100 Years of Kids

 At some point over the last month or two, the kids realized that in September there would be a week during which their ages summed up to 100 years. Unfortunately, it was a bad time for a celebration, because by then our eldest daughter would be back at college and unable to attend. So they scheduled a slightly early 100th birthday part for this last weekend. 

I slow cooked 10lbs of chicken with Mexican style spices and put out quantities of Spanish rice, refried beans, and tortillas. Various friends brought food and drink, and I made a large cake and picked up candles in the shape of a 1 and two 0s. Forty or fifty people came through the open-house style event, bringing together the different spheres of our lives: church, theater, the kids' friends, etc.

Even without this particular reminder that we have 100 years of life experience that have sprung from our marriage, I'd been thinking about the next generation lately. Our eldest is heading into her senior year of college, and we have one more in college and two in high school. Going into parenting, you imagine all your children being just like you and your spouse. I'd pictured the kids all reading the same books we enjoyed, taking the same approach to school, and having the same ambitions for their careers.

Instead, the thing you realize as a parent with many children is how staggeringly different these humans can be. We do not simply reproduce ourselves. We produce these completely independent and very different people, whom we sometimes struggle to understand, despite how much we love them and want to know everything about them.

So far, no one seems "just like us" when it comes to favorite books or academics or talents, but instead we find ourselves with people who have a great many interests and abilities which only partly overlap with our own. We are our own crowd, not just in numbers but in variety.

As I watch the kids working their way through school and taking their first steps into working, and try to nudge them in directions that seem like they would be most conducive to being able to support a family, I do worry at times. We've managed to work our way up to making much more than either of our sets of parents have. Will the kids be able to do as well in the career world as I have?

It's natural to worry, because we want good things for our kids.

But there's also a hierarchy of goods. I find that the things the kids have most consistently picked up from us are the things we do as a part of a community, which for us ends up meaning Catholicism and community theater. All of the kids, thus far, seem to have made these things very much their own, though as in all other things they each approach these activities in their own way. 

Perhaps if I'd made my career or my reading and intellectual interests the center of family activity and conversation all the time, those would have been the things that the kids had picked up most from us. But if it's a choice between those and the connection to faith, morals, and arts which they have instead picked from us, I think the path we're on is the better one. 

And clearly, 100 years is not nearly long enough to spend around such excellent people. Although the fact that they rack up another communal seven years to their total for each twelve months by the calendar underlines how exhausting it can often be to serve as the axle from which so many different spokes go out, watching these people grow into their adult selves is one of the best ways I can think of to spend my life.  Here's looking at you, kids.