TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I’ve insisted for years that my children are not mine — not really. I’ve always believed my son and daughter came through me, not to me, like I’m the door they used to enter the world.

In this way, I feel like they’ve been loaned to me, and my job is to be a steward and a guide while they’re young. Given the average lifespan of a human being, which now is roughly 79 years, my kids will probably live with me for only a quarter of their lives. Just twenty-five percent! It’s not much time when you think of it that way.

Now that they’re both teenagers, and my oldest is in her last year of high school, I’m constantly reminded that soon they will be off building lives of their own. It’s bittersweet, and it’s an unavoidable part of growing up. I’m not the center of their world anymore, not like when they were small and hanging on me all the time: Mom, look! Mom, can we go to the park? Mom, can we play a game?

These days I’m the one reaching out more and asking them to do things. I’m not their first choice of movie companion or dinner date — their friends are, and that’s as it should be. I want them to be increasingly independent, to find their people, and to pursue their own passions.

With that in mind, I find myself writing about my children less, because they can tell their own stories and express themselves in their own words, if they want to. They can decide how much they want to share of themselves. They’re my kids, but they’re their own people, first and foremost. I will always love and support them, but they belong to themselves.

Today’s poem articulates that better than I can here, and I think that’s what we turn to poems for: to tell us the truth, and to tell it beautifully.

On Children
by Kahlil Gibran

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His 
         arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

This poem is in the public domain.