David W. Krueger, Krueger, Ralph Siegfried
Description
These essays and lessons are a prolonged reflection on that final hug given and received when my two children departed for college. In these essays, I
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try to draw the enduring qualities of the process of being a parent from the moments and incidents of my own experience.
I write of teaching our children to listen to their own internal voice, so that they do not waste time in adulthood searching for something missing from childhood. And of listening to our own head and heart as parents. I write of momentary acknowledgements of the model we provide as a person, the everyday creativity of parenting, love being a verb, reverse truths, admirable restraint, and adolescent storms. I write of postponed revelations, such as how heroes change, how we ultimately become unemployed as parents, and the how the shadow of the past lengthens.
Our children teach us much about ourselves, not all of which we necessarily want to learn. All we can know, here together on the floor of our children's souls, is that everything we do as parents matters. Finally, by the time we've the got the rhythm of the thing, it's over.
Making Memories documents how children give birth to their parents. It is about learning from our children and, ultimately, learning to say goodbye to them so they can mean it when they say it back to us.
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