I Want to be Like My Kids....

You know as your kids are growing up, how you wonder if or when you'll see traits like yours? Not the physical stuff so much, but do they have your sense of humor, or your knack for math or writing or logic or music or do you share a love of sports or art?  Then you might feel that special connection that is so very rare.

Well, I'm experiencing the opposite feeling lately. I'm not looking to see if my kids are like me...I look to see how I can be more like them. As they've blossomed into young womanhood this summer, at 16.5 and 20, they've are the kind of people I only could ever wish or hope to be.

My older daughter is leaving for a semester abroad this coming weekend.  She's just sort of fearlessly going about her planning, making a list of the countries she intends to hit, the places she will see, the things she will do. She doesn't know one other person in her program, will be building a new group of friends from scratch in another country nowhere near her home, an ocean separating her from everything she is used to. I don't know that I ever would have had the courage to do that at 20..maybe not even now, at 46.

My younger daughter worked this summer as a day camp counselor for the first time. She shepherded forty (yes, 40!) sixth graders through a busy day at drama camp, dealing with everything from everyday issues like girl sagas and boy problems and who got the best part in the camp show to meatier, thornier issues like kids with body image issues and emotional issues and family issues and a co counselor who quit midway through the summer.  She handled it all not only with grace but with a sort of adult-like view that I wasn't even aware she had developed.  I could never have been as she was, calm, cool, under so much pressure at that age -- and she LOVED it.  She hopes to be asked back next year as a counselor again.

So how did this work out -- me getting the kids I never could imagine being but would love to have been, and me getting the joyous reward of watching them be this way?  I don't know...but I'm sure glad I did.

Depression is not just a Bummer

"I'm depressed," we tend to lament pretty easily on any given day or week -- at least I know I've done this. Maybe we're low on funds in our checking account or we didn't get something we wanted or the dishwasher is on the fritz -- again. But with the suicide of Robin Williams earlier this week, I can't help but think we've lost the meaning of this very important word -- depression.

Depression is not just a bummer. It's not that blip in your day or your week. It's not that you don't have enough money to go to dinner with your friends, or that your car needs $500 worth of repairs or that you have to make due with last winter's coat. Yet every day we utter the words I'm depressed about these sometimes small or annoying or frustrating things.

Perhaps we should save the word depression for true, serious depression. Just so that we can honor and acknowledge what it is.

For people who've never been depressed, it's hard to imagine the truly gray pallor that seeps over the life of the depressed person all the time. I once read an article about a woman who was so desperate to get out of her decades-long depression that she allowed her doctor to perform experimental brain surgery to try to figure out exactly where in the brain the depression was coming from. As he touched various parts of her brain -- while she was awake, no less -- she was to tell him if she noticed anything different.  And at one point, she did. "Who turned the lights up?" she asked. She felt the pall lift.

People with depression don't want to be depressed. They also just can't snap out of it. They can't enjoy the things you and I enjoy -- the movies or a good meal or time with friends and family. They don't understand that you want them to live when the depression tells them not to. They don't understand how it will hurt you if the depression tells them to end their life. They are not being selfish. They are suffering beyond what any of us can imagine.

We need to live in a world where it's okay to talk about depression and what it really means. We need to live in a world where it's okay to be depressed, and no one will tell you just stop. And let's decide to live in a world where we don't say that we're depressed when we're just having a bit of a bummer of a day. Let's honor depression for everything it is. And everything we wish it wasn't.

Paying it Forward

When I graduated from college twenty four years ago (gulp!) my parents gave me ten shares of IBM stock as a gift.  (My father was a lifetime employee.)  I really didn't think about it at the time, just put it away and forgot about it.

Until two years ago. That's when my older daughter was entering college.  We had saved for her to go, diligently putting money into a 529 every month since she was just a little girl and barely reading. It was hard to believe, back then, that she would ever go to college. She was still wearing a size small dress and was scared of dogs.

But grow up she did. And during her senior year of high school, as she applied to college, my husband and I knew that even with that diligent saving, we were far behind where we needed to be to make up the difference. We knew that we would need to pay for eight semesters of college for her, and then turn around with no break and pay for eight semesters for our younger daughter. And every year, college tuition, room, and board jumps about four per cent. So where was the rest of the money coming from?

I remembered the stock.  My husband and I decided we should sell some of it. I didn't know how many shares the ten had morphed into, but I figured, it was something at least. So little by little over the last two years, we've drained that account, filling in the deficit we face every August and December when we need to make a payment.

Yesterday I got a letter in the mail that the account was closed. Apparently we've used those entire ten shares up (and whatever they've morphed into) this week. I was a little sad -- we'd held onto that stock for twenty four years, after all! -- but mostly, I thought it was so cool. My college graduation gift had gone to pay for my daughter's college education.  What could be a better way to spend it? Now, just to get through the rest of college payments without it. . . .