Molt

“Make a list,” I say, “Write down places you want to go, activities you want to try, anything you’d like to learn.”  It’s his move in the chess game of life and he has no idea which piece he’ll pick up.  I can’t fully appreciate the pressure, having in some ways taken the easy way out myself.  I went away to college. Immediately.  Immersed in the throes of New Student Week months before my eighteenth birthday. I didn’t have it figured out any more than anyone else did, but I picked a major that seemed achievable, and with that took the next step toward bettering my future on a well-worn path.

While rewarding for many, high school can be a defeating, dark time for lots of kids. It’s a time of tremendous change physically, yet labeling is affixed freshman year with permanent glue, making reinvention over the next four years nearly impossible. For every cheerleader or football player fully embracing the fairytale dream of Friday night lights, there are at least as many kids, maybe more, living a nightmare, steeping in isolation, wondering why they can’t have or don’t want this prescription.

A traditional college education is a chance to create a new identity, hopefully one more aligned with who we really are inside, offering enough diversity to join the culture that fits rather than try to fit into the culture that is. Along with a degree, it includes the added benefit of “finding yourself”. Parents unleash somewhat sullen or surly, argumentative know-it-alls onto campuses swarming with the same, to be infused with alternative perspective, and are delighted to welcome home almost unrecognizable adults:  Born-again, humility leached into their skin, a worldly energy coursing through their bloodstreams, bubbling over with new viewpoints they can now articulate with more intelligence and respect than before.  It seems miraculous, like they have to do this without us, like it’s something we can’t give them.

 

As our economic times force disruption of higher education, I wonder how we help our kids find themselves.  Junior colleges are infinitely more affordable, and while taking courses on-line takes care of book learning, how do we replicate the community of peers living and breathing the experience?  How do we generate the passion and excitement around critical thinking and personal development inherent in 24/7 immersion?

Is it simply being on their own, away from parents that allows so many kids to flourish?  Is there something magical about being on a college campus?   As graduation day draws near and I listen to my youngest struggle to express his uncertainty, I can’t help but think about my own reinvention, the one that led me to, among other things, writing this blog. I believe it’s a new way of engaging with the world that carries us through the iterative process of finding ourselves. We forget sometimes how much loneliness there is in this digital, connected society, how scared our kids are to put their toes in its water.  I need only to recall how frightening it is to start a new life in the isolation of divorce to relate to him.

The milestones in our lives present us not with the option, but the obligation to engage with the world differently. Whether we’re talking high school, the working world, college, marriage, becoming a parent, divorce:  It’s all scary in its own way. Maybe sending our kids away to college seems like magical transformation to us parents because we aren’t directly witnessing the courage our kids expend as they learn how to engage with the world on their own terms.

And so I ask him to make a list, to contemplate, in poet Mary Oliver’s words, what he plans to do with his one wild and precious life.  I urge him not to worry about whether his desires seem plausible, nor to work out the details, but just to dream. The bravest thing he can do in this moment, I tell him, is to speak out loud what his heart tells him to pursue. From here we chart the course.  He is his own windlass.