What I Ching Divination Taught Me About Parenting Teens

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.