Later that year, there was a time when Taiji was habitually late to arrive at school. It was our fault. Sensei, Patty and I are night people. Sensei teaches late and stays even later to talk with the people that he teaches. We generally slept well past the start of school. We made Taiji responsible for using his own alarm clock to get up and out of the house on time. He just wasn't doing it. When I asked why, he mumbled something about being too tired from all the late night activity, and not having enough time to wash and dress and eat and do all the hundreds of thing that are such an impossible burden when it is early in the morning and you are sixteen years old.

I thought about this and decided that the solution was for me to get up every day at 7:00AM (ugh!) and roust him. I didn't push him out the door, but I made it plain that he was not going to be allowed to sleep. He had my nagging company until he left the house. I let him know that I didn't like getting up at that hour, but I would do it however long I had to. It worked. I only had to do it for a week. I guess when you live with guilt in your life, you learn how to influence the behavior of other people with it.

In small steps, I was learning something about being a parent.

I think that parenting is something different from being a father; different from being a mother. We each get a father and a mother whether we want them or not. They become fundamental reference points in our lives as children. Most often, they are also our primary parents. But they can share that role with many other people. I think the reality is that our "parents" are all the adults who make a commitment to themselves to help us grow up.

If you see it this way, then "parenting" means trying to give appropriate help--even when kids don't know it, don't want it and don't know what it is. Parenting means paying constant and careful attention. It means listening and really hearing; it means watching and really seeing. Parenting is the difficult process of turning discipline from something that is imposed from outside into something that comes from within and has nothing to do with anyone else. Parenting is knowing when to stop; when to let go; when to hold your breath and pray that the mistake that you know a kid is making will not hurt them too much: because you know that there is nothing more you can do, or you know that holding on will hurt more than help.

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