Parenting: UNTYING APRON STRINGS

Instead of actually “cutting the apron strings,” my kids gently and firmly, even lovingly, helped me untie them. With love and good humor, they persistently peeled my single-parent mothering off their backs. For about three years each, they worked on developing new relationships with me. I did my best to reciprocate. Having insisted on and modeled mutual respect since small kid days, I was still able to put my foot down on occasions when I felt that the price of their bid for self-determination was too high, but only after very thorough discussions. If I regressed into intrusive “parental entitlements," they were sure to remind me that pulling rank was not how we did things..

One of our more difficult win-win solutions came the first year my daughter had her license. She wanted to drive some friends to a New Year’s Eve Party in my car. She was an excellent driver, a very responsible person, no highways would be involved, and she promised to have only two beers in the four hours she'd be there. I was concerned that she would be distracted by rowdy, drunken friends or hit by someone else on this night of drinking. I was scared silly for her safety and told her why. She heard and understood my concern and we worked on it together, both explicitly aware that my trust in her honesty and good judgement was the bedrock for her growing freedoms.

Gitalongs: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR WAKE

If your words, silence, action, or inaction purposely or inadvertently interfere with or hurt another, it is up to you to restore equilibrium as sincerely and quickly as possible, immediately taking the time required to do so – a quick apology for a bump, a full scale pick-up-dust-off for a knock-down. Defense and denial are wastes of time and pervert human interaction and harmony.

You are Responsible for Your Wake by Abby Freeborn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. For Permission to use contact randmxcentric@gmail.com