Riven by These Crossroads

Kids are leaving home again. All those cute emotional stories posted by Facebook parents at this time of year never get old, and it never gets easier. You think that once they graduate college, they’ll be home again, but for me and several close friends, that has not been the case. Our kids left the state. (One friend’s daughter left the country, although that was many years ago, not that it gets easier.)

When they go away to college, or enter the Air Force, or just move in with roommates across the city, you have an empty-nest feeling but also the knowledge that they are not leaving permanently. The Air Force kid will be back. The on-her-own-with-roommates kid will come for a meal or to do laundry. The college kid will be home for holidays and summer vacation (until they get that summer job or summer experience that keeps them away). When they leave the state (or the country), that’s when the shit gets real.

Thank the universe, most of this happens in stages, so we can acclimate. For parents who have lost a child, however, and it’s sudden, and horrific, there is no getting used to anything, ever again. I have friends and family members to whom this has happened, and this past week, a young man with whom my son works died unexpectedly over the weekend. He left work on Friday, said "have a good weekend" to everyone, and his co-workers were preparing to attend his funeral on Monday. He was a year younger than my son. We don’t know what happened, but he was a recovering addict. My son, who lost his father last year, has taken this pretty hard. He lost another friend a few years back to a drug overdose. The sudden death of a person you know, in your age cohort, never gets easier.

We have got to do something about addiction.

News stories over the past year have reported that drugs like Ozempic may help curb addictive cravings for alcohol, and maybe other drugs as well. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

A content creator I follow wrote this week about how hard the teen years are, and she is not wrong. Sometimes it feels like a battle you are destined to lose. And yet, when my older child went off to college, all the drama melted away, replaced by fear and anxiety that she was out there in the world, subject to the whims of the universe and other people’s bad driving. After weeks and weeks of sleepless nights, I finally had to have a talk with myself that went something like this: “You have no control. You never had control, even when she was here. You have to trust her and the universe or you’re never going to sleep, ever again.”

We live in an era when trust is hard to come by. We don’t trust big corporations, the news media, our elected officials, other drivers, or other voters.

There’s a scene in the 6th episode of the final season of “Ted Lasso” where Roy Kent and Jamie Tartt are training in the streets of Amsterdam, and Jamie rents a couple of bikes for them to ride so they can find some windmills, which Roy doesn’t believe actually exist. (The team has been losing a lot, tilting at its own windmills, so this is yet another theme the producers and writers pull together seamlessly.) Roy refuses to get on the bike and eventually, with a tinge of both shame and regret, admits it’s because he doesn’t know how to ride a bike.

Jamie gets a good laugh out of this because he thinks it’s a joke. How could a 40-year-old man never have learned to ride a bicycle, one of the most universal experiences of human youth? Roy explains that it’s no joke. His grandfather died before he could teach him, and there was nobody else. Jamie soberly comes to understand how painful this is and decides to help the old man out, and because it’s Ted Lasso, where no cultural reference goes unmentioned, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” plays over the scenes of Roy trying to steer the thing, wobbly, unsure of himself, and tumbling, over and over.

Many viewers may have watched this scene and squirmed: It’s not that hard. How does he not just get on and start riding? Most of us learn to ride bikes as children, and we usually do it with the help of an adult, someone we love, someone we trust, someone who holds the rear of the bicycle as we take off, because learning to ride a bicycle is really about learning to trust. We trust the teacher, and we learn to trust in ourselves, in our sense of balance, in our ability to overcome a new challenge. Doesn't every child deserve to revel in their own capacity for meeting a challenge head-on and walking away with a win?

Roy has had a lot of wins on the pitch, but this is completely new. It’s something he’s not good at, something he can’t quite grasp. He has to believe (a Lasso theme) and trust that when he pedals, despite every fearful signal his brain sends him, that his balance will actually improve, because on a bicycle, movement and balance go hand in hand. You have to go forward to not fall sideways.

Letting our kids go forward is very much about trust, in them, in the scary world out there, and in ourselves. We have to trust that we did the very best we could as parents, and that’s really all we can do. Did we make mistakes? Sure. Did we cover everything? Not possible (she says, laughing). Will they be okay? Probably. And we have to believe (as Ted would say), or we’ll never get anything done ever again.

Much love to all the parents going through this today and tomorrow and 10 years from now.

Summer is almost over, and the smell of pumpkin is already on the grocery store shelves. (Yuck.) Hang in there.

Beth

[In this same episode, one of the best of the “Ted Lasso” series, Higgins (on stand-up bass) sits in with a jazz band performing “Let’s Get Lost” in a bar in Amsterdam where Baker was known to play.]