I'm Preparing My Son for a World Without Me

Since being saved by Christ, I’m no longer afraid of death on this planet because I know my spirit will live on forever. However, knowing that my time on this earth is finite, my worries about myself have transferred over to concerns about my son.

Such is life.

Now that my son is an adult, he’s experiencing life in a vastly different way than when he was a child. My role as a father is to be available to him, listen, and share whatever wisdom I’ve earned.

It’s tricky. Once your kids are legal adults, you have to reconfigure how you approach all of this. It took me a couple of years to figure out what my role is now that I technically can’t tell him “what to do” anymore.

So, I’ve settled on one word to give me direction: Mentor.

To Be A Mentor

Here's a little history lesson that I think you’ll enjoy. The word “mentor” comes from the Greek epic known as the Odyssey . In Homer’s tale, a father (Odysseus) is lost at sea and making his journey home. His son, Telemachus, is fatherless. The goddess, Athena, appears to give him guidance, but she is wearing a disguise and goes by the name Mentor.

The rest is linguistic history. Mentor comes to mean trusted advisor, teacher, and sharer of wisdom.

Like most parents, I’m concerned about the day I’ll be gone, which could be sooner than anyone anticipates. I don’t worry like I used to about my own life and death, but I do worry about any wisdom I’ve left on the table, unshared, that my son could use when I am gone.

Time is the most valuable asset to each and every one of us. Over it we have no control whatsoever. You can’t buy more of it. What if my time zeroes out when my son needs me the most, and those occasional calls for help go unanswered because I’m no longer physically here for him?

Heartache. This is the pain of a parent and mentor.

Since my son started driving, he has developed his own pathway in life, and I’ve proudly watched him become an amazing young man who is much farther ahead in life than I was at his age.

He’s made friends in a new place relatively quickly. He’s figuring out what he likes and who to keep company with, and I know I’m with him in the back of his head. I hope the volume is turned up decently loud. In fact, I know it is.

Trials By Fire

Every mentor knows this about raising up a mentee. Training is nothing compared to being in the thick of the real thing. It reminds me of when I worked for a telecom company in tech support, and they gave us seven weeks of training.

By the time we were done, we felt optimistic that we could perform our jobs effectively and had a good understanding of what needed to be done.

The day finally came when we “hit the floor” and tech assistants dropped like flies almost immediately. One guy quit after a few days, more after a few weeks, and even more after that.

What kept me sane in that job was knowing that I had people I could rely on for support and mentorship: life is too difficult to attempt doing everything alone.

As a father, I’ve been responsible for training my boy with age-appropriate micro-lessons in preparation for this period of adulthood and the full responsibility it entails. But no matter how good a parent you are, your adult kids will periodically need your guidance amidst the chaos they’re experiencing.

Storms come and go, but they are a certainty.

All The Small Things

It’s possible that I’m being overly dramatic about one day falling dead and not being there for him when he needs me the most, but I can’t shake this fear. It’s a new feature of this stage of fatherhood.

Not having my father around as a child was bad enough, but his absence continued into my adult years, marked by even less contact and a complete lack of mentorship or encouragement when I was battling perennial self-doubt.

Like storms, fear returns in new forms, predictably as the tides. God is here for us through it all.

If I’m honest with myself, this was always the moment I feared, and you can’t train for the moment your child becomes an adult and ventures into the world without you.

To hold their hand again… parents know this yearning.

I never wanted my son to feel cut off from wisdom the way that I was at his age, but I simply don’t know how long I’ll be here.

The only thing I know to do is to make every mentoring opportunity with him as memorable as possible. That means both the large and small things.

Wisdom isn’t just learned in the gauntlet. It’s picked up at the dinner table in how you respond to questions. When the food is cooked incorrectly at the restaurant, your child will never stop observing your reaction, regardless of their age. A child is never too young or too old to talk about money and financial wellness. Mentorship is just as much what we do as the things we say.

I’m determined to seize every chance we have together to share relatable wisdom. That’s what a mentor does.

And as time goes on, my son will hopefully need me less and less, easing my anxiety in the process. To know he’ll be fine when I’ve gone to see the Lord, that’s what this thing called life is all about.