Flow State

My mood is heavily tied to the performance of three other people. Those three people, unfortunately, are my children.

When they were little, this made sense. If a toddler is unhappy, that becomes everyone’s problem. If a teenager is making questionable decisions, parental involvement is generally encouraged. There are forms to sign, rides to provide, curfews to enforce, and occasional lectures that are ignored in real time but hopefully absorbed later.

The problem is that my children are no longer children. They are 26, 24, and 21. And yet somehow I still find myself checking their emotional market performance like a nervous investor watching stock prices.

• Child A is doing great? Wonderful. The market is up.
• Child B gets a new opportunity? Bullish.
• Child C seems happy and engaged. Record highs.

On the other hand, if one of them is in a bad mood, worried about work, stressed about money, frustrated with life, or simply having a normal human day, my internal ticker starts flashing red.

SELL! SELL! SELL!

The strange part is that I know better. I know adults are supposed to have struggles. I know uncertainty is part of growth. I know nobody becomes resilient by avoiding every difficulty. In fact, if you asked me about someone else’s children, I would sound remarkably wise.

“They’ll figure it out.”

“These experiences build character.”

“Growth comes through challenges.”

Apparently, I become considerably less philosophical when the people involved share my last name.

Recently, I realized that my mood often rises and falls with theirs. If they are happy, I relax. If they are struggling, I struggle. That sounds loving. It is also exhausting.

I suspect I may come by this honestly. Years ago, after my wife told my dad she was pregnant with our third child, my father asked a question that has stuck with me ever since.

“Why would you try for a third when you already have two healthy children? What if the third has a defect?”

Now, before anyone starts sending letters to the editor, my father was not a bad man. He loved his family deeply. But he was also a worrier. His mind naturally jumped to what could go wrong. He was a worrier. At the time, I remember being stunned by the question. We weren’t thinking about defects. We were thinking about another child to love.

But now, decades later, I wonder if I inherited more than his eye color. Maybe I inherited some of the wiring, too.

When I see one of my children struggling, my mind immediately starts building flow charts.

What if this leads to that?

What if that leads to something worse?

What if this is the beginning of a larger problem?

The reality is that most of those imagined futures never arrive. Meanwhile, the actual present often looks much better than my imagination.

The child I’m worried about may simply be having a bad day. The one I’m convinced is lonely may be spending time with friends. The one I’m worried is lost may simply be taking a longer route.

I am slowly learning that one of the hardest parts of parenting adult children is accepting that they are allowed to be unhappy. Not permanently unhappy. Not destructively unhappy. Just unhappy sometimes.

They are allowed to be frustrated. They are allowed to make mistakes. They are allowed to struggle. They are allowed to figure things out the same way I did.

The challenge is that every parental instinct screams, “Do something!”

Unfortunately, adulthood has changed the job description.

When children are young, parenting is often:

• Notice the problem.
• Fix the problem.

When children become adults, parenting becomes:

• Notice the problem.
• Stay available.
• Wait.

The waiting is brutal.

It feels like inaction.  I’m not a patient man.  I watch 2-3 episodes of a show and then Google recaps of the finale because I can’t bear the ups and downs and just want to know what happens.  And yeah, I do read the end chapter of books to see who is still alive.

It feels irresponsible just watching the kids struggle and learn, but I know that’s what they need to grow. That’s the job now.

What I’m trying to learn is that I can love my children without carrying their lives on my shoulders. I can care deeply without making their mood my mood. I can trust the process without knowing the outcome.

And perhaps most importantly, I can remember that every one of my children is still in the middle of their story.

The truth is that if my parents had judged my future when I was twenty-four, they probably would have worried too.  I know they worried.  I made some bonehead mistakes, was pathless, and, although I remember enjoying it all, was probably as sad sack miserable as any Gen X person at the time.  Only one of my friends had a “real job,” and yet decades later, we’re all doing well with our lives.

At that time, though, my parents would have seen uncertainty. They would have seen mistakes. They would have seen unanswered questions.

What they would not have seen at that time was the life that eventually emerged.

Maybe my children deserve the same grace.

And maybe so do I.