My husband is about to go back to school. It’s going to be quite an adventure for all of us I suspect. Although he has enjoyed learning new things for as long as we’ve been married, the arrival of his high school transcripts were proof that this love of learning is a rather recent development. The transcripts portrayed the idiocy of youth. He was a straight “A” student as long as the subject involved sweat or power tools, but as for the rest? You can probably do the math better than he did back then.
As an adult he is focused and driven. He has more goals than Steven Covey and more projects than Bob Villa. So, since I never knew my husband in his youth, I had to ask why he squandered his time the way that he did. The answer was interesting. “I just never knew that college was an option. Actually, I never knew that there were any options other than graduating and getting a job.” This was astounding to me. His parents are college graduates who had seven children and his dad held down a professional job for 45 years before retiring. But they believed that their children had to live their own lives and make their own decisions.
I always knew college was an option—my only option. My parents expected it. See, I come from a slightly different background. My parents were high school graduates desperate to get out of their small hometown. They eventually built a business and lived the middle-class American dream, but part of the dream was the college education they never had, and were determined to give to us.
Which approach was right? I have no clue. All I really know is this. We are shaped by our experiences and the things that we regret most are missed opportunities. So our children already know that they are going to get a higher education. We talk about it at dinner as if it’s a forgone conclusion so that when they reach their senior year of high school the only choice is which college they will attend. Although I attended college, I didn’t finish because I had so many interests that I couldn’t nail one down. I had more majors than pairs of shoes in my closet. So my regret is that I didn’t have someone tell me to just pick a major and get it done. There was no need to play Chutes and Ladders with my education. Graduates today will have an average of five totally different careers because the job market changes rapidly so, the goal is a bachelors degree in something—anything.
My unfocused energy and wide array of interests led to another regret. Why didn’t anyone tell me that money matters—a lot? I’ve heard all the bull about how if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life, but the truth is that if you make enough money you can do what you love in your spare time and not have to wonder how to pay the bills. Dream jobs that actually pay the bills are generally either ridiculously competitive (pro-sports) or require great genes and a lot of luck (acting). My friend chose to be a dental hygienist not because cleaning teeth is fun but because the job pays well and is fairly flexible, leaving her time to do what she loves most—being a mom. So I’ll probably have a lot of conversations with my kids about what they really want out of life and what’s the most realistic way to get it.
Parenting is hit and miss. There’s no one way to succeed or fail. The path to raising children is littered with so many obstacles that it’s impossible not to miss-step. Mix in children with such different personalities that you sometimes wonder if you should have had a blood test to see if there’s been a mix-up, and you’d be a fool to think it’s going to be easy. I only hope that my children eventually realize that their parents loved them enough to give raising them our best shot.
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