SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Our oldest daughter turned 21 this week. I will try to spare her any more public embarrassment, except to say she's grown up to be kind, funny, and hardworking - especially kind. I've learned to accept that our daughters have no real memories of most of the nutty things I used to do just to coax giggles from them.
At times I'd squeeze onto a slide in a park to go down headfirst - kerthunk. At times, I'd pretend to be oblivious to walls I would walk into like a cartoon character - yow - just to make them howl. It doesn't take stage training at the Royal Shakespeare for a father to play the fool with conviction. Our daughters figured out long ago, there isn't really a magic witch on a star outside our windows who looks over them or a zebra named Stripey on our balcony, or a mermaid named Ethel - yes, Ethel Mermaid - who pokes her head out of the swells of Lake Michigan to sing, (singing) you'll be swell. You'll be great.
What a parent comes to tell themself is that while our children may have no memory of those moments that mean the world to us, they hear the stories over the years over and over, and a special sense of closeness endures. They know you would do anything -anything, anything - to make them smile.
When our daughters get together now with some of the aunties and uncles they've known most of their lives, they meet them as young adults. They've written school papers on Shakespeare, Dickens, Laurie Halse Anderson, "The Great Gatsby" and Langston Hughes. They sit at our table and talk about the news, films, games, articles, videos and friends. I'm the only one in the family who still uses some of the words they babbled as toddlers.
My wife and I are slowly beginning to change places with our children. They teach us things - and not just about tech, TikTok, and Taylor Swift, but history events and what they think we may need to survive in the world ahead. They're breaking free, as they should, but also seem to find time for us in their full, frenetic schedules because they can see, displayed in the furrows of my anxious, aging face, how important it has become for us to spend time with them. I even think, now and then, I've overheard our daughters asking one another, do you remember the time our parents did that crazy thing?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVERYTHING'S COMING UP ROSES")
ETHEL MERMAN: (Singing) You'll be swell. You'll be great.
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