(Apologies for the long post. But I was feeling introspective…)
Some children decide to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Some children are made to follow their parents’ footsteps. Doctor mother, doctor son. Professor dad, professor daughter. There are also those who make a conscious decision not to be anything like their parents, to chart their own course.
How much of what we are today is ‘natural’ and how much of that was ‘steered’?
I look back to when I was younger and I don’t recall ever being told by either parents what I should be when I grow up. Both my parents are learned folks. My father is a retired math professor. He is a well-known watercolorist (is that even a word?). He is a Chinese scholar. My mother has a degree in Architecture and could produce paintings just as beautiful as my dad’s. She is a soprano and has performed locally and abroad with a choral group. She is, in Josh’s words, a “fixer”; she could fix just about anything --beautifully. She adjusts hems, binds books broken apart by overeager little hands, attends to faulty plumbing, etc.
And moi? While I appreciate art, I never felt inclined to pick up a brush and create. I’m not particularly proficient in mathematics (except for that one A in actuarial math –!- don’t ask). I sing, good enough for within the our walls of our house. I ended up with a career in advertising, a field where no one in our family (immediate and extended) of passive overachievers has ever ventured.
Growing up, I never felt any pressure from either one of them to excel in fields where they excel. Beyond instilling early on the love for learning and a certain discipline, they pretty much let me be. By design or simply luck, I was exposed to a wide array of experiences that opened my eyes to the many choices I could make about what I want to be. At some point in my younger life, I had wanted to be a nurse, a nun, a waitress (my grandfather’s printing business had a job order for ordering slips for a restaurant), a cheerleader, a cashier, a teacher, a diplomat, a psychiatrist, a news anchor. I was never discouraged from being any one of those, except maybe for a remark about having to wipe bums that turned me off about being the next Florence Nightingale. I was never given speeches or feel-good spiels about pursuing my dreams either. I don’t recall it being verbalized, but the understanding was there that I could be anything I choose to be.
The one message from my mom, though, that I distinctly remember is something along the lines of “You reap what you sow. We’ve given you as best a start as we could and the rest is up to you.” Even that being the case, there was plenty of encouragement along the way. Opportunities were laid before me, but the choices were always mine to make.
Were my parents just more confident of their parenting skills that I had so much room to 'be’? Perhaps they were just more accepting that there is a limit to what one could do for one’s child, that they needed to just trust that what they could provide was good enough?
Could Chris and I be just as wise? Chris and I are not my parents and our children are not me. What worked for my parents with me might not necessarily work for us with our children. Different circumstances and different dispositions (of both parents and children) need to be carefully calibrated and taken into consideration. No doubt Chris and I will have to navigate our own way through this ever tricky maze of parenthood. I just pray that in the process of wanting the best for Josh and Zoë, we remember not foist our idea of ‘best’ on them, to let them make their own decisions, in time, about what they think would be best for themselves. And that when the day comes, we can, too, sit back and know and accept that we have done the best we could.
