brushfire"This, yes, this, it was always like this." -Stanley Koehler
REFLECTIONS OF AN EMPTY NESTER
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I am an elephant parent. I admit it. I ran across an article recently that described what an elephant parent is and the moment I read it, I knew my husband and I had found our parental classification. Did we do things for our kids they could have done for themselves? Check. Did we let them get away without doing a lot of chores around the house? Check. Are we enablers? Check. Even when our kids were in high school, when they were perfectly capable of making a sandwich and putting it in a paper bag with an apple and granola bar, I made their lunches for them. I even — gasp — delivered forgotten homework to the school office. My husband cooked dinner every night and afterward did the dishes because the kids always had homework to do, or sports to go to. When they went off to college, I emailed detailed instructions on how to do laundry, since none of them had ever touched the washer and dryer. Separate whites and darks, I wrote. Hot water for white, warm water for dark. But oddly enough, after reading the article, I felt vaguely reassured. OK, so I wasn't a tiger mom — my child wasn't playing with the Philharmonic — but I must be doing something right if there was a name for it. The author of the article described a childhood in India where adults believed children had their entire lives to be grown up and should be allowed to enjoy themselves. The role of parents was to nurture, encourage and protect. She said her father wouldn't allow anyone to scold her before she was five. The article even came with a video showing how elephants parent. A baby elephant is playing in a ditch. She tries to climb up the side, but falls backward onto her back into muddy water. Get up, baby elephant, says the tiger mom. Show some resilience, some perseverance … some grit! Uh-oh, mommy and daddy elephant aren't standing for that. There they go, rushing — stampeding, in fact, trunks waving from side to side — to their baby's rescue. Now they are in the ditch, on either side of baby elephant. They gently nudge her up with their trunks, escorting her to the other end of the ditch where the incline is less steep. The little elephant escapes the ditch back onto safe, dry ground. With baby wedged securely between her parents, the three trudge off to do whatever elephants do. Video fades to black. What did baby elephant learn from this? That her parents will continue to pick her up every time she falls, rescue her every time she fails, usher her way through life? No, I think she learned they love her and will always support her — and next time she will be able to find her own way to the safe end of the ditch. A version of this appeared in the Grosse Pointe News July 11, 2016.
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Mary Anne BrushJournalist, fiction writer, wife and mother |