I remember holding my boys often during the early months of their lives. After all, they couldn’t yet walk, so I had plenty of excuses to pick them up. And they were a long way from rebelling against cuddling, so I had plenty of time to engage in the typical parent game of “Who do they look like?”
As the boys grow up, however, I’m curious less about who they look like as who they seem like. As the day draws nearer for Alex to head to college, I’ve decided that, in many ways, he has my temperament.
Looking back on my life, I realize that I tend to let life happen to me rather than plotting a course through it. Greg likes to set goals and work toward them; I take one day at a time. It made for some interesting adjustments early in our marriage, but, after 23 years, I think we’ve reached a happy balance.
As I watch Alex nearing the moment when he leaves our nest, I remember my last two years of high school and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. I debated a career in accounting because I liked numbers, but then I latched onto journalism partly from a fascination with the television show “Lou Grant.”
As for where I would attend college, I was in no great rush to decide. I received the usual mail from admissions offices after I took the ACT. Back then, every Regent university in the state of Kansas had to accept every student who graduated from a Kansas high school, so I knew I’d get an education somewhere.
Many who know me now will laugh when they hear that I was a diehard K-State fan in high school. So what if my dad graduated from KU and my parents had lived there in the early days of their marriage? I was from a rural high school and most of my friends were K-State fans in the early ’80s. I even remember the excitement of attending a K-State football game with a friend and her parents.
Then came the day I arrived home from school, and my dad was waiting for me. He’d resigned his position as Lyndon High School principal after my junior year and returned to KU to work toward his doctorate. He was like a little kid pushing me into my room to see his surprise. On my bed was a blue KU sweatshirt and a red KU backpack.
“If you go to KU,” my dad said behind me, “I’ll pay for it.”
That’s all it took for me to bleed crimson and blue.
Back in the present, Alex is ready to fill out the paperwork for KU. For him, it’s an easy decision. I’m the one pushing him to look at other options, however.
Of course I’d be thrilled to have a fourth-generation Jayhawk in the house. But I want him to see that this is a time for him to look beyond what’s easy. He already knows he’d be accepted into the KU engineering program if he applied today.
Meanwhile, I’m pushing him to put more thought into schools. I want him to find five he’d like to visit over the next nine months, then narrow it down to three to which he’d apply. A typical 16-year-old, he listens to me, then quietly ignores me and goes his own way.
Like all of us, Alex will grow to discover that each choice he makes narrows more and more the path he walks through life.
But right now, anything is possible.