The Limits of Being A Parent

So here’s the awful truth about being a parent. It’s a crapshoot. And you can’t game the system. The wheel’s still in spin and there’s no telling who it’s naming, to paraphrase Dylan. It could be naming your child and there is nothing you can do. 

Two of our community’s best young men, Matthew Miller and Gavin Powell,  died this weekend. The Las Lomas High juniors were scholars, athletes and good sons. They did not intend to die, but death found them. 

Armed only with a youthful sense of adventure and invulnerability, the two set off on a rafting trip on rain-swollen Walnut Creek on Saturday afternoon.

Matthew and Gavin's parents didn't know about the rafting trip until hours after their sons had gone missing. By then, it was probably too late. The boys' bodies were found in the waterway about five miles north of where they started their trip. They had both drowned.  

Look around. Do you see teenagers strapped into car seats in the back seats of cars being driven around by their middle-aged parents?  Do you see them holding their parents’ hands when they cross the street or walk around a store?   Of course not.  At some point, we parents have to let go and release our beloved children into the world.  What the world chooses to do with them is, alas, beyond our control.

Perhaps this is especially hard for parents of our era to fathom. We’ve had so much control. Baby monitors, car seats, outlet and doorknob covers, safety harnesses, organic food, immunizations, dental sealants, permission slips and cell phones for checking in with our older kids. We believe that we have baby-proofed our home and safeguarded our children’s lives.

Parents in earlier generations had far less control over the odds. Diptheria, smallpox, polio, tuberculosis took many children’s lives. In 1900, 30.4 percent of all deaths in the United States were children younger than 5; today it’s only 1.4 percent.

So after all that control and safety, it’s a shock when we finally have to unbuckle those car seats, unlock the door and let our children out.  When my oldest son, Eric, was in fourth grade, he wanted to ride his bike downtown with his friend and the friend’s 13 year-old brother. At first I said no. Then I relented but only after I made Eric take his health insurance I.D. card and our pediatrician’s phone number with him — he didn’t have a cell phone then. Nervous, I called the trading-card store where the boys had been headed and asked the owner whether my son had made it. 

“Lady,” he said in an exasperated tone, “my store is full of boys who came here on bicycles. I have no way of telling which one is yours.”

Chastened, I hung up and stared out the window. So this is how it goes. We do what we can to protect our kids but after a certain point, it is out of our hands. Like Daedalus of Greek myth, we can only warn our kids and then grieve if, like Icarus, they fly too close to the sun, melt their wings of wax and fall from the sky.