Bea V. Larsen . . . .Commentaries |
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Bea V. Larsen is a Senior Mediator at the Center for Resolution of Disputes in |
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Parents One At A Time This entry was posted on 5/9/2009 7:00 AM and is filed under Personally Speaking. A small porcelain bird sits on a shelf in my bedroom, always in view if I glance away from reading the morning paper or from watching a movie in the evening. It's not something I would have purchased for myself. Too cute, too sentimental. But it was a gift from my father. He brought it to my home almost fifty years ago when he traveled to my city on business, a rare visit made without my mother along. He probably purchased it at an airport kiosk, the only present I, as an adult, ever received from him that hadn't been handed to me, and likely chosen, by my mother. After our marriage, Len and I lived quite some distance from both sets of parents. We visited them several times a year, and in that pre-computer era wrote often, and had weekly long distance phone conversations. The letters I received were in my mother’s hand and she did most of the talking on the phone, with my father listening on an extension. When my parents were together, it was my mother who filled the air with her presence. My father died in 1977. I regret not having known him better. He was a kind, quiet and reserved man who readily answered questions about his views on politics or world affairs, but even those conversations were often interrupted by one of my young ones, or a practical concern of the moment raised by my mother. Thinking back, I knew little about the feelings hidden behind the gentle smile of this man who immigrated to this country as a teenager, struggled to get a foothold and then lost virtually everything after the 1929 crash and had to start over. He rode the Grand Central railroad into N.Y.C. early every morning, usually returning well after dinner, working long hours to rebuild his family's security. My husband's experience growing up was not too different, a vibrant mother who held the family together, while his father commuted to long and arduous work days in Chicago, returning home weary and often wordlessly retreating into a world of music. Born of this past, Len and I realized, years ago, that we wanted our adult children to really come to know their father, another quiet man, in ways we both had missed. So, when my husband and I talked to our grown kids on the phone, we did not share the conversation. One of us would talk and then the phone was handed off. The more verbal of their parents, myself, did not eclipse the other. And we went a step further. Len took our oldest grown son on a wilderness canoe trip, and flew his small plane across the country with our second son to revisit towns in which the family had spent summers many years before. And he went to Alaska with our daughter, then 14, for a flying camping adventure neither would ever forget. At least once a year we visited our children separately, traveling alone to their distant homes. Without witnessing the quality of the interaction they had when I wasn’t there, I knew it was a more significant connection for them in my absence. I, in turn, enjoyed being with them on my own. Do divorced parents have an edge here? Len wept bitterly at his father’s funeral for what never had been. And I wish I'd been wise enough, so many years ago, to realize what I was missing. |
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