MOTHERING

Slouching Toward Real Life

by Fern Kupfer

As my friend Linda's son told her: "Mom, I think I'm going to start my real life when I'm twenty-five." He said this to assuage her fears. Or perhaps his own. He is 20 years old. With a minimum wage job. Enough to pay a third of the rent on the house he shares with friends of similarambition. Enough to keep his old car running (if his parents pay for the insurance). Enough to buy fast food and CDs (compact discs, not certificates of deposit). He chose not to go to college "right now," so he's on his own. Sort of.

Next year my older stepdaughter will be on her own. Sort of. Megan's been waitressing these past few months newly out of high school to save up for moving out. She's not going to college next year. She's taking some time off to think about what she wants to do. Part of being a parent to nearly adult children (is that a contradiction in terms?) is letting them go. Sending them into theworld, letting them face the slings and arrows of adult vicissitudes like taxes and cleaning their own kitchens.

Megan did not like high school and did the least amount of work possible to get out without having to go to summer school. Most of the time her book bag remained in the back seat of the car, a weighty symbol of the necessary baggage she had to carry around the next day.

How to get her to study? There were occasional bribes for a good report card. There were tutors for math and physics. There were mandated "study" hours during the week - no friends over, no TV, no phone calls (I have the feeling these hours were spent behind the closed door of her room reading Rolling Stone). There was talk until we were blue in the face about giving herself "options" and the "future."

The thing is, for a lot of teenagers, the "future" looms just about as large as the concert they want to attend next Friday. Finally, sometime around the end of her junior year, we gave up. What she did - or didn't do - in school was up to her. Her tests, her homework, her life - it was her business to take care of.

Then my husband and I said something really radical. Well, it was radical for us - two college professors and writers who live with a houseful of books and have, in a sense, spent our entire lives "going to school." We told Megan that she didn't have to apply to college. Thatcollege (this was after the years talking about "getting in" and state schools vs. art schools and perhaps she would have to go to junior college first if she didn't keep up her grades, etc., etc.) was not something she had to go to!

It was kind of a revelation for her. For us, too. "I don't have to go to college?" she said. You don't, we said. We said going to college (and having it paid for by us!) was a privilege, something she should really want to do, something she should be grateful to have the opportunity todo.

What could she do instead, she wanted to know. We talked about becoming a nanny for a year. Or moving in with her friends who were going to rent a house in Iowa City. We talked about being on her own for a while, perhaps just taking a photography course somewhere. Since we weren't going to support her if she weren't going to school, wesuggested a job might be a good thing to have.

In a way, I think it's brave of her not to go to college. Because college - with a place to live and meals prepared and a program of study - is really a kind of delayed adolescence. Anyway, we all know that in these economic times, a college education is no guarantee of a"career" rather than a job. (I know a woman who jokes that her daughter has a BA in art history so she's working as a salesperson in the museum gift shop; her son, the English major, is a clerk in the mall bookstore.)

By summer's end, Megan is moving out with friends. I have to say that even though we're all getting along, I'm looking forward to her move.

It's difficult living with a person on the fuzzy border of childhood and adulthood, someone who might or might not be there for supper or who decides that sometime after midnight is a cool time to rent a movie.

She's a little nervous going off on her own. We are, too. We know we're going to have to find the balance between not bailing her out if she maxes out on her credit card and not letting her starve in the streets. We're going to pay for health insurance. And we promised to keep her room the same as she left it - as a sacred shrine toalternative rock groups and political correctness.

A job. School. The future. We'll stand back to watch it unfold. We don't know if Megan will wait until she is 25 for her "real" life to begin. But paying for her own shampoo, taking clothes to the Laundromat, showing up for work on time, even though she was out with friends untilthe wee hours - if that's not real life, it's certainly good preparation for what real life is all about.

Fern Kupfer is a novelist and writing professor at Iowa State University. She is a frequent contributor to Working Moms' Internet Refuge.

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