With Firmer Step

During all the long years of our children's growing, we have doubtless both feared and looked forward to the day when we would be able to say, "Here stand these young and hopeful people, facing their own futures, firm on their own feet."

Before these children of ours reach manhood and womanhood, however, they must take steps which are often difficult for us to endure.

We need to stand by, for one thing, and watch them gradually come to accept their masculinity or femininity and to grant it honor. To know themselves male or female. To feel that they can function in their own sex roles in life and not have to proclaim it artificially by masculine blustering or feminine fluttering.

We need to see them developing their own intimacies outside our family's orbit in relationships that become more intimate and more essential to them than their relationship with us.

We need to watch them find their own economic place in the world and know their own worth as adults realistically facing the problems of earning a living.

And we need to see them grow apart from us and go on their own way in their own right, with their own personal orientation, integration and integrity. With their own unique selfhood.

The achievement of these goals by our children has its desirable side for us as persons in our own right. It has its undesirable side as well. "When I think of my children grown up, I feel as if I had two faces. One bright and smiling. The other sad at the loss of them and apprehensive in wondering: What now about me?"

So many years of our lives have been spent as parents. So much thought and emotional energy has been invested in bringing up our children. We look forward to the task accomplished. But we also feel somewhat fearful that the days ahead may be empty and bleak.

And so the last lap of helping our children to grow up is fraught with conflict for us, their parents. It calls for wisdom and forbearance and fortitude in us. And for thought focused on ourselves as well as on them.