Time-travel temptations

Are they my sisters? My daughters? Or me? (Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay)

My father graduated from high school in 1965, a year in which (at least in southern Maine) styles were still decidedly conservative.

A devotee of Elvis and The Beatles, my dad felt stifled by the Eisenhower-era mores that still reigned and longed for the opportunity for greater self-expression.

So much so that he still recalls the indignation and outrage he felt less than two years later when, home from the service for a visit, he drove by his high school and saw kids with long hair, beards, and jeans. The injustice of it all! He felt it keenly on behalf of his sixteen-year-old self.

Like my father’s teenage ghost, the child you once were is not gone. He or she exists in another dimension.

Many of us time-travel to that dimension all the time.

When you cringe imagining the other kids’ reactions to an outfit another child is wearing, you might be time-traveling.

When you get irrationally angry at a coach for pulling your child out of the game (or benching them for most of it), you might be time-traveling.

When you find yourself strangely threatened by a very attractive or talented child and drawn to a more homely or awkward child — or vice versa — you might be time-traveling.

Sometimes, we adults look at children and see the people we once were, reliving our memories through them. This is the beginning of the empathy necessary for connecting with kids, but we need to take the next step to see them for who they are, not how they compare to who we were.

Over the course of my life and career, I’ve seen a lot of adults who competed with their children or their students. Then there’s the classic case of the parent or mentor who wants a younger person to be the 2.0 version of themselves. These patterns are common enough that they are apparently normal and natural, but they can cause serious problems if left unchecked and unexamined.

If a writing teacher were to measure all of his students against himself at a similar age, his ego would be overly invested in his work. Instead of supporting two sixth graders of differing levels of experience equally, the time-traveling teacher might be impatient with the less accomplished student and overly praise the more experienced one (who reminds him of himself). Alternatively, he might coddle the developing writer and be dismissive of the one who shows unusual ability, finding such a talented student to be threatening to his own self-concept (because she’s better than the teacher was at a similar age).

In the above scenario, nobody gets what they need. Nobody gets to feel truly seen — they are only viewed through the prism of who they are in relation to the adult in charge. And their path, the path toward the writer they could become, is blocked by path taken by the time-traveling teacher.

Teachers and parents must make space for each child (each person) to have their own story and their own future. To find their own preferences and make their own mistakes.

For that matter, their successes do not belong to us either, no matter how many practices we drove them to or how many times we gave them the same piece of key feedback until they heard it.

If we find ourselves constantly comparing our adolescent or childhood self to the person in front of us, overly invested in a teen’s activities, resentful of a child’s choices, or dismissing a whole roomful of kids as lazy or slow, we may have some healing to do. We may need to do some deliberate time-traveling to forgive our younger self for being imperfect or to express sympathy for some of the things he or she went through.

It might help to tell ourselves that we did the best that we could with the resources we had at the time — indeed, that we are still doing the best we can. And even though we can’t claim a young person’s success as our own, we can reassure ourselves that the next generation stands on our shoulders. Your kids wouldn’t be where they are without you — they wouldn’t be here at all!

And if we are threatened by someone else’s talent or determination, that’s a clue that we could invest more deeply in developing our own skills in a particular area. As Julia Cameron says, jealousy is a map. It can tell us where our desires are. Maybe it’s not too late for you to be who you want to be.

Go ahead and time-travel intentionally. Reminisce, share your stories, resolve issues from the past. But when it comes to the kids in your life, make sure the “adult you” is there and present for them, right now.