Say It in the Living Years

In a recent email exchange with a friend about our children, he posed a rhetorical question: “Why does affirmation from our kids mean so much to us?”

Maybe it wasn’t so rhetorical. In any case, it got me thinking. Are there actually any answers to that question?

Here are a few I came up with:

• It returns our thoughts to that place in time when our kids thought we knew everything and were invincible. (It lasts only a few short years. Blink, and you may have missed it.)
• Nature is responsible for 50 per cent of who we are; nurture does the rest. In this age of self-validation, kudos from someone we had a hand in raising is a real kick and can feel enormously satisfying.
• As parents, we all make mistakes. Perhaps positive affirmation provides us with some sense of absolution.
• Quid pro quo kicks in. We’re proud of them, and we love to hear that they’re proud of us too.
  

And then I realized something. The real answer may be that the parent–child relationship is like no other. Biological, adopted, step, foster, all iterations. If you’re making the effort required, your child (no matter their age) is always residing, in some space, inside your head.

Or maybe it goes even further. Your internal organs have been adjusted, so that your children are now your heart, walking around outside your body.

And it’s a two-way street. Your own parents are always with you in that headspace as well, into adulthood and long after they leave this place we call earth. Both my parents have passed, but they are still a part of my thoughts, both when I’m awake and in my dreams.

So, yes, that mutual affirmation thing is, in my opinion, one of the most understandable emotions to desire.   

Yearn for, even.

Enough of my attempts to explain it. I’m now realizing that my wise friend’s question was probably best left in the rhetorical column.

In closing, here’s the circle back: Mike + the Mechanics “The Living Years.”

Still gives me shivers whenever I watch and listen.