Years ago I had a conversation with a woman whose son was about to leave home— I must have been worrying about my boys never leaving home, not being able to take care of themselves, you know, failure to launch and all that— and her response was, if you legislate house rules well, then remaining at home becomes extremely uncomfortable for a budding young adult. I thought this advice was ingenious, and so we really stuck with our rules, of which there have always been many. Our strictness has paid off, and Seb moved out last week. It took an entire week, but he got all his stuff. Got his bed. Got his desk. Got his dresser and clothes. We donated some things: dishes, glasses, a pot, a pan, some groceries. He’s got what he needs to take care of himself, now he’s just got to take care of himself.
I’m sad and glad. I’ll miss him, but he is so excited.
When Seb turned 18, he suddenly started yelling at us , “I’m an adult now!!” And Brian and I would look at each other and roll our eyes when he wasn’t looking. He has wanted to be completely independent from us for a while. He has wanted us to quit telling him what to do, which is a difficult transition for us to make. He didn’t want to follow our rules anymore. We tell ourselves that this is a good impulse, and we applaud it, but it has been hard to live with under our roof. Seb, our boundary pusher from the start, needs to be on his own to grow and mature away from us now, outside of our parental gaze, distanced from my tendency to stifle him with motherly management— I mean, LOVE. But, mostly, the past year he has been living at home, our house rules did not change (though, I confess, there was relaxation of some of them), so we often found ourselves repeating the line that our parents always said to us (a line that I swore I would never say myself): “Oh no, not while you live under MY roof…!”
Even though he is venturing out on his own, we also remind him (and ourselves), family and friends exist so he doesn’t have to do it all by himself, all at once. Growing up and being completely self sufficient is a process, something done over time. It doesn’t happen from one moment to the next. It’s a becoming. And are we ever completely on our own for all of time after that? We were meant to be in relationship with other humans. We were meant to rely on each other. We were not meant to be alone. We want him to come over for dinner whenever he needs to.
I just read this in Rebecca Solnit’s book, Recollections of My Nonexistence. She says it better than I have (and I would hope so with the multitude of books and essays she has written!):
The word adult implies that all the people who’ve attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a country as we go. The road is tattered and elastic. Childhood fades gradually in some ways, never ends in others; adulthood arrives in small, irregular installments if it arrives; and every person is on her own schedule, or rather, there is none for the many transitions.
When you leave home, if you had one, when you start out on your own, you’re someone who was a child for most of her [or his] life, though even what it means to be a child is ill-defined. Some people have others who will tend and fund and sometimes confine them all their lives, some people are gradually weaned, some of us are cut off abruptly and fend for ourselves, some always did. Still, out on your own, you’re a new immigrant to the nation of adults, and the customs are strange: you’re learning to hold together all the pieces of life, figure out what life is going to be and who is going to be part of it, and what you will do with your self-determination.
You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally. Youth is a high risk business.
I want to send these words off to him, if he would deign to read them… and I would tack on my own additional thought: that there is much prayerful discovery involved in this intensely creative task too— it’s less that we create ourselves so much as we are discovering who we are created to be.
Seb may move back in with us for a time at some point— I have to prepare myself for THAT possibility. After college I moved back in with my parents until Brian and I got married. I needed that kind of help at the time, and they were very generous— I wasn’t necessarily easy to live with back then (I might not be now either… ahem!). More recently, my sister and her family— husband, kids, dog— lived with them when they moved from CT to Pittsburgh in 2010 until they could buy a house, and that was a huge blessing to all of them too.
I think these are also the times that convince you, it’s better not to live with your parents.
So we will still feed Seb or loan him a car sometimes. It’s good. It’s fine. Just relax and let it be. (I may be convincing myself here.)
Anyway, he moved out. Maybe I’ll sleep better now? That would be nice.
