I have a fan club. It meets every Wednesday night. The leaders – Aaron and Missy – call me Yoda. Everyone in the group, other than me, is 40 and under. I am by sheer default the sage of the clan, not so much because of my age, though, as much as the number of children I’ve raised – four.
I suppose I ought to insert the disclaimer here – these Wednesday night meetings are really an off-shoot of our church body, known as care groups, not really a fan club. Doctrinally, we are all opposed to idol-worship in any form.
Nearly everyone who attends is an educator. Several are coaches. All are parents of kids much younger than mine. These are people who’ve passed state boards on how to manage children, yet, when it comes to raising up their own brood, they struggle.
Aaron is an identical triplet. He recalls in excruciating detail the day he and his brothers jumped off the roof of their home after their father implored them to never do such a thing. Or the time they tracked orange paint all over their mama’s new crème-colored carpet. And there was that day the three boys lined up at the upstairs window and held a contest to see whose stream would hit the curb first.
When Aaron considers all the ways in which he put his parents through the wringer, he cringes at his own lack of parental patience. He doesn’t know what to do when his young son shrugs his shoulders, and throws up his hands in protest whenever he’s given an instruction.
My four kids can tell you I was hardly Mother of the Year when it came to the patience department. I was, after all, the daughter of an Army Sergeant. My children were taught to have a healthy respect for the chain of command approach to life. Yet, the things that I used to agonize over when my kids where young, make me laugh now. If I were to find three boys whizzing out the window today,
I’d probably try to rig up something to see if I could out-stream ‘em.
The biggest fear of most parents is that their kids are going to turn out exactly the way they did. They are traumatized by the memory of the hell they put their own parents through. They think the worst thing that can happen to them is to have a mimic for a child.
They are wrong. That’s not the worse thing that can happen to a family. The most awful events occur when a child rejects nearly everything they’ve been taught and, dismissing their parents for fools, swear to never be anything like them, ever.
I was reminded of that while reading Jon Krakauer’s compelling book, Into the Wild. It’s the story of Chris McCandless, a headstrong young man who, in a fit of righteous indignation, declared his parents hypocrites, then, hitch-hiked his way to a disastrous Alaskan adventure. Sean Penn has turned Krakauer’s book into a movie that’s debuting soon.
Krakauer, an Oregon native and literary giant of mythological proportions, compares his own ill-tempered youthful willfulness with that of McCandless’s. The distinction being that Krakauer lived to see the error of his thinking and McCandless didn’t:
“I had been granted unusual freedom and responsibility at an early age, for which I should have been grateful in the extreme, but I wasn’t. Instead I felt oppressed by the old man’s expectations … I was consumed by a blinding rage. The revelation that he was merely human, and frightfully so, was beyond my power to forgive.”
Two decades passed before, Krakauer realized his rage at his father had subsided:
“I came to understand that I had baffled and infuriated my father at least as much as he had baffled and infuriated me. I saw that I had been selfish and unbending and a giant pain in the ass. He’d built a bridge of privilege for me, a hand-paved trestle to the good life, and I repaid him by chopping it down and crapping on the wreckage.”
Sadly, by the time Krakauer gained some perspective, his father was in ill-health. Many of us go merrily about our days, assuming that the time will come when we’ll be able to correct the wrongs we’ve done, or those done to us. We wallow around in the slop of righteous indignation and stubbornly refuse to make apologies owed until it’s way too late.
I’ve heard people say that all they want for their children is to be happy. Not me. I want more than that. I want them to discover the Tolstoy truth that McCandless underscored in days leading to his death: “I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done for them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor – such is my idea of happiness.”
Since McCandless’s untimely death, hundred of fans have made the trek to the Stampede Trail outside Healy, Alaska to pay their respects to the iconic adventurer. Tragically, the youth wasted to death without ever knowing that Walt and Billie McCandless, the parents he neglected, were among his most devoted fans.
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