Shifting down to speed up

I learned to drive in a 9 passenger station wagon, usually with 8 disruptive young passengers in tow. 

To this day, there really isn’t any standard vehicle I am not 100% comfortable driving, parallel parking and getting in and out of traffic in. My confidence as a driver is quite high. When the time came for me to have my own personal vehicle a 5 speed coupe was purchased. But because I’d been driving for over a year with my permit and freshly minted license and had not experienced issues, no one thought to teach me how to drive a car with a manual transmission. I had to figure it out for myself. And I did…or so I thought. But I did not realize that when you slowed down you had to shift down and then shift to speed back up. I thought my new car was dying on a drive a few days after purchase because I’d slowed from 5^th gear speeds of around 65mph to 20ish in a traffic jam. When I went to apply the gas, and return to the high speeds, of course I went nowhere because 5^th gear wasn’t where I needed to be.

I should have downshifted to 2^nd. I pulled over, gathered myself together and started out in 1^st without any problem. And then the light bulb went off in 100 watt fashion and I was never again flummoxed by the change of speed and gear. 

A lesson learned, for life!  I told you that story, to tell you this one. 

Our boys are 23 and 20. Today, in fact, our youngest is 20. 

I wasn’t one of those parents who bemoaned the fact that her children were growing up, moving out and starting a life of their own. From the minute they placed those boys in my arms in the delivery room, I knew my job was to raise them, love them, guide them, give them the ethics and morals to be good and decent contributors to society and understand the consequences if they were not and to help launch them from the nest when they were ready. Launching has been different than I imagined.

For our older son, my husband and I have had to more actively parent into his early 20s than we felt either of us had from our own parents. But I also feel that my husband and I were set to sail in a pond of adult life, where now our boys are setting out on choppy seas and there is more skill needed to stay afloat in that larger body of water, to be sure. 

Smart, he certainly is. And capable as well. And yet our older son has struggled with committing to a choice for any sustained period of time. He’s attended several colleges and does well, he was inducted into the honor society for instance. But he’s not been able to complete a degree, focus on a career, make any plans that last beyond 6 months and is frustrated by his lack of follow through and yet it doesn’t appear to propel him to actually follow through. 

So we find ourselves in the role of coach and mentor. Of encourager and of reality grounding responses. We want to celebrate the moments of forward movement, but at the same time feel we need to be there to help him from taking two steps back immediately after that incremental progress. We don’t want to be a source of negativity and yet we do need to keep him grounded in reality. He has not only champagne tastes, but ‘drink it in France at a private event of the vineyard’ tastes and yet his earnings to date have been more ‘6 pack on the bed of a truck by a river’ so far in life. I think he struggles with the desire to have the former while in the reality of the latter. 

And interestingly enough, of all the young men my son has been friends with for the last 15 years or so, only one has really fully launched. The friend with the least advantages has done the most with his life. Which of course leads me to wonder, did all the advantages that I worked so hard to provide and all the sacrifices made along the way equate to his being unable to start out in first gear and learn how to shift up in this life?  Is he unaware that he was cruising along in 5^th gear and needs to shift down, refocus and start out slowly but surely on his path in life? 

I see him sputtering, but he struggles with me telling him how to drive and so I find myself perched, waiting to hear the downshift and knowing he’s found his way down the road of life. But I don’t ever think I will fully take my eye off the road, but I do look forward to being a back seat passenger instead of a front seat navigator.