CS Lewis and Middle Age

Just a week ago, my eldest finished his sophomore year of high school. My second son finished his freshmen year. My third son finished up elementary school and is off to junior high next year and my youngest (a daughter) has just 2 more years of elementary school. In two years, we’ll have a high school grad, a middle school grad and an elementary grad. It feels as if I am on the cusp of a whole new chapter.

A friend in her 70s once mentioned that the last quarter of a life one looks back, thinking much about regret and legacy. As my children are on the edge of leaving my full-time, day in and day out care, I too reckon with regret.

I had such idealistic intents in those early years. I would spend hours making homemade superhero capes for a birthday party and even served my eldest a non-sugar millet cupcake. Reader, he didn’t like it. I worried about nap time and sugar consumption, and how much screen time they had. I sought to move them around like chess pieces in my life, and now — they drive and explore and jump off of cliffs. And while I know good and healthy risk is important it feels like that song from Mama Mia where time like sand is slipping through my fingers, and I cannot protect them.

Parenting teenagers, and (most likely) young adults, feels like this odd dance, almost like dating, where you’re not quite clear where the lines are and how to show care without being over-eager and turning someone off. I wanted longer and deeper conversations. I had hoped for much more time to spiritually form them. And yet when I push and prod, no one wins. I am drawn deeper into prayer.

But this is what I know: my children have been formed by our local churches, we have tried our best to show them that hospitality is their call too. They know their parents love Jesus and really like books. Perhaps that’s as good a legacy as I can hope to impart. I pray that when they come to me with their inevitable losses and hurt, I will be able to say, “I’m sorry, tell me more.”

As I’ve been working on and thinking through the importance of metaphor, I’ve been rereading CS Lewis’s essay “Learning in Wartime.”

He says this as about middle age : “You would be surprised to know how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether: of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say “No time for that”, “Too late now”, and “Not for me”….A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands…Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment ‘as to the Lord. It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

So while I am apt to let myself off the hook through self-pity, or try to pull myself up by my own bootstraps in idealism or what I like to call Cruise Ship Director Energy, I will remember these words of Lewis: the present is the only place where grace may be received.

I suppose every stage of life is a letting go until it finally culminates in the final, letting go, which is really a birth of another kind, into a new reality of perfect consummation. And until then, of course we will reckon with regret. And until then, we will wait with Hope.