I’ve been waiting twenty years for my parental “Aha!” moment, and I finally got it. My, was it sweet.
You know the moment I’m talking about, the one where you finally realize that your child has become an adult, left the nest, exceeded your expectations, become his or her own person.
I’ve been waiting for this moment since my fortieth birthday, back on November 19, 1987, when my wife presented me with twins, a boy and a girl, our first children. Yes, we were a late marriage; and yes, we were delighted. So much so that we had another baby boy twenty months later.
We watched our three move like a blip through childhood. There was the nursing stage; the diaper stage; the toddler stage; the terrible twos (and threes); the preschool, kindergarten, elementary, junior high, high school, college search and getting-into-and-starting college stages.
Along the way, we had great parental moments: The baptisms, the birthday parties
(three every November 19th); the trips to Disney World and Wisconsin Dells and
Kiddyland; the death of their grandmother; the sports games and banquets and
awards; the academic achievements; the first dates and proms and breakups and
reconciliations; the “Dad-I’m OK-but-the-police-officer-would-like-to-speakwith-
you” calls (always after midnight
and always when I was in a deep sleep). There
were Father’s and Mother’s Days, Christmas eves and mornings; Halloween trick-ortreating;
July 4th parades, trips to Wrigley Field and the United Center; the Fighting
Illini comeback against the University of Arizona in the Sweet Sixteen; the
“take your child to work” days; the time we bought a puppy; the other time we
had to put our dog to sleep.
I enjoyed every moment: the bad with the good. But I kept expecting a big one, one that I wouldn’t see coming, one that would make the whole parental experience complete, the “Aha!” moment when I would know that I had been a good father, that the kids would make it on their own, that they would be fine without me. It came last October.
My daughter, Abigail, which means, for the record, “joy of her father,” had the lead in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles. Of course, her mother and had I to go see it (airfare from Chicago $300 each, hotel room $100 per night, ticket to play $15, seeing your daughter play Blanche DuBois—priceless). My wife, Kathy, and I couldn’t organize our schedules so we could go together, so she went the opening weekend and I went for the closing performances. And so I found myself sitting in the small theater at LMU (maximum occupancy 60) for four nights in a row, less than ten feet from the stage where my daughter played a woman who is struggling to maintain her sanity, is raped by her brother-in-law Stanley, and gets carted off to an asylum at the end because her sister Stella has to believe her abusive husband rather than her crazy sister.
To say that Abby was good is to state the obvious. I’m her father. Of course she was good, better even than I thought she was capable of, at least at this young stage of her theatrical development. But that wasn’t my “Aha!” moment.
As the final performance was drawing to a close, Abby- Blanche was about to deliver the final line, the one that is so famous it is almost a parody of itself. “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” I had heard her do it three times before, and each rendition was heartbreaking. But that night, she said it much differently. Lying on the bed, the same bed on which Stanley had raped her, her hands held behind her back by a nurse, Abby- Blanche was sobbing uncontrollably. Life had finally done her in. She had lost the fight to have a normal life, to marry Mitch, to repair her reputation. She had been betrayed by her brother-in-law, by her sister, by her neighbors, by her phantom admirer who was going to rescue her. She had no one left in the world. She was completely, utterly alone.
Then the doctor from the asylum tries to calm her down. He strokes her hair. “Please, ask her to let go of me,” Abby- Blanche asks him plaintively. The doctor nods to the nurse. The nurse lets her go. Abby-Blanche takes the doctor’s hand. Unlike the other performances, she holds his hand for what seems like thirty seconds, looking into his eyes. Then, again unlike every other night, she takes the doctor’s hand to her lips and kisses it for what seemed like another half minute. Finally, she delivers her line: “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
She allows the doctor to lead her through the kitchen, past Stella and Stanley and Mitch and the other characters in the play. She holds her head up high, struggling to maintain her dignity to the end and somehow succeeding. Stella runs after her, but it is too late. Kill lights. Curtain call.
I could hardly breathe. I had just seen my daughter pull off one of the greatest roles in American theater. She played a thirty-plus woman at age nineteen. She was Blanche DuBois. But that was not my “Aha!” moment either. That happened after the play, outside the stage door, as we all waited for the actors to come out. Abby greeted her friends, her director, other patrons. Then she came over and gave me a hug.
“I saw what you did with that last line,” I told her. “Where did that come from?”
“I have no idea, Dad,” she said. “It just seemed right to me in the moment, what Blanche would have done and said.”
I suddenly realized that my daughter understands that we humans have to trust someone, no matter how alone we are, no matter how often we have been betrayed, no matter how weak our grasp on reality. We all need “the kindness of strangers” to survive. This is sometimes the only way that we can get out of the messes we have made—in our private lives, in our society, in the church, in the world. We’ve got to take the stranger’s hand that is offered to us, kiss it, and trust it.
My daughter understands that, thanks to Blanche DuBois and Tennessee Williams and LMU.
Aha! Greg Pierce is president and co-publisher of ACTA Publications and author/editor of a number of books among them, Spirituality at Work: 10 Ways to Balance Your Life on the Job, Diamond Presence: Twelve Stories of Finding God at the Old Ball Park, and Prayers from Around the World and Across the Ages.