Spaces in your togetherness

When Wife and I were married, the clergyman who did the honors (this was Tartuffe, in case you wondered) inserted a bit of poetry into the service. He selected a passage from Kahlil Gibran, a writer I had scarcely heard of though I did know that his stuff was madly popular in the 1970's. I have forgotten most of the passage, but the one line I remember is, "you shall be together ... but let there be spaces in your togetherness."

Wife and I never learned how to do this. But, quite without remembering anything about Gibran, we kind of managed it with Son 1 and Son 2. Or at any rate I think I did.

The key was sending them off to boarding school: Son 1 to Hogwarts, and then (a couple years) later Son 2 to Durmstrang. Before that, when Son 1 was in eighth grade, he and I were already starting the difficult act of colliding with each other that happens not infrequently between fathers and teenage sons. I would ask him to do something, and he would blow me off in the casual way that he had long used with Wife but never before with me. We'd disagree about some obligation of his, and he'd make it clear that he really didn't give a shit what I thought. I know, I know, this is normal. That didn't make it easy.

Have I ever told you my metaphor about The Number? It's just this: when your child is born, it is as if God gives you a Number. It's a positive integer, and it is the number of direct orders you can give to your child during your entire lifetime and expect to be obeyed. Needless to say, it's finite because human life is finite. But—and this is the key—you don't know what the number is! And it is pretty much guaranteed to be different for each child. When your child is a toddler, you burn through those numbers pretty quickly, because you always have to give your little children so many orders to teach them about the world and to keep them safe. But then as your child grows older, you have to stop and think: Can I afford to give an order about this or that? What if that turns out to be my last one? Is this issue important enough that it is worth my using what might be my Very Last Order on it? Or at any rate if you don't stop to think about that, one day you simply run out all unawares. And if you haven't started rationing them, the sudden transition from Filial Obedience to Callous Disregard is likely to be jarring for both of you.

Of course I never knew for sure what my Number was with Son 1, but one way or another I could tell while he was in eighth grade that I was getting close to the end. And having to put up with four years of him in high school without the ability to tell him to do things was a grim prospect.

Boarding school changed the whole calculation. Suddenly, Wife and I were no longer the ones putting constraints on his daily life. His teachers did that, and for the most part they were people who had trained professionally how to relate with teenagers. We, by contrast, were the people he saw on vacations. He was able to reset the way he interacted with us, and we could reset the way we interacted with him. By moving him two hours away, we improved our overall relationship enormously.

Two years later, Son 2 did the same thing. Two years after that, Son 1 moved away to college, which meant moving to another state. Another two years after that, Son 2 moved away to college ... also out-of-state, and even farther away.

After Son 1 graduated from college he lived with me for a while (I allude to this briefly here)—actually, now that I think of it, he started living with me in January 2019 and didn't move out till February of 2020, right before the pandemic broke out. So it was a full year. But we got along great. The relationship had been sufficiently interrupted that we were able to get along as two adults, rather than as father-and-child. It made a lot of difference. "Spaces in [our] togetherness" really helped us.

What started me thinking about this was my conversation with Debbie a couple weeks ago, when she started talking (again) about the emotional difficulty of living in the same house with Mattie and her family. At the time, I described this history to her and she agreed it sounded encouraging. She didn't make any snap decisions, but she found it good to hear.

Meanwhile I thought I had long since told this story to you too, but I couldn't find it anywhere. The indexing in this blog is not good. Whether there is any kind of moral to this story is up to you, I guess.