last spring), she has just had a new tattoo done on her wrist, she wears metal in places I'm sure I don't want to know about, she befriends people who will never grace the cover of Forbes or amount to much (socially) unless they win the really BIG lottery and she loves heavy metal, metallic, head-banging, violent-languaged music...oh, and she has the mouth of a sailor (like her mother).

And as my heart hurts, I question all the mistakes I made in motherhood; and as I feel the guilt of failure as a parent, God sits up there and laughs at me. Sometimes I can hear Him snorting as He doubles over in hysterics. "Yes," he snickers. "You have produced that same person that you so pompously taught your daughter to 'tolerate'. Are you two-faced in your beliefs? Are you a bigot?" Those lessons of accepting all people for who they are and not by what they may look like or where their background may have originated are now standing firmly in my living room showing me her new "ink". And I beg God, please show me the humor; this will be much easier to take if I can laugh about it too. But He answers, NOT YET.

My son is now 17 and on the verge of leaving the nest, maybe. I didn't push him as hard as his sister under the advise of others. In hindsight I wish I hadn't listened but "boys are so different from girls, they learn on different levels and at different times". And besides, Kyle was just so darned different than anyone I'd come across, any of the other children and he, well, Kyle reminded me of me. He was my daydreamer and rather than reprimand him about it, I fostered that "creativity" in him. Dreaming was wonderful, some great creative minds are dreamers, IE Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, um, Steven Spielberg...! And Kyle loved to help me in the kitchen so I gladly allowed him that opportunity. He was not athletic and once we moved to an area of the world where the weather wasn't conducive to outside play, we stopped trying to make him participate in physical games. And now I have an overweight giant on my hands, whose heart breaks at a wrong word, who still daydreams instead of doing his homework, and who has made the success of failure an art form. My young man who is kind, good, gentle, tolerant, sweet, and different from all the other boys because he is gay. And God laughs harder and I shake my head and wait for the punchline.

Today my children who are not really children (17 and 22) are angry with me. As a single mother I lose patience sometimes as I feel overwhelmed by it all. I rue my decisions and shake my fist at God, I yell at the injustice of being the only parent carrying the sole responsibility of these "wrong choices" taken in their youth, I dream of running away as their father did and I ask myself why I couldn't have done it first...then I stop and I realize God is no longer laughing as my words have hurt him as deeply as they have hurt me. Then I remember the report card where the D was pulled up to a B, and I see the excitement in the new art of ink that shines in the brilliant eyes, and I take a deep breath, cry a few tears and remind myself that I have produced two wonderful children. No, they may not be the adults I had envisioned as I held them in my arms. Their experiences in life didn't preclude the shaping of home-coming queens, or geniuses with full-ride scholarships to Yale for there was no participation in the high school booster club and no debate team. There were no piano recitals and no football games.

What they had, though, was love, tolerance, respect, and a plethora of colorful and worldly experiences that will eventually shape them into the incredible adults that they ARE becoming...that is, if I don't kill them first. Then I hear God laughing again, and I finally get the joke!