I have some lovely, well-meaning friends who delight in giving me advice. Not for me, because my life is already perfect. But advice they think I should pass along to my young adult children.
Now, Oscar Wilde said it best: The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
You know this, I know this, and yet we can’t help giving advice. We just aren’t very good at taking it.
When my two beautiful children were young, I didn’t give advice. What I gave them was instructions.
Don’t ride your bike after dark. Put on clean pants. Do your homework. Suck up to your boss so he’ll give you a better shift.
But, sadly, eventually they became teenagers and no longer listened to me. Because they knew everything.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got it, Mom,” was the typical response when I altruistically tried to share some of the wisdom I’d gleaned over five decades of life. And, frankly, they didn’t have it.
“I got it, Mom,” my son told me vehemently when I urged him to study for his written drivers license test. I couldn’t help fretting when I walked past him playing video games in the living room, knowing that his test was the following day. Surprise, surprise. He failed on his first attempt. He blamed the DMV.
“I only missed one question and it was on animals. Why are they asking about animals?” he demanded.
Then he failed on his second attempt. At that point, he spontaneously decided to study the booklet. It had nothing to do with my advice. Greatly to his astonishment, he passed on his third attempt. Imagine that.
My daughter, Curly Girl, who’s now 25 and married with a baby, is a dog maniac. She loves all animals, but particularly the canine species. So, she decided to rescue a big dog while she was pregnant. At that point, I butted in unasked and told her that this was a bad idea. I try not to give unsolicited advice, but this time it was necessary to provide a mother’s wisdom. She was about to have a baby to care for, and landlords don’t like to rent to people with big dogs.
Her response? I might as well have been talking to the moon. She ended up rescuing not only one big dog, but two.
So now she and her husband have a baby, two big dogs and – guess what? They’d like to move, but no one with an affordable place to live wants to rent to them. What a shock that is. It’s too bad, because they are great tenants, but who could possibly have foreseen that outcome?
Oh, wait. I could have, having been both a tenant and a landlord in my long, long lifetime. As I point out to my kids occasionally, “You should listen to me. I’ve lived a long time. I know stuff.“
I’m not saying everyone who is as old as dirt is a fountain of knowledge, but I am. And, sadly, one of the things I now know is that my kids are not going to listen to a single bleeping thing I say.
So when my friends advise, “You should tell him or her to do this,” I just roll my eyes. Maybe their kids listen to them, but the only time my offspring hear me is when I’m offering to spend money on them.
Then, they suddenly regain their sense of hearing. It’s like a miracle at Lourdes.
This makes me wish I were richer, but I foolishly chose a career as a newspaper reporter, which is a rewarding job, but not financially. Many of my friends bailed out at a certain point because they actually wanted to make a decent living, but I seem to be addicted to journalism and can’t give it up.
On the plus side, I have all of you readers, and you’re great.
Now, I will share one incident with you that still resonates with me, because it felt so good. Cheetah Boy once had a girlfriend who cheated on him while we were away on vacation, and he broke up with her when he got home. Then, he came into my room and asked me if he should take her back, because she wanted to get back together with him.
“I wouldn’t do it,” I told him. “Once a cheater, always a cheater.” He nodded his head and walked away. I didn’t think any more about it.
A week or so later, I walked past him while he was on the phone, and this is what I heard: “No, I won’t take you back. Once a cheater, always a cheater.”
It might be a little pathetic, but I’ve clung to that memory for years. Maybe he does listen to me sometimes. A mother can only hope.
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