Five Minute Friday: TAKE

TAKE:

My children had birthdays recently. My daughter turned 23, and my son turned 20. Just like that, NO MORE TEENAGERS IN THE FAMILY.

This milestone felt so big to me. Not in a bad way, but in a reflective way.

The days between June 26, 1996 and July 1, 2019 were excruciatingly long. The years, as the saying goes, were breathtakingly short.

What does it take to make a young adult?

I put on “The Things We’ve Handed Down” by Marc Cohn to play for my five minutes of writing about being the parent of two non-teenager young adults. It’s the song we used on Tenley’s birth announcement.

Will you laugh just like your mother
Will you sigh like your old man 
Will some things skip a generation 
Like I’ve heard they often can 

I see the things we’ve handed down in our children, of course. So many times, though, I don’t think we handed them something but they came into the world with qualities that don’t come from anything we did or from any DNA we contributed to the process.

It’s hard as a parent not to worry about the wounds we’ve created. As I’ve said here on my blog often, I wonder sometimes what I did in overcompensating for the things I grappled with that will create my kid’s material for the therapist’s couch.

Ultimately I come down to: I did it all out of unconditional love. I don’t know if there’s anything else we can give a child besides that.

I suppose it’ll take a lifetime (theirs) to know.

Happy birthday(s), Tenley and Wayne.

Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.” (But I can’t resist spell checking, as you can imagine.)