A Letter To Parents Of Young Boys On The Cusp of Adolescence
Crafting A Trustworthy, Small, Local, Culture-Growing, Grassroots Rite Of Passage For Your Son Within the Next Year (Even If It Seems Too Late)
Your son is somewhere between 9-13 years old. You’re seeing the first signs of his transformation, and you’re both excited and frightened about what’s to come.
And now you wonder, have I left it too late?
You’ve imagined a rite of passage for him for a while, but you hadn’t realized the time to prepare would already be upon you. How is it already here? Yesterday he was your little boy and now… you see the young man breaking the surface.
You still would like him to be held in a rite of passage. You know he would be well served. You all would.
But how?
You feel isolated as a parent, and you are at a loss as to how you can parent him now, when you feel you’re losing him to people you don’t know, places you haven’t visited and to that little black mirror he has in his hands most moments of most days.
You know that these days, with all that we have forgotten and lost, not a lot is possible, but surely something ought to happen. You understand that someone else should organize it, but nobody else is coming, so what do you do? You’re too close to see how to proceed.
If You Found A Geni’s Lamp…
…you might have three wishes that likely find you every night before you drift off…
Wish #1: You wish you had more time.
Although you know that time is running out, that he’s changing so very fast, surely some form of rite of passage is still possible? You know it won’t fix anything. It’s not a panacea for your worries, but it would offer him a chance to know something of depth, something slow, something that speaks to his soul. Something he deserves.
And you know that the window of time is closing on this. In a few years, he’ll be off with his friends, seeking desperately to fit in and belong and have no interest in anything close to this. If only there was more time.
Wish #2: You wish you had more support.
You are longing for help though you’re not sure from where or of what kind.
You’re aware that he’s at an age now when, long ago, the uncles of the village would have guided him through a rite of passage.
If only someone you trust would step in where your reach ends, to talk to him, to listen to him, to make sure he’s okay. Where are the solid, reliable, imaginative male role models, elders, uncles, aunties, people who can help welcome him into adulthood by modeling vulnerability and honesty about suffering and resilience?
You want community, an extended family, a neighborhood, or even just a circle of trusted adults, to help him find his way. On your own, you don’t have the time or the experience to figure out what, or how, or with whom.
Wish #3: You wish you had a plan…
Given how late in the day it is, you’d need help from someone who’s been there before you and can point the way. Just something, so your boy would come to early manhood with a sense of his own beauty, of the beauty of life, and of his human obligation to tend it well.
On Trying Anyway (Even When It Seems Too Late)
Of course, it’s already too late for a lot of things in your son’s life, and if you refuse to admit that, and force something through, you can damage your boy, and break yourself or your community in half, trying too hard, too late.
And yet if you don’t do anything at all, some vital seed of his worthiness and the worthiness of life might go unplanted in the still fertile soil of his burgeoning soul. A seed that might protect and nourish him in the years to come. He might need this.
One thing I suspect is true of you: One day, you want to look back to this time in your family’s life and be proud that you did your best to offer him a trustworthy welcome into early adulthood, and to know you did it with a handful (it’s all you’re likely to find) of generous and courageous friends, all in your most heartfelt, limited, frail, beautiful and human ways.
All too likely, you will look back after and see that it could have been more spectacular. You, more than anyone, will be keenly aware of the failures of the thing. Of course. I know I was. And yet you may take comfort in knowing that it happened at all, even in that imperfect way it did. It was something of a miracle.
Your friends and you passed on your hard-earned teachings about sorrow, grief, bereavement and its sibling, love. You helped him know the cycles of life, about birth, death and rebirth, and the limits that bind us. He may have learned something worthy about failure by the ways your endeavour fails him. All of that.
But for all the imperfections…
Your community took him to sit alone under the firmament, asking questions of the stars that no human can answer.
There’s Still Time
I know from my own experience that the bewilderment, fear and urgency you’re with can be turned into a meaningful and transformative experience for your boy, for you as parents, and for the people to whom you turn for help. It will ask something of you all, and there are no guaranteed outcomes. It won’t be what you imagine, but it will be a work of culture, and there’s no doubt it will make a difference.
Most of all, I believe this: If you’re willing to give yourself at least twelve months of lead up, there’s still time to create an honest, realistic, credible plan for a home-based initiation that helps you to stand next to your son as he matures, not behind him, knowing you were all able to transform as he takes on early manhood with a deepened sense of belonging as a participant in the web of life, not just a mainstream, passive and individual consumer.
There’s still time, likely not for what you envisioned years ago, likely not for what you were hoping for, but for something with a life of its own, a whiff of culture-making and village-mindedness that your son will remember for the rest of his life, a year that might help him turn feral alienation in the hard times into a soulful belonging.
There’s still time if you are able to take one year for a creative collaboration with friends and family to midwife a home-grown, grassroots, rite of passage journey for your boy, that has a solid chance of transforming him, in subtle and noticeable ways, into a young man with a foundational understanding of his role as an adult member in the web of life, able to live well in two worlds, rooted deeply in life, as he contends with an increasingly unpredictable and turbulent everyday.
Three simple truths can guide us as parents in this moment:
There’s still time.
It won’t last forever.
There is such a thing as too late.