There is a time for parents to become orphans from their own children. It's because children have grown up.
Independent like "talking trees" and "clumsy birds", they grow without asking for approval. They grow like cost of living, independent from the government or people's will, among prices increases, speeches' discharges, and train station attacks. They grow boisterously happy and, sometimes, arrogantly.
But they don't grow in the same way every day -- they grow all of a sudden. Some days they sit close to you and say something so mature that you realize you cannot change their diapers anymore.
How have they been growing so naughty, and you haven't seen it yet? Where went the smell of milk on their baby skin? Where is their little shovel to dig in the sand, the birthday parties with clowns, the little friends, and the kindergarten T-shirt?
Kids are growing in an organic submission ritual and civil contumacy. You are there waiting for them at the Bowling Club door. Waiting, not just for their rising, but also for their arising. There are lots of parents, behind the wheel, waiting for the moment when they will come with disheveled hair on their roller skates.
Between cheeseburgers and sodas, there are our kids wearing their generation costume: uncomfortable backpacks on their naked shoulders or a shirt tied around their waists. It's warm. We are sure that they are going to rip the shirt, but what can we do? It's a teenage badge.
There we are with our gray hair. We were able to bring up these kids in spite of being against the tide, catching bad news, and living under the dictatorship of our schedules. They grew a little bit more tame despite our many mistakes.
There is a time for parents to become orphans from their own children.
We no longer pick them up at the disco clubs and parties when they showed up talking slang and singing songs. The time when they took ballet lessons, swimming lessons, and karate lessons is over. They left the back seat and started driving their own lives. We should have gone to their beds more often at night, listening to their souls mumbling speech and confidences. We should have been more often in their teenage bedrooms, with plenty of posters on the walls and deafening musical sounds. No, we haven't brought them enough to the Play Center, or to the crowded mall. We haven't bought enough cheeseburgers and sodas, ice cream, and outfits they deserved.
At first they went to the mountains or to the beach among packages and cookies. There were traffic jams at Christmas and Easter. They loved swimming pools and barbecues with their little friends. Yes, there were fights in the car, arguments because of the window, requests for bubble gum, and childish songs. After that, there was the time when a trip with their parents was a sacrifice, a suffering because it was too much hard to leave their friends and their first dates. Parents were exiled from their own kids. They had the always-desired solitude, but they started longing for those devilish kids.
It's coming the time when we have nothing to do but keeping ourselves away, cheering and praying for them. They have to make right choices seeking for happiness, and they deserve to accomplish that anyway.
There is no other way besides waiting. Soon they will bring us some grandchildren. The time with grandchildren will become the time to apply that inactive and stored affection -- that affection we haven't given to our own children -- which cannot die with us. That's why grandparents are so generous in giving love. Grandchildren are our last opportunity to offer our tenderness.
That's why we have to do something more. Before they grow up.
Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna
Brazilian Writer