Two responsible adults. Established careers, a house in the ’burbs and a vacation every summer. This is the picture my kids see of their parents. A picture they title “Success.”
My daughter and her friends lament, “How can we ever be as successful as you?” They gauge their expectations on a level of financial and personal stability decades in the making. Not surprisingly, they feel daunted and frustrated.
Too bad our kids can’t know the newbie adults we once were. My children might feel encouraged if they could observe my husband and me when we arrived at Ohio State. They might also be shocked that these two turkeys would eventually become responsible enough to raise them.
At 18, I was a naive, boy-crazy farm girl. I had known the same 40 boys in my small graduating class for 12 years. I was ready to meet real college guys. Clearly I had my priorities straight as I made time to hot-roller my hair twice a day. I doubt that my husband believes I ever spent that much time on my appearance.
At 17, my future husband spent the first two months on campus waiting to turn 18 so he could drink 3.2 percent beer with the rest of us.
Together we participated in strange dorm theme parties, including the standard toga party as well as the transvestite party. We performed even weirder nightly rituals. The Who jam at midnight foiled our hapless RA, who pounded on our door to no avail. (I did not disclose these activities during my weekly 10-minute calls to the parents.)
Instead, our kids assume we have always been the upstanding middle-age citizens that we are today. The pedestal our kids place us on and the subsequent expectations they place on themselves have not gone unnoticed by university staff preparing new students and their parents for the challenges of freshman year.
A friend of mine attended a University of Texas at Austin parent orientation this summer. An administrator illustrated the expectations students face from themselves and their parents with a clever audience participation exercise. Nearly a thousand parents filled the auditorium. The facilitator asked all the parents to stand and then began:
Remain standing if you graduated in four years. Remain standing if you never changed your major. Remain standing if you are today working in a career in your degree program.
Remain standing if you never received a grade lower than a C. Remain standing if you never received any grades other than A’s.
In the end, only two dads were still on their feet in this room of a thousand parents. More telling is the response my friend got from her daughter when she later described the event to her. “Who else was standing besides Dad?” Dad wasn’t even a semi-finalist, but his daughter assumed he had never taken his seat.
If our kids knew more about our young adult selves, they might realize you don’t have to be perfect at 18 to turn out OK.
Our teens don’t need to know all of our youthful warts, but it would encourage them if we shared a few. We can tell our stories of making the softball team or achieving a perfect score on an algebra test. But we also need to confess about the times we failed, the dumb stuff we tried and the ways we disappointed our own parents.
I’ve shared college report cards and my junior prom picture featuring me in pink gingham next to my boyfriend in a maroon tux with a pink cummerbund. But I have my limits.
There is no reason for my kids to see those candid dorm party shots. That wouldn’t be good for anybody.
Tracy Begland of Coppell is a freelance writer and a frequent contributor of Voices columns. Her email address is
Beglandtx@aol.com.
