One of the hardest things about being a parent is watching your kids make mistakes. It is inevitable that your children will falter along the way as they mature, but it doesn't make you feel any better. Parents often feel powerless in preventing every stumble. We try our best to help kids learn from their mistakes, but it's still hard.
This grudgingly accepted reality becomes much harder to bear when one consigned to the sidelines to watch scenarios unfold with full knowledge of the potential consequences. It's like watching a car accident in slow motion and hoping in the end that no one will be seriously hurt. Most parents have lived enough of life to foresee those times when their children will make the same mistakes as they did. When they make poor choices based on peer pressure, when they rush into things without considering consequences, when they enter into destructive relationships with people who have their own interests in mind.
The problem is, parents cannot control the outcome. Although they might know that there is potential for pain or heartache, it doesn't mean that the scenario will play out.
Sometimes, kids get lucky.
As children and teens we often regarded our parent's concern with disdain. We thought they were being overprotective and sometimes controlling. Whenever we did falter, the consequences were made worse by listening to mom or dad say "I told you so" or "didn't I warn you this would happen?" Yes, maybe they did tell us so, but was it so necessary to gloat?
I guess now, as a parent, I get it. There are a lot of things that we might want to be right about, but accurately predicting our child's hurt is not one of them.
It's not something that we can see as children when we are so preoccupied with pursuing our independence, with our parents being the greatest hurdle to overcome.
Of course, the realization that another person is pursuing a potentially detrimental path is not strictly the purview of parenthood. It can be, at times, a challenging aspect of our friendships. Let's face it, we're uncomfortable asking a friend if they have had too much to drink before driving home. We don't want to to confront a friend when we recognize signs of destructive behaviour. If we see someone we care about in a toxic relationship, we try our best to be supportive because we don't want to risk losing our friendship.
For a young Alex Hamelin this past Sunday, luck did not save him. Caught up in the exuberance of the St. Patrick's day parade, and evidently impaired by a day of celebratory drinking, the young 20 year old man died after being crushed under the wheels of a parade float. He had evidently climbed onto the float when it stopped temporarily near the end of the parade route. As the truck began moving the man jumped down, lost his footing and fell in front of the wheels.
Sunday's tragedy has all the makings of something that could have, and should have, been prevented. But to think anyone would want to stand up with any degree of self satisfaction and declare "I told you so" is deplorable. It does, however, offer some perspective on how we weigh risk against personal discretion. Should someone have intervened to stop Alex's reckless behaviour? Should someone have been watching over him after he had consumed so many drinks? These things we will likely never know, but it surely weighs heavily on everyone involved, and leaves many others with a sense of emptiness.
This is no consolation to the parents of the young man who lost his life doing something so seemingly benign as celebrating. They will have to live with the most unthinkable pain any parent could bear, the loss of a child. They, like many others, have already learned that being a parent is not a popularity contest. Now they must endure the knowledge that they were not there, for just one last time, to protect their child. What they would surely give right now to have him be angry at their interference.
It makes us think of all those times when our own parents stuck their noses into our lives without invitation. Maybe we owe them a thank you.
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