New Years' Musings: Twenty is the Cruellest Age

Twenty or thereabouts. My sons are 21 and my daughter is 18. From a mother's point of view, these are difficult times. Nothing like the meltdown we endured during the high school years, but trying and depressing nevertheless.

The kids are, of course, revelling in their independence, as they should be. But how quickly they discard childish things, and how little they have created to replace them.

Over vacation they were mostly bored. Their friends and activities and lives are all elsewhere now. They spent a little time with high school friends, but none of them show a keen interest in going backward in time. Not so much interest in the present, either. I did all the holiday decorating and preparing myself -- the days when they enthusiastically pitched in to hang ornaments or bring in greens are apparently gone, at least for now.

I had some unpleasant moments with each of them over the issue of "parental pressure," as they describe it, or "acedia and inertia," as I describe it. I listened to many protests in which the key theme was an insistence that "I'd take care of it if you'd leave me alone." That, as a friend of mine and mother of six noted, is not the case. I said very little from September to November to any of my children about matters that they needed to take care of, matters pertaining to majors and courses and spring and summer plans. As a result, none of those things have been taken care of.

Yesterday I finally said to my daughter that (1) it might have been nice for one of her brothers to have spent spring break with Habitat on the Gulf Coast but the deadline for his school's program was in November (2) the job she has indicated an interest in is competitive and her three weeks at home have produced no completed application or requests for references and (3) she might remember that last winter break she similarly rejected all my pleas to explore a community theatre opportunity for the summer, announced in March that she was indeed interested, went down to apply, and was greeted with laughter -- all the jobs had been filled in January.

She rolled her eyes.

It is so hard to see three young people with the energy, freedom, and mental elasticity that I no longer have frittering away their time on poker, video games, and television. They could do ANYTHING at this point in their lives. The boys still have at least one long summer ahead of them, and parents willing to finance certain adventures. I told one of them that in a couple of years he will be wearing a white shirt and tie in a corporate environment that allows him four annual weeks of freedom, and he will wonder why on earth he didn't take this summer to work in Alaska or volunteer on another continent or go back to work as a summer camp counselor -- one last chance to play in the mountains. Or -- go and grab one of those summer internships that looks so impressive on a resume. Just DO something!

As I sat around with my own friends on Saturday morning (out post-holiday breakfast lasted over three hours), I said that I thought maybe we wouldn't be doing Christmas dinner next year. "The kids don't seem to care about being home, or about the family aspect of Christmas anymore," I said. "And there are fewer and fewer spaces on the calendar when all five of us can be in the same place at the same time. So I'm thinking maybe we need to develop a new tradition for a few years, and travel over the holiday. "

Somewhat but not entirely to my surprsie, two of my friends said they had been thinking the exact same thing. I'm afraid that this city is full of mothers wistfully decorating trees by themselves and trying to think of other ways to foster family closeness at least once a year.

When I started this series, I noted that there is little guidance for this stage of life. All those hundreds and hundreds of infant and childcare books -- but nothing for the mother who has to somehow master the final transition to independence. The kids barely notice -- they pack, they drive, they fly. And it's the ones who don't, who struggle to independence in the most roundabout ways, who foster the most dramatic parental grief -- the child who flunked out of college with only one semester to go, the daughter who had a baby and now struggles to combine single-parenting with work and college, the children who never went to college and whose mother finally decided to use the tuition money for her own graduate program. But those who navigate the last years of youth less eventfully are still capable of twisting the knife.

I guess there was nor reason to expect these years to be as delightful as some in the past have been. I know that it's a time of terrible struggle for the young people, as they come to terms with the looming spectre of employment and the possibility of making choices they will come to regret. They don't know how to tolerate the internal chaos on which the cusp of adulthood teeters, and their mothers, mixing memory and desire, don't want to.

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April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot