Charting Our Course

We ask a lot of our 18 year-olds. Decide now what you are going to do for what feels like the rest of your life. Now. Right now. By the time you walk across a make-shift stage on a stifling June day, in front of friends, acquaintances, strangers, and family packed into a high school stadium or auditorium, and are handed a piece of paper declaring that you met the basics of a compulsory education for the past 13 years. Seriously - decide now. Hurry. The rest of your life hangs in the balance.

We’re watching this play out in real-time with our youngest edition. We watched it with his sister last year, and his oldest sister the year before that. Where am I going to go? What am I going to do? What am I going to be?

This is, as everyone of us who crossed the threshold into adulthood remembers with varying clarity, an incredibly difficult and fraught time. There is existential dread, soul-crushing anxiety, confounding and conflicting advice - and a pervasive desire to both become an adult and to stay a child.

Watching each of our kids go through this, walking beside them, trying to advise and counsel and guide each of them, has not been easy.

In the late 90´s, a song that played almost every twenty minutes on the radio, told us: “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year-olds I know still don’t.”

Looking back at that time in my own journey, at 18 I headed in one direction, sure of myself, my future, and the course I was charting. And by 22, I was going in another direction. At 18, I was preparing to study economics, looking to serve in the military, confident that I was going to enter a life of civic service. And by 22, I was getting married, buying a house, and teaching high school English.

Each of our kids are setting out on their own course into adulthood. It will not be a straight path. There will be many twists and turns, ups and downs in the journey. There will be - at a million seemingly random and indifferent times - forks in the road, where the right course often will be the hard choice: to choose to live by the Golden Rule, to choose to be a man or woman of character, to choose to serve.

I never took an economics class, nor had a day in uniform. But I have worked all of my adult life in civic service, serving my fellow human and our society to educate.

Who we are is not what we do - it's how we live. Success, as explained by John Wooden, is “the peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” Our identity is not our job, our title, our bank account, or our political affiliation. And - this is especially hard to hear as a parent - our identity is not our children.

Our identity is our character - manifest in how we are doing to become the best that we are capable of becoming.

As parents, our success becomes inextricably linked to our children’s being, and as they grow that means our identity has to change. We want them to remain children. We want to remain in control.

But our identity is not our kids. That’s ridiculous, we would never believe that. Except we do. We tell ourselves it makes us better, makes them love us more, makes them better people.

Idling in the pick-up line for an hour before dismissal, holding a position on the PTO board, cutting the crusts off their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches does not make us better parents, does not make them love us more, does not make them better people.

Not arguing with the ref during a U12 game, not sending a 17-page email to your kid’s principal, not hyper-scheduling every free moment and social interaction they have, those make for a better parent and better kids.

In order for our kids to grow up to be the best version of themselves, we must be the best version of ourselves. We must live by the Golden Rule. We must seek the peace of mind in knowing we did our best to become the best that we are capable of becoming.

Our uber-focus and structure on our kids as they grow up leads to our eventual total loss of control and causes a personal crisis of identity. In my work over the past two plus decades I’ve seen this time after time. Parents having a crisis of identity as their kiddos entered high school as 14 year-olds. And parents having another crisis of identity as their kiddos left high school as 18 year-olds. Parents taking their kids to visit 20 colleges, shuttling them to-and-from year-round athletic training camps, forcing them to practice instruments they dread. We don’t want them to transition, we don’t want them to change, because that means we’re changing. And it means we’re not in control.

My wife and I experienced this as each of our kids left the school they attended through eighth grade. We experienced a loss of identity as they processed out at the end of the ceremony, their names called in alphabetical order as they were handed a certificate of completion. What would this mean for us? Our friends were here. We were comfortable here. Their transition - their graduation from elementary school - was sad, like a death of our identity.

Life went on. The change from one grade to another faded. We became comfortable with our kids in a new setting. But we continued to identify our success through them, their achievements, their activities, their accomplishments, their setbacks.

And then they were 18, and it was time to graduate - for real this time. It was time, for each of them in turn, to enter the world, be an adult, go off to college, start a career, enlist, be an entrepreneur.

We ask a lot of our 18 year-olds. There is a fundamental conflict between our identities as parents tied to who our kids are, and our kids crafting their own identities while being overwhelmed by the vast expanse of choices that is adulthood.

College, career, commitment. Employment or education or enlistment or entrepreneurship. Figure it out. It's only the course of your life that hangs in the balance.

That’s where their struggle is - because they need to be in control of their own destiny. They need to feel out of control in order to (hopefully) gain control, like Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967), like Lloyd Dobbler in Say Anything (1989), like any other human transitioning into adulthood. We need to give them the space and the opportunity to craft their own identity.

Our youngest came home after meeting for nearly two hours with a military recruiter. He had pamphlets, branded swag, and a puffed up sense of self. And he had doubts, questions, and reservations.

I'm not sure if I helped him, confused him, or hurt him with my response, my advice, my own reaction.

This isn’t about the military, that particular branch, patriotism, or about enlisting or enrolling. This is about my child making a decision and stepping into adulthood, and my wife and I supporting him and worrying about him. Our reaction, concerns, and excitement are very similar to what we experienced with each of our daughters as they made decisions about their futures.

This is about them becoming adults, and us recognizing and acknowledging that they are their own people now. They make their own decisions, cast their own fate, and reap their own consequences. We ache and celebrate as our son sets his course just as we ache and celebrate for each of our daughters. And we will support them - just as we held them steady as they took their first steps as a toddler, held their hands as they went off on the school bus to kindergarten, and waved as they drove a car on their own for the first time.

We ask a lot of 18 year-olds. You possess the self-assured confidence of childhood, and the incessantly nagging self-doubt that comes with adulthood. You have belonged to a family: identifiable, typically tight-knit, and self-sustaining - for the past 18 years; and now you actively seek to throw off that yoke of identification - to craft your own identity, to strike out on your own, set your own path. And you're scared.

We - as parents - are also scared. There is no crystal ball. There is only faith that they will make good choices, hope that they will be safe and secure, and our love to walk with them.

A parent of much younger (elementary-aged) children responded to me - after I provided a very factual, pragmatic, and logistical programming overview - that their concern was not for the program, curriculum, or instruction. Their concern was that their children would remain “young” and remain “kids.”

I get it. I want my kids to remain kids too. But on a random Sunday evening, after visiting your daughter who lives over two hours away on her twentieth birthday, your son is going to come downstairs and tell your wife and you: “I want to let you guys know that I’m 95% sure I’ve made my decision to ____.” And you’re going to see his shoulders, his whole body relax. And you’ll be reminded how each of your daughters had similar responses. And your heart will call out to each of them. You’ll want to hold on to them as children. You’ll want to call on the wisdom of the Coug’ - to “hold on to 16 as long as you can/ change is gonna come along real soon/ make [them] women and men.” But you’ll know - really know - that they’ve got this.

We can’t keep our kids “young” anymore than we can ask water not to be wet. As parents, we aren't programmed for their personal journeys of self-introspection and development. Instead, we've wired ourselves over 18 years to facilitate and manipulate their linear progression through life's challenges, and to live vicariously through the accomplishments they achieve.

This is our problem. Our success as parents, our value as human beings who happen to be parents, is not determined by what our children do.

I asked a friend, who served in the same branch of the military our son is considering, if he could talk some sense into my son. His response was simple and beautiful and disarming. “Why would you want to,” he asked, and then quickly, before I could embarrassingly look away, he responded to his own question: “I get it, you’re scared. I would be too.”

He’s right. I am scared. I am scared, not just for my son, but for each of my children. I am scared for their safety, their security, and their futures. And I am scared for my future, for my identity - because, with each of them crossing into adulthood, my identity - tied for all these years to them - changes.

In a recent episode of the The Tonight Show, Steven Colbert is asked by his guest Dua Lipa how his art (comedy) intersects with his faith (Catholicism). His response is deep and measured, thoughtful and thought-provoking. He notes a profound sense of love manifested in sacrifice and a very real belief in the triumph of life over death; that there is sadness inherent in life, and that sadness is like death. And he reflects that laughter is a means to triumph, to overcome; otherwise there is fear, and fear begets more fear, which ultimately begets evil.

He quotes the poet Robert Hayden: “We must not be frightened or controlled into accepting evil as our deliverance from evil. We must keep struggling to maintain our humanity, though monsters of abstraction threaten and police us.”

And so we live and we laugh, to keep evil at bay, to overcome our fear - to seek the peace in knowing that we are doing our best to become the best we are capable of becoming.

I don’t want to live in fear. No parent - that I know - wants that. I want to have faith. I hold on to the faith, hope, and love that my kids will be safe, that their futures will be secure, that they will be good, and that they will be successful in seeking peace to become the best they are capable of becoming.

Each of our kids are seeking to serve their fellow human. Our oldest studies to counsel individuals suffering with addictions, our middle daughter prepares to be a teacher, and now our son charts his course to serve by protecting.

Service is not confined to an industry or a job title or a particular organization. While I can’t do anything about enlisting now - I’m too old and broken, I can (and continue to) work - alongside my children - at serving my fellow humans. Service comes in many stripes and colors. It isn’t confined to a particular flag, tribe, or profession. It is a way of life, a hallmark of character, a virtue which delivers us from fear.

Our son may change his mind, may alter his journey into adulthood - and that’s okay. So too may our daughters. Their identities are not tied to the colleges they attend, the majors they study, or the clubs and athletics with which they participate. Their identity is their character.

It is not the roles or titles they hold, the colleges or branches of the military they attend or enlist with that we are proud of. It is that they are working - everyday - to be good human beings who serve their fellow humans.

We ask a lot of our 18 year-olds. Let’s try not projecting our own crisis of identity onto them.

As our children cross the threshold into adulthood, I have faith, and hope that they will love and serve, and actively seek the peace of mind that comes with knowing they did their best to become the best they are capable of becoming.