Camp Letting-Go

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/30/AR2009073002817.html?sub=AR

So this is the independence we seek for our children -- to turn our closest relationships into acquaintances. Of course, I knew this getting into parenthood. But the reality remains shocking. For a time, small hands take your own -- children look upward, and you fill their entire universe. They remain, to you, the most important things in the world. To them, over time, you become one important thing among many. And then an occasional visit or phone call. And then a memory, fond or otherwise.

The memory of my own father, gone these 17 years, is fond and blurry. He shrank in my mental universe from sun to star, bright and distant. With every season of camp, I dim to my sons as well. It is the appropriate humility of the generations. It is also harder than I thought. And I don't know how to let go.

 

 

     I selected an article that my father recently sent me in an email.  It had actually been sitting in my inbox, unread, for weeks.  I was much too busy preparing for college to read some stupid article from my dad.  Fortunately, we were given this assignment and I was forced to take five minutes to read that “stupid” article, which actually ended up being quite worth my time.  Ironically, the article was about parents watching their relationships with their children naturally dwindle as they grow. 

     One of the main reasons that this article was so moving was because the subject matter was that of a more familiar tragedy.  Aristotle repeatedly wrote of the importance of the tragedy, which made me automatically think all writings must have death in them to be intriguing.  This article put a new light on the tragedy, while also following Aristotle’s suggestion on page five about the severity of tragedies between those close to us. The fading of relationships with those we love is heartbreaking, but natural. 

     On page four of Poetics, Aristotle wrote about the appeal of reversal of situation.  It is the “change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity.”  The author of the article seems to be promoting this summer camp that he sends his child to every year, somewhat denouncing parents that don’t know how to let their children grow up and be independent.   That possibly being the author’s original intent, writing his feelings on the subject had the opposite effect on him.  By the last paragraph, it is clear that the article has evoked his own fears about watching his child slowly drift away.