I won’t dilate too much on all this, but I did want to offer one idea which has helped me, personally. All their lives I have taught my kids to take calculated risks: not stupid ones, but ones where it is not certain things will go their way. One of them has taken it farther than I am comfortable with. I tell them to take risks, but I am terrified every time they do. Going rock climbing scares me, even when it is introductory, and they are not leading, which is where most accidents happen.
My personal belief is that we choose the broad arc of our lives. I believe in life after death, life within death, and logically this means that my children’s lives, like mine, are their own. If they chose terrible fates, that was their choice. They don’t belong to me. Their lives do not belong to me. I can offer them shelter when they request it, but both are relatively fearless, and while we enjoy seeing each other, they don’t come crying home, ever. If life deals them a blow, they just deal with it.
My oldest was a bit upset the other day about a bad grade on a quiz, and I was dishing out the usual platitudes “life always has a path. Failure doesn’t define you, etc.” And she got MAD at me, because I was helping her accept a B in that class, and she wasn’t prepared for that. She wanted to fight HARD to get the A, in spite of her fuck up.
I was proud. She had no time for me helping her accept failure at any level. One of her parents, at least, did something right, but part of that she was born with. It’s not me, it’s not her mother: it’s her.
I can actually honestly say that as a parent my proudest accomplishment is giving both my children the space to become exactly who they are, and who they were meant to be, and watching them slowly become absolutely unique. I–and their mother, too, although we each have different relationships with them–presented all the support they needed, and no barriers to leaving and growing far beyond the walls of the home they grew up in.