Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-05-21 - 8:06 a.m.

Parallels

The interesting thing about adolescents, when I am far enough away from them to find anything about them interesting, is how completely unaware they are of anybody else's wants or needs.

The interesting thing about elderly parents is pretty much exactly the same thing.

Little kids are sweet. Little kids worry about you, and want to feed you, and when they get something cool, they want you to have some too. Younger child still asks the pediatrician for an extra sticker to take home to her sister. When we used to stop at the doughnut shop after dropping older sister at the elementary, little one didn't want a doughnut unless sister could have one, so we would buy an extra. Then she wanted to save hers until she could eat it with older sister after school. Generosity went to war with greed, and in the end she would tear the doughnut in half and eat half right then - but half was saved, to share in the joy of being sisters and having chocolate doughnuts together.

Older sister did these things, too. She still does them at times. But she is also adolescing, so has moved farther into the land of "I am the wronged and displaced Queen of the Universe, and I am Greatly Owed, and you, serf, have no existence other than as it relates to Me."

Which, on reflection, is an approach that I think was developed by my mother in recent years.

Ma has great trouble understanding that it is a difficult thing to run up to her town, run by her house to get a grocery list, then run to the store and buy the groceries and deliver them, when I have to get the kids at school in an hour. Can't someone else get the kids? Ma has trouble understanding that when I spend five hours getting her to and through a weekly visit to the retinologist, that I can't stay and visit for a few hours afterwards. A good daughter would. Why am I so mean? What else could I possibly have to do?

Older child wants me to run home after dropping her at school, find her music folder somewhere in the house, and drop it by school on my way to work - in time for her band class in the next fifteen minutes. She wants me to thank her for "going shopping with me", somehow overlooking that the items purchased consisted of a swimsuit and a new pair of tennis shoes for HER. A good mother would. Why am I so selfish?

Children do this self-centered thing as part of their growth, I know. They turn inwards to figure out who they are. I wonder why the elderly do it. Are they, too, consolidating, getting ready for the next step?

I want to be patient with this, I do. It's important to me. I get my patience from understanding. I want to see why this needs to be, how it isn't about me at all, how we all do what we need to do. And I want to keep a private promise to myself to age differently - to be kind and wise and witty and independent and never to spark the kinds of feelings that my mother sparks now in me - even though I know that this is just as valid and useful a promise as, "When I grow up and be a Mommy, I will NEVER make my children clean up their rooms."

We bring our children forth knowing that we will have to tend them and love them through this period (although raising adolescents, like kidney stones, can't be adequately described until it's experienced.) We don't know, or perhaps only I didn't know, that we will have to tend and love our parents through similarly difficult stages.

When I can't find the love to do it, I fall back on hard and gritty duty. Love may wear thin some days, but duty is always concrete.

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