Quite a few years ago a friend of one of our kids had occasion to visit us on his own, when our son wasn’t home. We adore this kid, both because he is amazing in his own right, and because these two friends just adore each other. Sitting at our dining room table, our son’s good friend asked me a question: “Are you proud of him?”
I don’t really remember anything else about this conversation, but I have thought about it so many times since. I must have answered “yes,” because how could I possibly have said “no?” It is very common to hear people talk about being proud of their children, and of course there is nothing wrong with that, but I realized that there is something about it that doesn’t accurately describe how I feel about the lives of my children.
Being proud of your children might mean that you have some expectation of them, spoken or unspoken, that they have lived up to. That stance may be more proper and relevant when your children are still actually children, living under your own roof, because of course as a parent you are your child’s first and more important teacher, and your job is to bring them up to be good people as adults. But once they are adults, it is much more important that they have developed their own principles by which to live than that they are “living up” to their parents’ principles.
Another possible pitfall I watch for is turning my children into a mirror I look into to feel good about myself, which is nothing but a little ego boost. In that case I am using them because they make me look good and add to my self-esteem. I have been guilty of this many times in my life as a mother, thinking, “Aren’t I a great mom?” and looking around to see if anybody is watching. One particularly hilarious example was during a backcountry trip in Honduras when our kids were still in elementary school. We were motoring up a river on the Mosquito Coast with an eco-tour guide, and I was congratulating myself on providing my privileged white sons with the experience of another culture where people didn’t have all the advantages they did. “What a great mom!” I thought, until I tuned in to their conversation in the back of the boat where they were discussing what they would each do if they had a million dollars. If parenthood hasn’t given you many opportunities to be humble, I think maybe you’re just not paying attention.
I have thought hard about what to do with this emotion that feels like pride in my adult children, and have gently settled on admiration. I deeply admire each one of them for the unique and principled men they have become. This stance allows them the space to be self-directed adults instead of the children we guided and taught. It also gives me the space to be humble enough to learn from them, instead of infantilizing them with the expectation that they should always be learning from me. We worked hard to teach and model for them values by which to guide their adult lives, and the uncomfortable mirror that they often hold up is the one that makes me ask if I am living up to those same values myself. I am grateful for that, and grateful that as they have gotten older they hold up that mirror much more gracefully and forgivingly than they did when they were younger adults. Life is complicated, and we are all learning from each other.
But is there any place for pride in my life? When that question occurred to me I realized that I am unabashedly proud of at least one thing: my profession of librarianship, from its grandest centuries-old role as the guardian of the record of civilization to the most granular minute-by-minute experience of bringing kids and books together in my years as a school librarian. Librarianship is based on a set of professional principles that elevated me as I attached myself to them: accurate, reliable information is for the common good; literature elevates and ennobles human life; free people read freely; libraries are for every one, literally every single person in society, paid for and supported by all of us. Libraries embody the concept of the “commons” as a way to structure society as opposed to the transactional systems engendered by capitalism (see? That’s what I learn from my kids!). Librarianship was an avenue for me to make a living by doing good in the world. Librarianship has provided me with heroes and role models of courage and conviction who even after my retirement still guide and teach me in the same ways I tried to guide and teach my kids. I can feel just fine about having pride in that.