My older son said this to a friend who had met me at a birthday party for his daughter, many years before. He was saying how the conversation had been significant to him and so deep by comparison to most with people you had just met. Bob smiled even replaying it to me saying, “yes, my mom doesnt do small talk”.

I always thought that was somewhat of a curse, at least in polite society type gatherings. Yet I have always said the opposite of your gift can often seem like a curse. In understanding my children growing up, even trying to explain them to each other, I often fell back on that nugget of truth. My son who is a musician can also be very particular, even obsessively so, about certain things. I think having a wife and his own children has softened a lot of that certainty, in expecting things can actually be perfect, but I could also see that his eye for precise details was radically important to becoming the incredible artist he has become. We need to look deeply at the things we may call flaws in others, particularly when we love them. There are always clues to the gifts that are also hiding there. It can be very helpful when we think we are training our children. There comes a point where we realize they are in fact raising us. If we are given the opportunity to focus on them deeply, as I was as a single parent, not distracted by any more important relationship, we are always noticing the buried treasures that have been a part of them since birth. Or at least that is the way it has seemed to me. They don’t grow up, they grow into who they are. I always felt as though I was just providing an invisible fence to keep them from running into a street, or a place they were not yet ready to enter. It was fence more like one you see around a large horse farm, very open so you could observe all that was going on just outside the fence. I always thought when they are ready they will choose their path. But I didn‘t want them to feel they were trapped behind walls they would want to escape. Love can feel like that to children sometimes and they bolt too fast, before they are ready. There is a magical medium area where they can be close enough to see what they want but to keep them safe while preparing for it. I guess that would be my ideal parenting style if I could do it over. I guess that is what I like best about grand-parenting as well. Maybe I have learned something valuable from my own journey.