Going, Going, Gone!

A week ago I lugged my son Daniel’s mini-refrigerator and cartful of computer equipment to a cramped dorm room at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) and officially became an empty nester. My daughter Rebecca left home for good later the same weekend to move into her new apartment at the University of Maryland.

Since I’ve been gone all summer scraping together income to fuel my midlife career transition odyssey – except for one-day-per-month visits back home – teaching tennis at the Sea Colony Tennis resort in Bethany Beach, DE, the kids’ flight hasn’t fully registered with me yet. But when I return home for good on Labor Day night, I’ll be faced with the fact that my role as a parent has changed.

My kids have become so much more independent in the last year. Rebecca spent a semester in France and traveled throughout Europe. Daniel became more social, broadened his circle of friends, with whom he traveled to Ocean City, MD for Senior Week and California over the summer, connected with a steady girlfriend, got his first job at which he is advancing and earned college scholarship funds.

They’re becoming young adults, and our relationships will change. I am curious what those relationships will be like.

Since they are attending colleges nearby, they’ll be around on occasion, but now their college residences are their primary addresses. I am going to miss having one or both kids around the house on a regular basis.

I’m thinking the transition may be easier for me than for parents in an intact family. My kids lived with me only half the time for about half of their childhoods, since they were 9 and 7, because of my divorce. I always felt sad when I brought the kids back to their mom’s on Sunday evenings after a week with me, knowing I was going back to an emptier house and that I would likely only see them one time over the next week for dinner. The necessity to adjust to the back and forth, every other week arrangement I hope will help me adapt to this new transitional scenario.

Still, there’s nothing like your kids branching out on their own and establishing their independent lives to let you know you are advancing to new and later stages of life. I taught many kids tennis this summer and met their parents. I couldn’t help thinking those parents were me a decade ago, enjoying family vacations at the beach and doing fun kid things like walking the boardwalk at night and sliding the water park during the day. When I told tennis parent clients that I had kids also, though older at 20 and 18 and in college, I had a hard time believing it myself.

Rebecca has talked about becoming a teacher recently and of possibly following her boyfriend, a chemical engineering major, to some yet to be determined destination after college. Daniel will be pursuing studies in the computer science field at a university known for its strength in that area. They both have promising futures. I’m proud of how they have developed and the people they are. I hope I have had a positive influence on them and will remember some of dad’s “pearls of wisdom” that they probably didn’t want to hear when I offered. I implored both kids to take Spanish; they each took French. I think Daniel already may be happy that I highly recommended dorm life to him when he was considering other college living arrangements.

I look forward to developing and nurturing close and warm adult relationships with both kids. I hope it happens. It will be a two-way street from here on out. Both kids will have to desire that too and give our relationship love and care to help it grow as we all mature.

The kids are gone and one long and crucial part of my parenting journey is over. It’s been a challenge, a great learning experience, an honor and a joy, but also tinged with some tumult, sorrow and readjustment resulting from the family breakup and my second marriage. I am eager to see what the next phase will bring and know I will need to work at staying connected.

The kids are gone. In the coming weeks, I’ll learn how prepared I am to accept it.

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Fatherly Words of Wisdom to a Son

With Father’s Day in three days and my son’s 17^th birthday two days after that, I figured it was as good a time as any to dole out some fatherly wisdom. I gave my son a heads up that I was thinking of writing about my sage and hard-earned advice, and even offered him a few pearls as a preview to try to get his buy-in. I thought I’d blow him away with profundity, or at least cleverness, but it didn’t have that effect – more like, “Yeah, whatever.” At least he didn’t yawn, or if he did, only mentally. (I should add here, for the record, that my son is a great kid and I’m proud of him.)

Whether he wants it or not – and most teenagers don’t and I can’t blame them and I’m sure I also was that way at 17 — I’m going to give it to him. Because that’s my job, that’s what parents do. Here, eat your spinach, it’s good for you, and you’re going to like it, because I said so, and I know and you don’t!

In fairness, he’s heard some of this before. And admittedly, not all my insights are deeply profound. And some of these may be more, “Do as I say, not as I do.” But I believe when he is an adult, he will hearken back, and realize some of these nuggets actually were on target…and that’s why it will be required reading! Eat your spinach! (I actually have semi-required my kids to read certain newspaper articles about young people who have it tougher than them.)

The Top 25 Fatherly Words of Wisdom, with some overlap and in no particular order, except the first one, which is meant to be shocking so he’ll pay attention to the rest:

1. Nobody gives a crap about you. Yes, this is harsh, overly dramatic, and for those who are even modestly lucky in life, not even true. But we all find out soon enough that the world can be cruel, so we might as well be ready for that.
2. Cultivate your resilience – you’ll most likely need it
3. Be the best friend you can be to your friends and the best relative to your family members
4. Cherish your significant other/always have their back
5. Focus on making your life fulfilling, meaningful and enjoyable, not on accumulating (live as Spartan as you can)
6. Develop self-confidence/believe in yourself (and fake it until you make it)
7. Be proactive/avoid passivity
8. Lead
9. Be courageous/have courage of your convictions
10. Find a passion and pursue it
11. Don’t procrastinate
12. Drink socially, not to get drunk
13. Eat healthily and exercise
14. Practice self-reliance
15. Strive for authenticity
16. Be bold/take smart risks
17. Find your own meaning of spirituality
18. Be generous
19. Be compassionate and seek to understand others
20. Beware of your anger/deal with it when you know you have it
21. Accept responsibility
22. Invest your money early and often
23. Invest in yourself and don’t shy away from self-promotion (Look out for Number One).  No one will do it for you.
24. Give back to a cause that is close to your heart. You will benefit spiritually and emotionally as much as those to whom you have given.
25. Embrace the mind-body connection and nurture both – you will need each in good shape for a long time.