Most jobs require some prior training or experience, but the job of being a parent consists almost entirely of on-the-job training, and it continues for years. Then, about the time we have developed the parenting skills that we had hoped for earlier in life, we become unemployed. Our children grow up and start their own families. This poem tires to express a parent’s concern as a young one leaves the nest.
THE FLEDGLING’S FLIGHT
Al Vester
The fledgling fluttered, faltered, flapping fiercely in the air
While parent doves feared their love would easily be snared.
The fledgling feels the freedom of being on her own.
The father fears the foes of fledglings flying all alone:
The calculating cat crouching under camouflage of leaves,
The hovering hawk hunting high above the tangle of the trees,
The power line with channeled lightning singing in its core,
The hungry hunter heavy with his weaponry of war.
All these threats to wing and feather known to silence songs so fair,
All unknown by fledgling flying now in blissful unawares.
The tiny, tired, feathered father watches taut with tender care,
Knowing that his fledgling’s freedom trembles in the tepid air.
For the hope of growing children is the time when they will part.
Yet the fee for fledgling’s freedom is a parent’s broken heart.
Gone the time of sheltered nesting in the gentle summer breeze.
Now the time of bitter lessons as the leaves begin to freeze,
Teaching her that life takes scratching, digging in the weeds.
There the tedious toils train her in the filling of her needs.
Meals no longer stuff themselves down her open beak
And life is not considerate of the timid, slow, or weak.
Departing home
Throughout childhood, a child’s parents are preparing him or her for the time when they will be ready to stand on their own as adults. Usually the time for a child’s departure occurs after high school as they enter the military, start college, get married, or embark in other kinds of service or adventure. Although, sometimes the child may depart earlier from home for more difficult reasons, yet early or late the time of a child’s departure from their parent’s home is a time when heart-strings are plucked and sometimes broken.
We, as parents, always want our children to avoid the same pitfalls that have we experienced, and sometimes they will and other times they won’t. Each parent knows that their adult child will also make their own share of mistakes, which is all a part of learning from life.
When they are on their own, they may occasionally ask their mom or dad for advice. But, even if advise is asked for, it might not be followed. As adults, they have become independent to think and act for themselves. An individual’s independence is to be cherished and guarded as the most precious gift of adulthood. Yet this independence is fragile and easily lost to addictions such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, pornography, and a host of other vices that can entrap the unwary individual.
What then can we do for our adult child? We can love them, pray for them, and, if asked, help them occasionally in ways that do not rob them of being responsible for their own actions. The responsibility of an older generation to the younger is to be a watchman on a tower, calling down warnings and advise, but leaving each individual the choice of how they will respond.
Good parents always continue to love, to worry, and to pray for their child until the day they die, and perhaps in the hereafter as well. In this process we come to understand the kind of care and concern that God, our Father in Heaven, has for us—his children.
