From 2011 Personal Essay Class

A good holding environment, then, is the environment that is needed for the human soul to grow and develop into what she can become. It needs to provide a sense of safety and security, the sense that you are, and can count on, being taken care of.                                                                            A.H. Almaas

Sometimes I get angry at my younger daughter for still living at home at the age of 28. But then I remember where I was at exactly her age, and how my parents’ incredibly patient support pretty much saved my life.

The adventure started in 1962. I was a supremely confident 18 year old who had just been accepted to Stanford with a full-tuition academic scholarship. My mom and I were sitting in two comfortable chairs across from each other in the small living room of our tract house in Canoga Park. We knew I was embarking on a great journey, but I had an idea that it might not be quite the same journey my parents were imagining. I had recently read The Way of Zen by Alan Watts and On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and I was starting to envision a bohemian, unorthodox life for myself. I wanted to warn my mom about something.

“Mom, I want to let you know that I am going to be very successful in life, but not quite in the way that you and dad understand it.  There are a lot of things I want to do that don’t quite fit with the mainstream concept of American culture. I just want you and dad to know now, beforehand, that it’s all ok, I know what I’m doing, and you don’t have to worry about me. Even though I may not have money or the standard marks of success, I’ll be really happy because I’ll be doing what I want to do”.

Confidence, yes. Modesty and humility were virtues that I didn’t begin to develop until a bit later in life.

As always she said, “You know we love you and we just want you to be happy”.

Ten years later, in 1972, we had another conversation in the same room. She had picked me up at the Greyhound station in Canoga Park, a scruffy, very thin and exhausted 28 year old burnt out hippie. I had been a player near the vortex of the San Francisco cultural explosion, but the good times were fading fast. When many of my high profile peers started dying very young — Janis, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, etc. — my survival instinct kicked in. I jumped onto a caravan of 50 school buses and 250 hippies that ended up buying a thousand acre farm in Tennessee, which made it the largest communal farm in America. I lived there a little less than a year, but left, disturbed by the unchecked power of the guru who ran it. After a series of rapid fire cross-country trips and some very dangerous hitch-hiking, I phoned my parents and told them that I had left the farm for the second time, and after bouncing around northern California for a couple of months, my plan was to come home “to get a new pair of overalls” so I could go to Colorado to do construction work on the winter Olympics, save some money, and go back to the farm.

Mom drove me from the bus station back to the house and we sat in the same chairs we had ten years earlier. This time she held all the cards. She kindly but very firmly let me know that I could stay in my old room, but there were two conditions. The first was I had to get a haircut and clean up. She would drive me to the barber shop in Topanga Plaza as soon as we were done talking. The second was that I would have to get a job to pay my way. She and my dad told their regular customers that their son was looking for work. One of the customers, who was an official for the TV stagehands union, asked them if I had any construction experience. I told them about the carpentry apprenticeship I had done on the farm, and he said send him in, we’ll give him a try. My parents loaned me the money for a set of tools and a cheap car to get to work at the various studios. I could pay them back out of my first pay checks.

What I didn’t know at the time of the first conversation was that “The Sixties” were about to start. What I didn’t know at the time of the second conversation was that the Sixties were now over, certainly for me. My drug fueled adventure had ended and I had come back home to meekly re-enter the world I had spent so much energy rejecting. And even though I had been disrespectful, angry and hurtful toward them in those years of rebellion, my parents were still there to help me put my life back together.

These days it’s comparatively easy for me to be supportive of my daughter Rebecca. She always knew she wanted to be a school teacher. But just when she finally got her credential and was ready to start working, the economy fell apart, causing massive teacher layoffs. The door slammed shut on her whole generation of new teachers. Unstoppable, she has been subbing for two years and is working on an additional credential in Special Education, which may be what it takes to finally get her first full-time teaching contract.

When I start to fall into the “cranky old patriarch” mode and am just about to verbally attack her (lazy, useless, parasite comes up fully formed), I quickly remember how grateful I am that my parents continued to nurture me long after many would have given up. Many of my peers and friends didn’t make it back from our “great adventure” in the counterculture, and I certainly cheated death several times (see memoir to be released). But knowing, if not consciously, that mom and dad would be there if I really needed them gave me the energy and confidence to navigate some pretty dicey terrain.

Now almost forty years after that second conversation, I realize I want that for my younger daughter too. I take one deep breath, decline the (internally generated) invitation to be an asshole, and remind myself how to do the practice of generating loving kindness. It’s better for all of us.