What I Ching Divination Taught Me About Parenting Teens
Hexagram 53, Gradual Progress, and What Attachment Parenting Teens Asks When Your Child Becomes Autonomous
He is taller than me now by enough that I have to look up when he is making a point, which he does often, and with the particular confidence of someone who has recently discovered that his thinking is his own.
This is the last spring he will live at home in the way that he has. The house will be the same house. He will come back to it. But the quality of his presence here is already shifting, as he goes to his part time job after school, or hang out with friends during the weekends. When we make family plans, we need to ask what he has in his calendar. He’s deciding which parts of our shared life to carry forward and which to leave in the room he grew up in. I feel many things at once, and more than anything, tender.
Luca was my first experience of loving someone I had not yet met. That is the original strangeness of parenthood that nobody quite prepares you for: you build a relationship with an idea of mothering and then the actual human arrives and spends the next eighteen years gently, sometimes less gently, correcting you. We know each other profoundly and also not enough, and the relationship we are now entering into the infancy period of yet a different chapter of parent and child.
Rachel Cusk wrote something I have returned to many times, about how children teach us to love and in doing so reveal, slowly, the full extent of what we ourselves were never given. I think about this often with Luca, and more so this spring, when the shape of our relationship is visibly changing and I am finding that what is being asked of me now requires something I was not taught either.
I’ve been sitting with the I Ching more than usual this spring, as I tend to do when I’m in a period that doesn’t have language yet. What keeps coming up is Hexagram 53, gradual progress, the image of geese crossing water, each one taking its place in sequence, as biology has directed them to do. The commentary says the student must come to the teacher, not the other way around. If we were to push the West’s hierarchical interpretation of student and teacher, I think about how much of my parenting has been the inverse of the hexagram, showing up unrequested with the thing I thought he needed, certain I knew what it was, and being met with the withering look that teenagers reserve for exactly this kind of blunder.
What’s being asked of me now is a different posture, to be available and findable but not insistent. The I Ching encouraged me to trust that the V formation of the geese holds even when I’m not the one calling the direction. And to recognize equally, in different circumstances, roles of teacher and student are reversed.
BaZi calls this an immense transition year in the larger cycle, especially those born in Year of the Rat. The pillar shifting is the kind that marks significant and structural phase change. I go into this in my YEAR OF THE FIRE HORSE PREDICTIONS recording.
BaZi (Chinese astrology) reads this year brings structural changes for many, and to further this, I’ve been sitting with that alongside one hexagram of the I Ching, two different instruments arriving at the same guidance. What I keep returning to, and what I teach in my FINDING I CHING CLARITY online course series, is that recognizing the nature of a season changes your relationship to the season itself.
What I’m learning from my son right now is also what the Hexagram 53 keep returning to: that the most reliable way to be close to someone who is becoming increasingly autonomous is to become yourself more fully in the same period, so that when you meet, you are both arriving as something new for both of you, with sparkle and humility. Beyond the excitement for what is ahead, we are both needing reassurance, too. We each need reminders that the old selves can still be accessed. I will always be the Mama Bear who will hold and rock him. And I can step aside, knowing his life will fill with people and experiences that have nothing to do with me, and find that I want that for him.
We are two humans with a shared history, walking in the same direction, sometimes together, sometimes in parallel, close enough to signal across the distance.
Humbled by the work of divination,