Doing It Right

Longtime readers know I have a lot of misgivings about the courses my life has taken. Four marriages? Being a non-custodial mother? Twenty years to complete college? Getting a J.D. but not passing the bar? Changing jobs every two years or even more frequently? Where's the sense in all that? How did it happen?

But sometimes, despite missteps and misgivings, one gets her life right.

And those rightnesses bring me great happiness and joy and a few tears to the eyes.

One of the big successes was walking with John from his diagnosis with metastatic prostate cancer through the 21 months to his death. He was lucky to have a wife who had the inner fortitude to just focus on him and his needs. And I was lucky to be able to give and give and give to him. We were both personalities who needed to be needed, and we were blessed by the universe to find each other.

I've done what I could for my older son, who is bound and determined to do everything for himself. The damage of my mother's parenting of me, and the damage of my parenting of my sons (i.e. leaving) led my older son to follow in my counterdependent footsteps. He seems to want to be left alone. So I try to let him know I love and support him, while letting him be his own self. It seems to work. I think we've been successful in our forming of the adult child-to-adult parent relationship.

But where I really did it right was with my younger son. This weekend he is at Interlochen Arts Academy (IAA) for a reunion, and I am filled with memories of what an absolutely miraculous place Interlochen is. Because of John's son-in-law, himself a National Music Camp alum, we were introduced to Interlochen Arts Camp and Interlochen Arts Academy. Because of my son's self-assurance, he was able to break away from his father and come to the parent who understood his love and affinity for this creative place in the woods of northern Michigan. Because of my determination to always try to do what was best for my children, I worked and worked and worked to provide that education and that place for him. I told him from Day One that he was to consider his time at IAA as an investment towards college. He worked harder than I've ever worked, made reasoned choices and decisions, studied, made a name for himself, and ultimately earned a full scholarship to college. Thanks to a loving housemother, he learned to do his laundry and manage his time. Thanks to incredibly gifted and compassionate teachers, he got an academic education he simply would not have gotten in any public or private high school in Dallas or in D.C.

And the entire time he was at Interlochen, he did not let a week pass without thanking me for all my sacrifices on his behalf.

And so this weekend I reminisce back to my phone calls from D.C. to his dorm between the lakes. "Is there anything I need to know?", I would ask. I would send packages containing both fans and blankets—to counter the blistering heat of northern Michigan summer days and the seemingly unseasonable chill of northern Michigan summer nights. I would find ways to make trips up for Parents Weekend and the Collage Concert. I would sacrifice and I would worry. But I would know that what I was doing was one of the rightest things I had ever done.

And I wipe away the tears of joy for having been given something hard to do and having done it well.

Ultimately, isn't that what matters?