The End of the Beginning

On doing our best

My teen daughter Evie and I are in a booth at our local coffee shop, laptops facing each other. I’m doing some work while she’s studying for her 11th grade philosophy final. It’s on Eastern philosophy, which is my jam, but I have to pretend to be only vaguely interested, so as not to irritate her.

“Look,” she says, nodding past my left shoulder. I turn to see a toddler in a high chair at the booth behind us, grinning madly. Evie and I start making faces at this little girl, cracking her up.

Turning back to Evie, I tell her, “I get such a pang seeing a kid that age, knowing that your childhood’s almost over.”

“Oh, it’s already over,” she says.

“I mean, not technically.”

“I’m seventeen,” she says. “I’m basically an adult.”

“Basically,” I say.

“Even my teenhood is almost over,” she says, sipping her chai latte, smiling as she does when she knows she’s got me spooked.

“Well,” I say to her, “I hope we did okay.”

We did our best, of course. Who doesn’t? A therapist told me, when I was in my early twenties, that my parents did their very best. Yeah, right, I thought, with a full-body scoff. It was one of those nagging ideas, though, that kept resurfacing over the years, like someone tugging on my sleeve.

Sometimes I’d fall into a spell of feeling generous toward them, but then snap out of it, like waking from a dream. It was hard to maintain, carrying as much resentment as I did.

At some point, instead of saying, They did their best, I refashioned this statement to: They couldn’t do any better. This felt true, and also the kind of thing one says from a higher moral perch, which I found pettily satisfying, like: They couldn’t do any better, the poor things.

Way back when I was a new dad, visiting my in-laws in England, I immediately noticed that they didn’t have a stair gate. I mentioned this to my wife, surreptitiously. I’m always wary, when I’m around her family, of being The American. I often feel like this cartoonish version of what Brits make fun of Americans for, over-worrying about germs, food expiration dates, and personal injury.

Encountering my in-laws’ (admittedly carpeted) staircase in the presence of two small children, I felt like one would regarding an oncoming truck. DANGER, this staircase called out to me. Nobody else seemed to care. Were they all crazy?

“I have an idea,” I said over breakfast. “Maybe I can just pop down to the Babies’R’Us in town and grab a stair gate.”

“You know,” my mother-in-law said, “every child has to fall down the stairs at some point.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said to her. “Though maybe not my kids?”

She shrugged. “They’ve got to learn somehow.”

She had a point, as usual. I wondered, though, if my kids could learn by witnessing other kids’ inevitable falls down the stairs—terrible, of course, but perhaps necessary! Either way, I followed my toddler daughter and infant son around my in-laws’ house in Oxford for the rest of the trip, my parental helicopter blades chuppering.

After more than a decade of this kind of parenting, it started to happen: people sending me podcasts and articles about how we’d gotten it all wrong. All of us helicopters, snowplows, and other over-parenting vehicles, we hadn’t let our kids build enough resilience.

Resilience! I thought. Shit. I knew I’d missed something. This was, of course, my second biggest fear, after something happening to my kids: getting parenting wrong.

Now, my almost-no-longer-a-teen daughter informs me in a coffee shop booth: It’s over. Pencils down.

Did I hover too closely behind as she wobbled her way up the slide ladder? Did we help her change schools too quickly when the mean girls cut her out? What about everything in between? Too much? Not enough?

Well, whatever Emma and I did or didn’t do, we couldn’t have done any better. It’s a universal law.

I used to justify my helicoptering, telling myself it was because of my difficult childhood. Was it, though? I’m not sure. Maybe it was just in the ether, the way we all collectively decide to do things, however that happens. Like a murmuration of starlings.

Either way, I wanted to give my kids the opposite of what I went through. In some important ways, I guess I managed that. They’re older now, and they’ve heard stories from me, about the violence and the chaos I experienced, long ago. They wonder what all of that was like. “It was crazy,” I tell them. “But I wouldn’t change a thing, because all of that led to you.”

“Besides,” I say to them, “everyone really was doing their best.”

I’m a true believer in this now. Everyone, at all times, is by definition doing the best they can, given their genetics, their life experiences, the conditions arising around them, their nervous systems, and all the vast, unknowable currents that carry us along in every moment.

How could anything ever be otherwise? As with all important things, I forget sometimes, and then I remember again. I look back at everything now, and it’s much easier to see the love, more than anything else.

Evie and I leave the coffee shop, which is called Bread Alone. Bride Alone, she used to call it unwittingly, when she was little. I loved how she mispronounced everything. Something was “skomething.” She would lean in, whispering conspiratorially: “Daddy, I have to tell you skomething.”

We start back down the street, toward the public lot, where we’ve parked next to each other. She’s driving now, my little girl.

Strolling our town’s main street together, we pass a young dad wearing a baby carrier, a tiny bald head peeking out. I feel another pang. Oh no, I think. Am I going to turn into one of those older parents who calls out, “I remember when my kids were that age! Seems like yesterday!”

I resist this fleeting temptation, thank god.

Evie and I turn and stop at the crosswalk together. I remember teaching her to look both ways before crossing. It really does seem like yesterday. And here she is, about to head off in her own car, to meet friends across the river.

A truck lumbers past, laden with mulch. The road is still wet from a recent rain. Just as we step off the curb and start across the road, my daughter reaches over, like she did when she was tiny, and grabs my hand.