Be advised: this essay refers fleetingly to the topic of suicide.
We recently received thought-provoking news from an old friend in New Orleans. That city, as you may know, still has streetcars. A few months back, our friend—who lives but a few blocks from the St. Charles line, I believe—started sending her son, age 11, on solo streetcar journeys to pick up milk and eggs at the store in between major household shopping trips.
I had conflicting reactions to this news.
On one hand, I wholeheartedly endorse the decision to grant this boy such early independence. We seem to be an increasingly fearful nation, and we all have a part to play in helping children avoid infection by the mewling anxiousness that sometimes threatens to overwhelm the alleged adults. Too many of us parents have our eyes out for nebulous harms our children might experience while looking past the guaranteed downsides of all of this parental hovering. In the face of all this, sending children on solo streetcar rides seems an admirable tonic.
On the other hand, this news from New Orleans pulled me up short. Coincidentally, Petra and I had only just begun discussing whether to start letting Axl—who is one month older than the Crescent City boy—start making the ten-minute walk from our house to his grandparents' house alone. He and his little sister, Belle, are frequent guests at that house, and to date neither of them has ever arrived there without being either delivered or picked up by a grownup.
Until our friend shared her news, it had felt as though we were contemplating a big step and should proceed carefully. Now I had to wonder what on earth we had been waiting for.
The days go by, the beard turns grayer, and suddenly your kid stands on the cusp of tweendom without having been trained to cross a real street by himself. Reflecting on our friend's news, I found I was astounded we hadn't started letting at least Axl make this walk a year or even longer ago, and I tend to think Belle, currently a few weeks short of her ninth birthday, is probably now ready as well.
Whatever reluctance we feel is not easily explained by any obvious sources of danger. In direct contrast to New Orleans—which possesses many of the characteristics of what are called "failed states" on the world stage and where daily life for many residents can approximate a Hobbesian state of nature—Waldhurst is a small, rural mountain city with a population of about 7,000 and an exceedingly low crime rate. If it feels safe for our friend to set her child loose even in New Orleans, what is holding us back from doing so here?
It's not stranger danger, let me hasten to assert. I am no Newsmax-obsessed simpleton, rocking back and forth and gibbering at lurid fantasies of "white slavery" and "human trafficking" and the rest of the sub-variant bugaboo scenarios that are obsessed over in QAnon-inflected wellness-and-yoga-mom groups on Facebook despite not actually existing. I know that the risk of abduction-by-stranger is as vanishingly small today as it was in the 1980s, when my parents apparently had no compunction about letting me range freely in a neighborhood very similar to the one we live in now.
Being not only human but American and perhaps also a little too fond of true-crime podcasts, I am not entirely immune to anxiety on this point. We do give the children free rein in the neighborhood around our house and in a hilly wooded area that lies adjacent, but—before allowing this—I may have considered it necessary to drill them in screaming "this isn't my Daddy" at top, throat-scorching volume and other tips and tricks of the escape and evasion trade. Certainly I never go out on "walks" the only purpose of which is to peer over fences and through hedges to make sure the children are where I think they are. Well, almost never.
Okay, okay, perhaps there is a pinch of this flavor in the larger stew of our concerns about cutting the apron strings, but the dominant flavor stems from something more mundane: the county secondary road that lies between here and my parents' house, a sort of frontier between the two neighborhoods. The streets immediately surrounding both houses are quiet, residential, lined with trees and parked cars. But to reach one neighborhood from the other, one must cross this road, with its higher speed limit (35 mph, as opposed to 25 in the surrounding streets) and total lack of traffic lights and crosswalks.
Clearly one part of our reluctance involves our worry that perhaps the children might, as a matter of unavoidable developmental fact, not yet possess the judgement and perception capabilities necessary for good decision-making about when to cross such a road. In our defense, I'll point out that—whatever other hazards our friend's son might encounter on his solo strolls in New Orleans—at least every major street he might need to cross can be depended on to have a traffic light and crosswalk at both ends of most blocks.
There seems to be something else going on, though, and what it might be only glimmered into dim shape just after it occurred to me to describe this county road as a boundary or frontier. That's exactly what it is, of course, and it doesn't only demarcate a physical divide. It lies between not only two neighborhoods but two stages of life, and I am beginning to suspect that I am not as eager to cross that boundary as I always expected to be.
Anyone who knows me (and, perhaps, a few strangers who have chanced to pass outside my house during one of my high-volume screaming fits on this very subject) will be aware how intensely and long I have wished to be done with "kid stuff." I long ago reached my fill of a home carpeted with little plastic toys and an emotional climate dominated by superstorms of petty, selfish irrationality. No, thanks, I'd really rather not hold or even frankly hear your baby, because there's a good chance I'll be plunged right back into the mental hellscape I inhabited for at least the first five straight years of my career as a parent, stomach clenched with nausea and fighting the urge to hide in a dark closet with my fingers in my ears.
The thing is, though, it has lately occurred to me that much worse stuff is coming down the road. The teen years will be on us before we know it, and with them the even more intense rebellions and conflicts those years will surely bring: the boyfriends and girlfriends selected for shock effect, the possibility of pregnancy and drug addiction and drunk driving, the experiments with felonious antisocial behavior, and the wee-hours wondering about where the children are and whether they're safe.
And then, at the end of those years, the departure.
In my darkest hours as a parent—that is, for most of the last 11 years—I have openly longed for the day my kids would leave for college and could only smile in disbelief whenever anyone expressed the slightest negative associations with the words "empty nest." Lately, however, I have begun to understand that that moment will bring its own kind of pain after all. Yes, I'll finally have the peace and quiet I've longed for, the solitude with my thoughts that is currently impossible for more than a few seconds at a time. But what will those thoughts look like? I am starting to suspect there will be strong elements of regret and self-recrimination concerning all of my tirades and screaming fits, my own selfish solipsism, the mean streak no one but my children has ever discovered in me, and the intensity with which I had longed for it all to be over.
When I was a new parent, I occasionally had the experience of some decrepit codger cornering me and prattling that I should enjoy it while I could, it all goes by so fast. I would smile, nod, fantasize about slapping their dentures out of their fool mouths, and think but not say something like "not fast enough by far, asshole."
I promised myself I would never, ever verbally assault a new parent in this way. In fact, I decided I would go so far as to warn childless young people not to have kids, and if—in my dotage—I ever chanced upon a young mother or father dealing with a toddler's tantrum in public, I would slide up and observe, in a warm and sympathetic voice , “It's like a nightmare you can't wake up from, isn't it?"
You see, the dominant experience of my first years as a parent was utter astonishment, not only at how unrelentingly awful it all was—at how, for years at a time, the best day I could realistically hope for was one with only a few hours of tantrums, three hours of uninterrupted sleep, and less frequent suicidal ideation—but also how secret everyone else seemed to have been keeping all of this awfulness, as though participating in a broad conspiracy of silence. The result was a profound and overwhelming sense of lonely failure that plagues me even today. So many other parents seemed to be enjoying themselves—so much so that, in some cases, after having one child, they actually, honestly wanted more.
What was wrong with me that I experienced it all so differently?
And what, therefore, could there possibly be not to like about this "empty nest" situation that parents of college students seem always and inexplicably to be moaning over?
By now, however, I have observed that my assumptions and predictions about each upcoming phase of parenthood always turn out wrong, so it seems safe to assume I'll be wrong on this point as well. I am finally starting to understand that the only safe prediction is that, at each stage of parenthood between now and the grave, the only thing I can count on is that I'll continue to be buffeted along by forces I neither understand nor control. I've bought my ticket, in other words, and must now simply take my ride, doing my best to keep all body parts inside the vehicle.
So I also understand that, the first time we let Axl walk alone across that road to his grandparents' house, he won't actually be alone at all. He'll be carrying us on his back, taking us into new territory whether we are ready or not.
That might be the whole explanation, the thing I'm really afraid of. I know I need to teach my kids to cross streets safely, just like I need to teach them to drink whiskey and write poems and use profanity properly. Then, once they are properly equipped to face the world, I must simply let them go, to make their own way as best they can.
Maybe I’m just not in as much of a hurry as I always thought I was.
I'll start tomorrow, I swear.
