Posted: Aug 14, 08
4:40pm
The brainy college graduate* (former cocktail waitress, current media professional) has moved back home. Temporarily. Again. This time she’s between apartments – the lease on her old one ran out a month before the lease on the new one will start. So she and her belongings are back in residence.
Coincidentially, I’ve borrowed from a friend a book called "Walking on Eggshells."** This is a terrific title -- I could have guessed the subject even before reading the explanatory subheading: "Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents." The bright blue cover is evocative too. It features an empty bird's nest with a broken eggshell.
Author Jane Isay is a respected book editor – she discovered Mary Pipher's best-selling Reviving Ophelia – and a mom. She has based "Walking on Eggshells" on her interviews with mothers and on her own efforts to bridge the distance between herself and her two grown sons. The experience she describes is familiar to many of us whose kids are newly hatched grown-ups. It may turn out that you were not the perfect parent after all, and your adult child, having recently come to this conclusion, may want to share it with you. This will not be a problem if you bear in mind that parenthood proceeds in phases and that this phase, like the others, will pass. (It may also be a comfort to recall that you went through this with your own parents.)
Isay's most trenchant advice can be found on the book's flap copy:
"On giving advice: They Don't Want It. They Don't Hear It. They
Resent It. Don't Give It."
I can distill this even further: keep your mouth shut. But what if they
ask my advice, you may be thinking. Even if they do, beware. Don't get tricked into offering guidance that could be interpreted as disapproval.
You may be able to speak your mind -- on rare occasions, through carefully chosen intermediaries (favorite aunts, family friends.) Or you might try my "one-day-only" strategy. I have told my daughter that on Mother's Day of each year, she may expect to receive advice from me. She doesn't have to take it, naturally, but I consider it a handsome Mother's Day gift if she simply agrees to listen.
*http://www.tbd.com/content/article/basic_article.article:::politics_oms_kids_home
** http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Eggshells-Navigating-Delicate-Relationship/dp/0767920856/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218743474&sr=8-2
