Being a parent I quickly learned is about being there, staying close, and letting go. And you usually have to do all three at the same time.
The truck was over a mile away coming at us in the opposite direction. But my son moved into that lane too early, with too much distance between us and the car in front of us. He slowed down and cautiously returned to our path.
The timing was wrong. He had to wait for another chance to try again to pass the car in front of us.
We were in Nevada on Highway 95 heading to Boise, Idaho. My son wanted to see a college friend who was stationed there and I decided to join him in the car.
It was a 10-hour drive from our home in the Bay Area, a 1,300-mile round trip. We finished it in 48 hours. The trip was boring and uneventful, except for a false alarm and one of our tires that forced us to stop in Reno.
But it was also special in a way.
It reminded me of an important lesson about fatherhood and motherhood in general. Being a parent I quickly learned is about being there, staying close, and letting go. And you usually have to do all three at the same time.
I learned this since my son was a toddler.
You need to keep him safe and make sure you are always there. But there are times when you need to let the child think for himself. You need to let him know how to turn, how to crawl, how to walk.
Guiding him on his first steps is good. But you need to let go of his little hands sometimes – even if it means watching him kneel or fall (safely on the carpeted floor), crying in frustration. Eventually, he will get it. And finally he did.
There was less clarity on other types of releases. For example, co-sleeping, or having your child sleep with parents in their bed is generally frowned upon by some parents. They encourage the infant to sleep in his bed alone in his room.
But hearing our son crying in his room was difficult for me and my wife. So we adopted a co-sleeping approach that made the relationship with our child more meaningful and more stable.
Other challenges of letting him go followed: the first time we left him in daycare and school, both heartbreaking. The first time he went to bed with a friend. The first time he went out with friends. His departure to college was difficult and sad.
But I must say the most difficult experience of letting-go came a few years before that – when he was learning to drive.
He took lessons, but it was up to me to help him practice. It was a terrifying experience, one of the saddest chapters in my parenting career.
Talk about letting go. You’re in the passenger seat with a new driver in charge, who has full control, whose decisions will determine whether you and he make it home safely or not.
Well, okay, that’s pretty amazing. But like I said: it was a horrible experience.
But I – we – survived that, my son and I.
But on that drive to Idaho, I realized that he still had some things to learn about driving. He didn’t have much experience passing on a long two-lane road.
And on the 256-mile two-lane highway that crosses Nevada and Oregon before ending in Idaho, he had plenty of opportunities to test it.
And out in the middle of nowhere, I had to, once again, let go.
By that time, I was confident in his skills. He had been a careful, careful driver. And it showed as I watched him know when and how to pull into the opposite lane to safely pass a slow moving car or truck.
“You made your trip too early and too far from the car in front of us,” I told him after he carefully turned back into our lane.
Then he waited, and waited, patiently. Again, he was leading. Again, I had to sit back and trust that he would figure it out. That he could use everything he learned as a new driver to come up with a plan. The more you drive, the more you learn how to do it, the more you learn how to avoid mistakes that lead to mistakes.
I watched him move closer to the car in front of us, and watched his eyes make quick calculations, before making his move.
He crossed to the other lane, picked up speed and then crossed smoothly back into our lane, to continue at a steady pace.
I will admit that I got a little nervous on his first try. But I relaxed more after that.
I let go. – Rappler.com
(This article was first published in the author’s book LinkedIn.)
Benjamin Pimentel is a technology reporter and editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His novel, Mga Guerilla Sa Powell Street, won the 2007 National Book Award and was exhibited by the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ (CCP) Tanghalang Pilipino in 2008.
