“I can do it myself!” says my six-year-old, as he swings his leg up the high bottom branch of the cherry tree in our front yard. I have just given him a barely perceptible, gentle nudge to help him get where he wants to be, but it’s clear that he doesn’t want this. I need to back off. What he really wants at this point is for me to be there, to cheer him on and observe his triumph. Once he’s firmly footed on the big branch, he begins to confidently scramble up to higher, riskier places, without any thought of the myriad of disastrous consequences that are possibilities if he falls. I, on the other hand, am silently listing the things that could happen: broken arm, head injury, broken neck. Or, more likely, nothing at all. I need to bite my tongue. I can say “Be careful!” but I need to let him explore, go a little higher, test his limits and feel the thrill of looking down on the neighborhood from his lofty perch. He proceeds to the uppermost, smaller, unstable branches. He starts to sway with them. I am just about to yell at him to get down, to remind him that he’s gone too far, but his own judgment kicks in, and he descends on his own. I realize that my child is starting to become capable of making good, safe decisions. I have let him test his limits, and he was able to recognize them. Then, just as I start to relax, he lets out a warrior yell and jumps to the ground from an impossibly high distance, providing me with yet another moment of parental terror. But it’s only a moment. He hits the ground, rolls over once and jumps to his feet, a triumphant grin on his dirty little face. He’s fine.
“I can do it myself!” says my seventy-four-year-old dad. The scenarios attached to this phrase are perhaps a little less daring, but still physically precarious: climbing ladders in the summer, hauling up the porch furniture in the spring, shoveling his roof and driveway in the winter even though he has hired help to do these things. Though over the past few years my very active, self-sufficient father has acquiesced some of the nitty-gritty tasks of taking care of a large house with a big piece of property to others, he still wants to do it himself. A former jock who played football and baseball and basketball in his youth, who coached and refereed and ran around with his kids in his twenties and thirties and forties, who ran a marathon with his best friend from college to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, is now meeting the orthopedic challenges of aging. Arthritis and spinal stenosis are messing with his desire to do everything himself. He can still swing a golf club and have a catch with his grandsons, he can still climb a ladder and start to shovel the snow on his driveway as he waits for the plow guy, but he moves more slowly and stiffly these days, and his balance isn’t great. I worry about him falling. The list of possibilities if this happens runs through my head: broken arm, broken hip, head injury. Or perhaps just a few bruises; this has actually already happened, the other worse scenarios have not. I can say, “Dad, be careful, let someone else do that stuff for you,” and I do, sometimes, but I need to bite my tongue. I need to back off, in a way that is different but also eerily similar to the way I need to back off with my kids when they are asserting their independence. I suppose that my dad did the same thing with me and my siblings when we were growing up. Eventually, he also did this with his own parents as they aged.
Maintaining the precarious balance of being present and supportive, of backing off and respecting boundaries in order to allow independence to develop or remain, is a constant challenge for parents, and for their sons and daughters, at each stage of life. Those of us who find ourselves occupying the space which places us firmly in the middle of young children and aging parents are particularly aware of this.
“I can do it myself!” is something I undoubtedly said to my dad as I was growing up, as all kids do. Now it’s my turn to hear this, from my own kids, and from my parents; to let both generations do it themselves. It’s my turn to hold my tongue, to hold my breath, to pray that nothing bad will happen; to cheer them on, but to be there if they need me. My dad did a great job of this for me. I hope I can do the same now for my boys, and for him. So far, everyone’s just fine.