Old Parents and Prodigal Children

Perhaps the story of the Prodigal Son means something different when we are old.   Will we take our children back when they fail or falter?  How many times?  With or without their children in tow?  In the story of the prodigal son, we are left to think that everything ends up ok – except perhaps, for the resentment of the older and more responsible brother.  The story (from Luke 15) ends with the father telling his “good” son why he has killed the fatted calf for his wayward sibling:

 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.

But in real life, this is seldom the end of it.  Does the prodigal son stay on the straight and narrow or does he wake his father coming in drunk every night?  Has he sired children that are looking for support?  If he runs away a second time, will he be taken in again? In “Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said that: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.”

How many times?  How many fatted calves? How much money?  How much heartache?  Surely, parenthood is a lifetime job, but we protected them when they were vulnerable – who is protecting the old couple who have frayed their nerves and spent their nest egg for the prodigal son or daughter who just keeps returning?  It is surely a question for our time.

Recently, I mentioned the story of the prodigal son to a parent who has had to exercise some tough love with an adult child, but seems to feel painfully guilty about it.  She pointed out to me that the father in the story represents God, not a typical parent.  Ah, I sighed, you are surely right.  But don’t we all see that gracious parent in Luke as the model of the endlessly forgiving parent?  Killing those fatted calves whenever there is a glimmer of light?

Because, here is the thing.  It is terribly difficult to renounce parenthood.  Harder than divorce, harder even than becoming estranged from your parents.  Your children can cut you out, but it is extremely difficult to cut them out – even when you have run out of energy and fatted calves.

There was a grand essay by Rebecca Solnit in Harpers entitled, “The Mother of All Questions.”  The question she poses is whether to have children.  (She has none.) And, of course, this is a weighty question, particularly in these days of economic distress and climate crisis.  But, when most of us made the decision to procreate (or neglected to make it and just let nature take its course), we were not possessed of our full maturity or even our right minds.

So here is the harder question: “Is it ever too late not to have children?”  To cut yourself off from your children?  Or, less extreme, is it ever too late to not make parenthood a primary identity?  Not to feel like we have to have the patience of the prodigal’s father, of Job, of God, in the face of the relentless demands of adult children?  It is not a question I have had to answer in any but the most minor ways, but I have watched the anguish that prodigal sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, can cause.

Here is another strange thing.  There are few novels, plays, or poems about good parents with bad children.  There is Balzac’s Pere Goriot, William March’s The Bad Seed, and a few other horror stories – however, novels and poems about bad parents abound. (Think of Philip Larkin’s wonderful “This Be the Verse.”)  Culture is on the side of the children.  While our offspring are children, that is the way it should be.  But what about when they are fifty and we are seventy?  There is no right answer to this question, but I find myself with great empathy for those who are asking it.

For a view of differing attitudes toward parents, you could try my story “Tale of Two Grannies” or look at “Snickerdoodles.”  Neither of these tales, however, depicts the extreme situations I am discussing.  It is probably no accident that most of the stories of “bad children” are tales of horror.  Again, I empathize and only hope it is never a situation I experience.