The title of this post comes from the Kahlil Gibran poem about children, the one with the line about how we can house their bodies but not their souls. When I was a kid I thought it was very sensible, especially the bits like "You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you." When I got older I wondered if Kahlil Gibran had had any children of his own. (Google suggests that he did not, but I could be wrong about that.) It is a true fact about teenagers that they have a knack for taking the things that are particularly important to you and choosing them as the ground in which to plant their flags, to say, "I am separate from you; I am different from you."
Case in point: I have a kid who spent his entire childhood hearing that it is good to live simply, to embrace frugality, to go thrifting instead of buying new, to opt for less house and less car than you can afford so that you have more margin for giving and saving. And this child, once grown, pursued affluence with determination bordering on ferocity. He is a generous guy with a good head on his shoulders, but he is not interested in eating any more lentils.
This has happened in different ways with both of my 20-something children, and I have done my best to roll with it -- to let them know that I love them always, whichever flags they happen to be flying in whichever bits of territory I had marked out as important. But you know, sometimes a parent has to take a stand.
Joe came home last weekend and he said, "Mom and Dad, I might get disowned for this."
I raised an eyebrow.
He cleared his throat. "I've been buying fat-free cheese."
So yes, it's true: you can spend almost TWO DECADES telling a kid that fat is what God put in food to make it taste good, and backing it up with actual taste-bud-tickling evidence, only to have them reject the truth and embrace the lie of fat-free "cheese."
I'm still getting over that one.
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