Sorry, Stephen. It Can't Be Done

I was flying down the highway from Waimea toward Kawaihae the other day, a steep grade conducive to loud music and streaming thoughts, when something struck me. It wasn't a truck or a bolt of lightning, more like a mini-epiphany.

It started with the view, the vast indigo ocean calm and wide straight ahead, and the early evening rays of light beaming down, God-like, through the clouds. But where the light met the water, strange circles reflected on the surface as though a spaceship were about to descend from the clouds. I'd been thinking about the last four books I read, and when the overwhelming view came into my consciousness, I had a feeling there was a reason it was there, like it was supposed to be somehow underscoring what I'd been reading and ruminating upon.

Then Suite Judy Blue Eyes came on. I'd been half-listening to the songs that started with "S"  on my iPod - I'd skipped a few, like Still Fly - and I wasn't paying much attention to Judy until of course zam, bam, there was the famous line. Don't let the past remind us of what we are not now. The words, when Stephen Stills wrote them, referred to his relationship with Judy Collins. But they have universal relevance and can just as easily relate to such topics as aging and parenting, right?

So back to the books: Beautiful Boy (David Sheff), Imperfect Birds (Anne Lamott), This Beautiful Life (Helen Schulman), The Lost Child (Julie Myerson). Two are fiction, two memoir. All are about families with teen and teen angst and, more importantly from my perspective, parent angst. The dialogue (and interior dialogue) is as raw and real as it gets, especially as the parents look back at the innocent blank slate they'd started with and wonder how they got to where they are today. As a collection, these books have been infiltrating my mind, like worms boring holes, sabotaging my attempt at inner peace. After all, I've got three teens.

As a new parent - nearly twenty years ago - I was like those parents in the books. I knew I'd have the perfect family not only because my kids were tiny little innocents with big smiles and poopy diapers but also because I was going to be the perfect mom. I was smart, had strong values, and was brimming with love. I was analytical but also creative. I was realistic; I knew my kids would get hurt and make mistakes and even rebel now and then. But I also knew that I was going to be brilliant and cool and funny and omniscient, and I'd handle everything swimmingly and all would be fine in the end.

I also believed in Santa Claus back then.

What these last four books confirmed for me, finally, is that smart, value-driven, loving parents can also wind up with lots of challenges. We are not alone. And that's the sign of a good book: characters, and a story, that plague you when you're done, sometimes without even having an obvious reason to do so, often times when you don't even want to keep thinking about them. None of these books will likely wind up on the list of great classics beside Woolf or Hemingway, but to be honest Woolf and Hemingway don't haunt me the same way these authors did. I didn't suffer from Woolf's mental illnesses and I'm not a game hunter the way Hemingway was. But I am - and keep reminding my kids always will be - a parent.

And the lesson I learned from these fictional and real parents is that it's impossible to follow Stephen Stills's advice. Parents do remember the past. They do remember their own exuberant dreams as much as they remember the first baby steps and the first day at kindergarten. No matter how hard we try, the past will remind us of what we are not now.