My Parents Taught Me . . .

My sister told me the story of her son’s senior year, when he created an AI game—and a multi-million dollar company—as part of his senior project. It blew up with a million downloads in the first week, which didn’t make his college very happy since he was using their servers and crashed them. The newspaper asked him how he managed to spend so much time working on the project when he was still in school full-time.

He answered, “My parents taught me school didn’t matter, so I just focused on the game.”

My sister is embarrassed about this story because she feels it makes her look bad and is an inadequate translation of what she taught her kids. What she taught them was that learning mattered and that things like grades and getting credit for schoolwork were not the markers of learning. Most of her children did a combination of public school and schoolwork and they all show evidence of her teaching them that learning mattered more than grades or busywork. I told her that I would be proud to have this quote on my tombstone and wished my children would say the same of me.

Then my sister reminded me of the time that I offered to pay my oldest daughter $20 if she could get less than an A in any of her classes. I’d forgotten about this, but it’s a good reminder of my attempts to get my kids to be less stressed about academic perfection. All my children were high achievers in academics and when I ask them about it now, about me trying to tell them that I truly didn’t care, they say that they knew that I really did, because no matter what I said, everything in my life made it clear how much I valued high achievement.

And, well, I can’t deny that I am the poster girl for making every hobby into either a competition or a business. I started triathlons to de-stress and then ended up checking my national ranking every day on the USAT website. It’s also true that I remember my parents trying to suggest to me that I didn’t need to take a class during my lunch hour as well as two college classes my senior year, when I was clearly struggling with the stress. All I heard as a teen was “you’re not capable of taking all those classes,” and I worked hard to prove them wrong.

My point here is that as a parent, you can never be entirely certain what your children are going to hear no matter what you tell them. My father used to tell me “measure twice, cut once,” but his entire life was proof that he never measured and cut a thousand times instead. I’m not even sure it was a bad lesson to learn to throw yourself at things and experiment with the belief that you would eventually figure it out. It just wasn’t the lesson that he thought he was teaching us, and as his kid, it’s amusing to me sometimes to think about how unaware he was of who he actually was.

I have no idea what my kids will say about me when I’m gone, what I taught them unintentionally or intentionally. I suppose part of parenting is giving up the control of your legacy with your children, just as you learn to give up control over all the other things people pretend you have control over, from their sleeping and eating and pooping schedule as babies, to potty training success to making friends and influencing people or getting into a “good school” to get a “good job.” Our children are continually teaching us about our own lack of control, and then in strange, sweet moments, they come back around and tell us that it turns out we actually did have control over something that we didn’t expect to have control over, and maybe didn’t even want to control.