Wealth of the Indies

I was watching a movie called Heist with Gene Hackman and Delroy Lindo. Lindo's character said something along the lines of "You're asking for me to freely share the wealth of knowledge that comes from a lifetime of experience." I may be getting the quote wrong, but the overall gist of it sticks with me when I think about my role as a parent.

Ideally, parents are supposed to be venture capitalists in their kid's development. Our role is to freely give the wealth of knowledge that we acquired over a lifetime of experiences. No more clearly is this evident to me than when I think about my own relationship with my parents. My mother was fifteen and it wasn't until I was about twenty that I realized that that fact is the explanation for a lot of our bumping heads when I was growing up. There isn't so much you can teach when you're so close to the beginning of the learning phase yourself.

Being that young and having a kid at home precludes you from going out and gaining the same life experience that someone without children gets. I'm 29 and my daughter is 2. When my mother was 29, I was 14. I don't know what the hell I'd do with a 14 year old and she didn't either. So there's that perspective, the one that finds me constantly learning and experiencing things that my friends (whose parents were well over 30 when they were born) got back when they were still in elementary school. To put it plainly, I'm trying to learn and experience as much as I can now so that I can process it and share it with my daughter as she grows older.

That isn't to say that this venture capitalist is metaphorically broke. I think that my upbringing actually gave me a lot of resources to work with. I had to teach myself a lot of things and that self reliance made me one hell of a force to be reckoned with. I find myself analyzing the most mundane memories and experiences like a prospector with a wash pan in a stream looking for gold.

I'm data mining. I'm looking for anything that may prove useful to give my daughter the upper hand or at least a fighting chance in this rat race. I've stumbled a lot and I hope that I went through it so that she won't have to. Still there's that delicate balance between preparing and sheltering. Unlike me, I want her to know how to navigate college and how to network and build relationships. I don't want her to have to work two part time jobs and try to do school full time. But at the same time I don't want to raise an entitled, inexperienced brat who is overly reliant on us and lacks the self confidence that I got by doing damn near everything on my own.

It's a pickle.