8 Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction
and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
9 They are a garland to grace your head
and a chain to adorn your neck.
Dear God, “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders.” Those are the words my grandmother spoke to my mother (her daughter-in-law) just before my wedding 20 years ago. They are the dismayed sentiments of every parent raising children. We want to give them the benefit of our knowledge that was learned through the experiences of failure and success. We want to give them that head start in life and help them to get further down the road just a little faster.
The context for my grandmother’s words were that she spoke in a moment of tenderness between her and my mother. I was less than a month from getting married, and my mom was talking with my grandmother about my mom’s own wedding to my dad. Both of my dad’s parents disapproved. My dad, their oldest, had just graduated from the University of Kansas and was working at his first career job in Kansas City. He had also just been drafted to go into the Army during Vietnam. My mother was a high school dropout, divorced, and a mother of two. She was not who my grandparents had in mind for their son, and they let both of my parents know about it.
In 1992, over 23 three years later, my mother (still married to my father, but it hadn’t been easy) and grandmother had made peace (but it was really only a recent peace). I was about to graduate from Baylor University and marry a woman who had one more semester to go at Baylor before she graduated. She had never been married and had no children. My grandmother, for her part, was terminally ill and would die two and a half weeks after my wedding. She and my grandfather had moved from Kansas to stay with my parents in Texas while she went through treatment. It was in this context that my mother said, “Sally, I have to tell you, if my Baylor graduate came home with a divorced high school dropout with two children, I wouldn’t be too happy about it either.” My grandmother’s response: “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders.”
I’ve always interpreted her words, which my mother told me about later, as being meant for the person in their twenties who hadn’t yet experienced life. But I wonder if they weren’t also for the person in their forties who still has a lot to learn. My grandparents wanted to save my dad from the pain they could see coming in his life by marrying into a complicated situation. In 1992, my grandmother now had 23 more years of experience that she didn’t have back in 1968. She probably wished she had known in 1968 what she knew in 1992.
Father, I guess my point is, I can try to train my children, but they are going to go the way they are going to go. It’s that weird, terrible, wonderful thing you gave all of us called free will. I don’t quite understand why you did it. It seems like it causes more problems than it solves. But I can see them learning, and, although as teenagers it appears they no longer listen to me, I can see us starting to get a little bit of traction in the lessons we have taught them. So help me to remember to allow them a young head to grow old on its own (though hopefully it will be at least somewhat formed by the lessons my wife and I teach), and help me to remember that, even at 42, I don’t yet have as old of a head as I think I do.
