My ultimate goal as a parent is to make myself obsolete. Really. I want to be out kayaking or hiking some exotic location when the kids are older, enjoying the fact that my kids don’t need me around at all. Oh sure, I’ll see them a fair bit and share their lives through phone calls and whatever electronic communication device we’ll have then, but I want them to sail their own ship. I was chomping at the bit for years in my parents’ home because I was an adventurer and traveller who happened to be born into a family that loved routine and tradition. No one, and I mean no one, could understand at all why I wanted to live abroad. It was like I had said I wanted to stick needles under my fingernails. Worse yet was when i really began to travel and decided to live far from home. Was I insane? Did I not love them? That I just enjoyed experiencing different ways of living was impossible to convey. Every alternate choice I made was regarded as a affront to them, and I never could get out from under that. Maybe I will have tradition-loving homebodies who want to hang out with mom and dad; who knows. But I recall only having a deep sense of what my parents wanted for me by the time I was an adult, and had never really given much creedence to what I wanted. So, every day I work the kids away from me in tiny ways in the hopes that by the time they are on their own, they will have a fair sense of who they are, who they could be, and what is important to them.
Of course, this is all very lofty when you’ve got Colin running out in the street, climbing out of his crib at all hours and refusing to potty train, but you know, I can dream.