4/18/08

The past several months have been a challenging time with our 14-year old son, a bright and headstrong boy. I've been thinking a lot about how to be the best kind of parent for this particular child -- but as he gets older  I realize, too, that he's becoming more and more his own person, and my influence, and his need for me, are ever-dwindling.

Hoping to find ways to cope, I have piles of books on parenting by my bed, but in the past few weeks three far more influential books about being a parent have entered my life -- not how-to manuals at all, but two works of fiction and one memoir.

The memoir is Beautiful Boy, by David Sheff, written by a father about his meth-addicted son, Nic. I heard both father and son interviewed on the radio and realized that long ago, when I lived in California, I knew David Sheff's brother, who was constantly talking about his adorable little nephew, Nic. I even remembered meeting Nic when he was about two years old. So when I saw the book I grabbed it. Nic, the adorable 2-year-old, turned out to be an addict and alcoholic, though still a person of enormous appeal when sober. David Sheff, who agonized through every minute with Nic, finds some peace of mind by the end of the book when he  realizes at the deepest level that his son's life will go on whether he, the father, is there or not. Compelling, harrowing reading.  

The next book I picked up, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a novel about a father and  his very young son wandering through the world after some sort of terrible holocaust. They struggle to stay alive though the nuclear winter has killed everything, including all plant life. The only food to be found is that in cans in houses and stores that haven't yet been ransacked. The boy in this books seems wise beyond his years and so well-behaved that I wonder if Cormac McCarthy has ever been around children. Still, it's another book on the theme of fatherly devotion and of ultimately letting go , and is another can't-put-it-down read.

Finally I've just started  Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a new collection of her wonderful short stories. The very first story is about a young mother who, in addition to moving across the country following her husband's job, has recently lost her own mother, and is now having to form a new sort of relationship with her father. Lahiri's usual theme of the pain of immigration is there, but as in the other two books, there's an underlying message, too - we go on without our parents and our children go on in their own lives, without us.