A generation later, when I was looking after Brooke that Saturday morning in 1967 (see: A Child’s Genius), I wanted my child to be able to take care of herself in the world. Just as I wanted Brooke to be self-motivated, self-directed, and self-sustaining for her own sake, I also wanted it for my own reasons. I wanted to be able to pursue my life, too. I loved my daughter. I delighted in her, loved playing with her, and found her growth and development a never-ending, jaw-dropping source of amazement. On the other hand, she was not my work-in-the-world. I was a teacher at the time, and though I did not then know that education would be my calling, I knew I was supposed to pursue some calling and somehow make something of myself. I knew that being the air traffic controller for my children was not it. Although my behavior at that moment in Brooke’s development was wise, my motivation for letting her go was quite selfish.
Between the blossoming of my independence at age ten, and age twenty-one when Brooke was born, I must have gone on hundreds of adventures. The longer the radius of my world, the happier both my parents were. My mother was happier because fewer loved ones were on her radar screen; my father was happier because fewer loved ones were on his wife’s radar screen. (In his perfect world, he would be the only one on my mother’s radar screen.)
Between the ages of ten and twenty-one, I came close to being killed a dozen times. There was the time I found myself most of the way up a forty-foot cliff with no more toe holds going up and no apparent way of going back down. There was the time I almost ran the boat aground in the middle of the night on Narraganset Bay. There were innumerable times I got lost. There was the time I dodged a truck and ran my Volkswagen off the edge of a bridge in the hills of eastern Kentucky.
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