Parenting Grown Children: What Dr. Spock Forgot to Tell Us

Holiday Togetherness: Calm, comaraderie and connection in the kitchen

We arrived for Thanksgiving at Uber Son's house on the Tuesday before the great feast. The idea was to help our daughter-in-law out--make it easier on her by either doing the shopping or watching the Grands or some combination of both. On Wednesday, while the older Grands went off to school, Uber son went to work and Paterfamilias took the laptop to Panera to edit a transcript, my daughter-in-law and I had the kitchen and all that cooking to ourselves--with occasional help from the 3-year-old who puttered around, climbed up on counters and "assisted."

What a perfectly wonderful day it was. All morning and most of the afternoon, my daughter-in-law and I kept each other company while we each prepared our share of the dishes. How companionable it was. We talked about everything and nothing, about how the kids were doing in school, what my son's plans were for the future, how their trip to London had been, how she was composting and what tips I had, and whether she should make her own pie crust [her idea] or use a frozen crust [my favorite shortcut]. We set the table, pre-cut everything for the salads and other side dishes, brined the turkey, pre-baked the stuffing, and finally made the crust and baked a blueberry-cranberry pie and a pumpkin pie.

Three days later, when I called from home to thank her for her gracious hosting of our family's Thanksgiving, she mentioned Wednesday and how nice it had been to spend time together in the quiet calm of the kitchen.

Talk about a Thanksgiving gift. Can't ask for more than that.

Empty Nesting: Life and longing after the Thanksgiving weekend

It is Monday, the day after the Thanksgiving weekend and colleagues at work are chatting about the holiday--who went where, how long the left-overs lasted and, for those of us of a certain age, what it was like to have the grown kids together again under one roof. 

Betty's oldest son traveled home from his first job in another city; the middle son came home from college and the youngest was already in residence--he's still in high school. Here's her take: "It was so great to have everyone under one roof, everyone sleeping in their beds--the normal pattern of life. It's as though all of life we waited to come back to this. I felt like I finally got the right kilter back. I so lamented the break up on Sunday when two of my sons left. They'll probably be back in December for the holidays, but life shouldn't be waiting for these moments."

Kitty had her two children home for the holidays--her daughter home from college; her son back for the weekend from a job on the other coast. Her take: "It was wonderful having them both home--being our little family of four together again. The days are really limited in which we are going to be just the four of us. My son has a girlfriend. I really like her. She's lovely. I bet they'll get married one day. It's what you want for your children. But, from then on it will never be the four of us again."

I also had my family--Uber son, Alpha daughter, their spouses and children--under one roof. Not my roof this time. Uber son's. My take: It was touching to be together, to see my children and their spouses and my Grands reconnect--it has been over a year since we've had everyone together, not only under one roof but in one country.  It was also bittersweet. Late on Wednesday night, when Alpha daughter and family arrived, it was heartwarming to see my children reconnect, to see the good feelings flow and hear questions asked and answered about each other's lives. And so bittersweet for Paterfamilias and myself. We were bystanders--watching the action but not really of it. After all, we'd kept up with each family--made it our business to get to Berlin to visit Alpha daughter and kept up on Skype. And we'd traveled to visit Uber son and his family pretty regularly. So we sat and watched the third leg of that family triangle connect--son, daughter, daughter-in-law, son-in-law. Happy to see it, but no longer at the center of it.

It's what Kitty and Betty are sensing lies ahead: Once the family is no longer the snug little four or five of you, the kilter changes forever.

Holiday Togetherness: The Thanksgiving Day handoff from us to them

My book club's monthly meet-up is winding down. We've finished parsing all the meaning we can out of Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra. We're picking at dessert when the discussion devolves into the personal. Are your kids coming to your house for Thanksgiving dinner?

We are all women of a certain age--an age when our kids are in their 30s and 40s and have kids of their own. What struck me as various book-clubbers coughed up their plans was how few of us are still making The Dinner. Not that we're not up to it. Nancy's son has really gotten into cooking. He's coming to her house with his family--she has the Big House--but he's manning the oven and burners for the family, which includes his two siblings, their kids, his kids and his parents. Nancy says she'll stack the dishwasher.

Elaine says her son, who lives in city that's a 4-hour drive away, usually comes home with his family but this year he's got a neck injury. So she and her husband will travel to his house. When she asks what she can make, what she can bring, he says he doesn't need anything. The meal will be a less ambitious one than Elaine usually cooks. Her son says he can handle the dinner preparations; after all, there will only be seven of them. Even the offer of baking a pie or a cake is turned down. It is going to be a leaner meal, not a Big Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner.

Ann says she gave up the ghost several years ago. Her daughter-in-law loves to cook, has tried her hand at several cooking schools. She doesn't like her mother-in-law or anyone else to step into the kitchen while she's at work. Since the results are excellent, Ann happily acquiesces. She'd agree even if the food were so-so. She never liked cooking. She pitches in with the clean up--as do her two other children and their children--but it's not her home so it's much easier on her.

My tale is more complicated. I love making Thanksgiving dinner. I love having the turkey leftovers to fiddle with. I love picking meat off the carcass the day after. But three years ago, Uber son and his wife had a third child, and it got complicated for five of them to get on an airplane and come to our house, when two of us could fly to them. And, since Alpha daughter was within a 3-hour drive of her brother but flying distance of us, it made even more sense: air fare for eight vs airfare for two. A no-brainer.  Everyone prefers the arrangement, except for Paterfamilias. He wants everyone to come to his home for the holidays. He likes the idea of it: His home and everyone he loves in it. He made his case for Thanksgiving at Our House when we were visiting Uber son a few weeks ago. He was swayed only when our son, who travels a lot for his job, said with an enormous sigh, "I would pay not to have to get on a plane."

Case closed. Thanksgiving dinner at Uber son's house it is. I'm allowed to bake and bring and arrive a few days ahead to help with the shopping and cooking. But I don't get to take home the carcass. It will have been turned into soup and sipped up before we head for home.

Grandparenting: Children's books in praise of what we can do for our Grands

The Holidays may still seem far away, but that isn't the frantic take you get from the Halls of Commerce. Not only is Black Friday starting earlier, the holiday decorations are already up in many malls and along city streets. But I digress: If you're looking for a gift for one of your little Grands--for Holidays or anytime--the New York Times has a delightful page of reviews of books about us and how we are the emotional mainstay or treasured person in our Grands' lives. What a nice way to impress on them our importance in their lives--without having to overtly say so. Or having our grown children have to ask them to respect us.

My favorite on the NYTimes list: Crouching Tiger. Maybe because my Grands have taken such an interest in my attempts to learn tai chi (they find it uproarious to watch me "Stroke the Wild Horses Mane" and "Ward off Monkeys.") Maybe because my grandparents came from "the old country" and i was fascinated by their multi-lingual abilities. In any case, this is a story that deals with an immigrant child’s conflicting emotions toward a grandparent from the old country. The grandson wants to learn kung fu, but his grandfather insists on teaching him the tamer tai chi. "Eventually," the review notes, "he learns to appreciate his Chinese heritage in a convincing, unsentimental way, and to value the wisdom of his forebears."

Can't beat the wisdom thing.

Emerging Adults: Will they ever grow up? Patience is required. Sainthood, too.

I hear the complaints from friends with college-age kids and recent college grads in the house. They don't have the drive their father or mother had at their age, they aren't taking life seriously, they're lazy, willful, don't help around the house. Why it's just like having a teenager living in the house again. Only physically larger. And more worldly.

My children chose to go through this phase of "growing up" in apartments and group-of-friends houses far from the family manse. But as this wearisome economy rolls on and more and more of our children live at home--out of necessity--more of us are making our unhappy way through this stage. And it is a stage. So assures psychologist Carl Pickhardt in a newsletter he writes about the challenges of parenting young adults.

He call this stage trial independence (18 to 23-year olds). It's a time when, he writes, "the curve of parental impatience tends to rise." Parents are "really ready for their older son or daughter to get their life together, set an occupational or educational goal, show clear progress in that direction, and act responsibly grown up." When that doesn't happen--when there is what he calls "floundering and failing to make responsible headway," we may fear that our child will never grown into being a functioning adult.

Pickhardt suggests we relax and tell ourselves to be patient.  The parental job, he suggests, is to hold their emerging adult "to responsible account, affirm positive signs of growth being made, express respect for what the young person is learning from hard experience, and be patient as their son or daughter struggles to find an independent way."

So much easier said than done. If only we could tack those thoughts to our brains when we come upon our grown child sleeping through Monday morning and forgetting to check out that job lead.

Parenting Grown Children: Smother love overdoes the kindness and helpfulness bit.

Every summer, friends' grown child comes to their house at the beach for a two-week vacation--rent free, of course. Every winter, my friends take this daughter, their son-in-law and two children on a long-weekend ski trip. My friends pay for the condo and the lift tickets. The daughter lives near my friends and is frequently a guest for Sunday dinner and always for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter.

Since my children live far away from me and Paterfamilias and we don't have a summer house by the beach or anywhere else, I usually think, "Lucky friends to be able to treat their daughter so well; to be able to spend so much time together in a pleasurable setting; to get to know their grandchildren so well; to be so much a part of their child's life.

And yet there's another side to the story, as a Carolyn Hax column made clear. "Any advice," a son wrote, "on how to deal with a mother who is smothering me with love?" The son is married; he and his wife have good jobs and two children. "Yet, Mom insists upon family vacations, family dinners, family everything. And she always makes reservations and nonrefundable deposits first, then invites us second, with that little (or big) bit of guilt thrown in." What the son wanted to know is, how to tell his mother to "let me live my own life and meet you on my own terms."

Of course, there's a big difference between inviting and insisting; on making plans together and issuing a fiat; on making your resources available to them at their convenience and playing the guilt card.

So what was Hax's advice? "Accept the number of invitations that feels right to you, decline the overkill, and gently, kindly, firmly become an immovable object who will not get into long renegotiation of each 'no' you issue."

From our side of the aisle, if we notice a son or daughter setting these kinds of limits--"We can't go on a vacation with you every year"--it may be time to gut check whether we're practicing smother love.

 

Wedding Notes: When the bride and groom make decisions you don't like.

They're getting married. The grown son has finally found Ms Right. They've also found what they consider to be the perfect place for the wedding. It isn't your hometown or hers. It's a destination. Someplace far away and beautiful--but expensive. Too expensive for, say, most relatives and friends. If you're not asked to foot the wedding bill, do you have any say in the matter?

That was a source of lively discussion in a recent Carolyn Hax column in which the son and his bride-to-be planned to wed on the Isle of Capri. Sounds romantic. But airfare to Italy and several nights accommodation can run up a bill. The father wrote Hax to say he can afford to take his wife and stepson but no one else can afford to or wants to spend the money to go, including the elderly grandparents, uncles and aunts. He's tempted to decline the invitation but is, he writes, "afraid of the damage to our relationship with him. I did offer to host a reception for all those who cannot afford to go, but he declined, saying it would cheapen the ‘real wedding.’ How should I handle this?”

It's complicated. On the one hand, the grown child isn't thinking of his greater family or the down-home virtues of having his family and hers meet and mingle and put down roots together. He's thinking of a wedding that will have panoramic views and sophisticated venues--or one that has a particular meaning for him and his bride.That's the best case scenario.

Most Hax readers saw the grown son as incredibly selfish and advised the father to stay home. Hax, who suggested the father go and make the best of it, had this point to make vis a vis the selfishness of the son's decision: "There's no way to re-raise your adult child by saying no for the sake of saying no. Sometimes you have to make a calculation that taking a big stand isn't worth the cost."

It is their wedding--and they're paying for it. If they make a decision we don't approve of--and sometimes that may be the choice of spouse--we still want to continue to be part of their post-wedding lives. Sometimes we just have to suck up what we see as a bad decision and live with it. Especially since it's unlikely we can change it.