Bad Links?
Other glitches?
Notify Webmaster

Dependently independent

By RICK RYCKELEY
Contributing Writer

There’s a place where facts, myths, and legends merge, blending together in our minds into a soft purple, swirling haze. It’s a place where each of us was the star; the captain of the football team, the head cheerleader, the smart kid with the 4.0 average, or the popular kid that everyone wanted to be and be seen with.

Memories. Somehow, now that we have children of our own, we’ve forgotten the awkwardness of adolescence as it slowly ebbs with time. In time, we have forgotten how hard it actually was.

Things that once we lived and died for don’t seem as important to us any more as we’re burdened with the every day responsibilities of being adults: hanging out at the mall with our friends, talking endlessly on the phone about everything and nothing, dating that someone we knew our parents didn’t approve of just because they didn’t approve of him or her and just because we could. We did every possible thing we could to push the envelope of their tolerance with our risky behavior for no other reason than just to see how far it would stretch. But those same things are still important to our kids: acknowledgment, acceptance, and above all else, being dependently independent.

Memories. The more time passes, the more perfect we were as teenagers. We were teenagers who never gave our parents any trouble, and if we did, somehow we remember that it was they who did not understand our wants or needs. It was not our misunderstanding their responsibility to set down rules to raise their children in accordance with societal norms so we could be a success in school and later in life. Upon seeing our children’s report card, instantly we reinvent memories that make us smarter than we actually were in high school or college, conveniently forgetting all the bad quizzes and test grades that were handed back to us while we daydreamed in math class — the math class we barely received a passing grade in.

Memories make us more popular than we actually were in college and help us forget how much our parents helped us out when we were still looking for our first job and a place to live. And with time, the line between what really happened in our youth and what we wished happened gets blurred. Our perspective gets skewed.

All our children want is food, a dry roof over their heads, an allowance, and love when they seek it, but for the most part they just want to be left alone. Face it: parents are the stupidest people that walked the face of the Earth. What possible things could a teenager learn from someone who is so old and so clueless? If we search our memories - our real memories - it’s the same thing we thought about our parents, but didn’t dare to articulate. It was a different time, but the same time.

So as I walk down the steps, I leave The Boy up in his room. He’ll talk endlessly on his cell phone until all hours of the night or play video games over the Internet against his friends in another neighborhood or watch TV or plan what party he will go to and with whom. I leave him alone. He doesn’t have time to talk to his dad anymore. I leave him alone. He doesn’t understand the time he can spend with us is coming rapidly to a close. I leave him alone, for a very good reason. So he can be dependently independent.

Tonight’s a very special night. The Boy has graduated from high school, and I’m extremely proud of him. Next month I’ll help him pack, then drive him to college. He’ll stay. I’ll drive back. Alone. For The Boy, he has memories of his own to create. And later recreate, when he has children.