I get lectures like that, too. Every teenager with concerned parents does. Last week I was sitting in a cafe eating bagels and drinking coffee with my mother, discussing my future. Looking at me with a bagel in one hand and her paper coffee cup in the other, she said, “Nothing magical happens when you turn 18. You don’t suddenly grow up.” I have to grow up now. I have choices to make. I have to find out what I’m going to do with my life.
At home that night, she dug in the wooden filing cabinet in the living room, pushing through old folders until she found the pamphlet that listed all the undergraduate majors of California universities. “Here,” she said, handing it to me with a red pencil. “Why don’t you go through it and mark everything that sounds intriguing, and then I’ll go along and mark everything you could make money at.”
By noon the next day, she’d gone through my list: comparative literature, the arts, Spanish, creative writing . . . “If what you want is comparative literature,” she said, sitting in her rocking chair with the booklet on her knee, “you’re basically buying the reading list. We can get you the books and you can get the same thing as you would by actually taking the class. I just can’t see spending that kind of money to go to college to take these kinds of courses.”
“Science is the field of the future,” she said, looking at me through her oval-framed bifocals. Faced with the prospect of a life in penury if I took the college courses that interested me, I was crying. My father, sitting in the open loft upstairs, looked down at me. “We’re just pointing out the things you can earn a living at,” he said. “We’re not trying to get you upset.”
My parents want me to have a profitable career. But to them, profitable means more than just making money. It means doing something that will benefit society, not just my bank account. They repeatedly point out that as I struggle with a world based on ideas and words, the real world outside continues to deteriorate. My parents admire the romance of the starving artist, and encourage me in my writing, but they are also in favor of preserving the environment. And so by nudging me in the direction of science, they hope I will succeed in both endeavors. My parents have taught by example. They realize that their actions and priorities have helped shape mine. My father read to me in the evenings before I was old enough to listen. And on summer afternoons I began to learn for myself, carefully deciphering words as my mother corrected my pronunciation. My parents began my education when I was small and taught me manners and morals. But more than what they told me, it was what they showed me that mattered.
We live on nine acres in a house that my father planned and built, living in a blue tent in the grass while my mother continued to work in Sacramento and commuted home on weekends. Next to a photograph of the house in a family album, I once saw a picture of our yellow field-the wild oats, a tiny shrub of a tree on the right. “There was the one mulberry on the fence line, growing in the shade of a fence post,” Mom said, looking over my shoulder. Now when I look out the north window I see the windmill and the trees. Where there was once only a single sapling, there are now thousands.
“I want to turn this field into a forest,” my mother says. She raises the trees from seedlings and tends them, working in stained white work clothes and a straw hat patched with duct tape. She does this all year, even in the intense heat of our California summers. Driving down the rocky driveway to the house my father built, I and the chinaberries, the pines, the trees of heaven and the tiny seedlings, ringed with dark mulch, withstanding the gophers and grasshoppers. And far over on the east fence line, its bark yellow with smooth lichen, stands a tall, thick mulberry, which years ago grew in the shade of the post it now overshadows.
My parents have shown me hard work, and their efforts compel me to hear their lectures. They have improved their world, and so when they attempt to steer me toward a useful profession, I do not feel hypocrisy in the words, as so many teenagers must. I warily come to accept that science is the field of the future, and that when my mother says, “I have one word for you: botany,” I can smile without skepticism.
There are people who struggle to impress upon their rebellious teenagers all the things my parents have impressed upon me. It isn’t easy. But I believe that parents must make an honest effort to introduce the expectations and realities of life to their children.
I hope that the man ill the tailored shirt, speaking earnestly to his daughter, will continue to introduce her to the realities and the needs of our world. When he reiterates that she is the hope for the future, she smirks and watches someone eat pizza at a table at the end of the room. But perhaps she believes him, subconsciously, already.
We mustn’t tell kids that “your generation will be the one to cure AIDS, fix the ozone layer, stop global warming, eliminate starvation and achieve world peace.” The world needs saving, but it’s unsafe to rely totally upon the youth of today. Nothing “magical” will happen when we become adults. Parents: help guide your children. Set the right example. Work together with our generation to begin the hope for the future.
