Supporting Your Child on their Hero's Journey

Cerrillos visual artist Wendy Young is on a hero’s journey.  A hero’s journey involves leaving the land of the familiar and embarking on a path of both inner and outer discovery.  For Wendy, her land of the familiar was the South where she had lived for thirty-four years.  Landing in Santa Fe in 1996 was the catalyst for Wendy to see the South with new clarity, discarding the veils of the familiar that can cleverly disguise underlying narratives.  The visual aspects of her former home were so unlike those of her new home in New Mexico that they were impossible to ignore.  Her curiosity was stoked. 

On her hero’s journey, Wendy created “A Long and Slow Surrender”, a photographic exposition in which she took a fresh look at what had previously been so familiar that it was made invisible.  She took a new look at the history she had been taught while growing up in the South and the culture in which she had been born and raised.  Wendy wrote that the project was an investigation into “the current day dissensions that Confederate monuments represent. Through this work, I have deconstructed my Southern education and confronted my discomfort with my Southern Heritage. The experience has been cathartic and at times unbearable. It is my hope that this body of work will encourage Southerners to question their beliefs about heritage and that it will promote alternative discussions of racial, rural, and religious tensions that Southerners experience living among Confederate Monuments.” 

At the risk of eliciting “boo’s” for a very bad pun, her work is monumental.  Her path of discovery and creation are the true definition of a hero’s journey. 

Hero’s journeys can be “at times unbearable”.  We question the beliefs that we have carried with us throughout our lives.  We look at painful truths.  We examine the formerly unseen meaning behind what had once been familiar and comforting.  We look at rituals that may have connected us with others, such as singing “Dixie” at gatherings, games, and rallies.  That examination allows us to see with new eyes the hidden narratives that shaped who we are and the previously unrecognized cultural immersion that we embraced as reality.  On a hero’s journey, we leave our safety zone and realize that the world is more than simply two alternatives.  The world is complex.  

Throughout her life and especially with the Long and Slow Surrender project, Wendy felt the support of her parents.  They do not agree with her politically, yet they have supported her.  She said that their support has given her “the freedom to explore the world without having their imprint” on her.  Because of their support, Wendy did not have to question if her exploration was going to harm her relationship with her parents or hurt their feelings.  They were “in 100%”.  She did not fear being tossed out of the nest, and it gave her the freedom to have her own opinions, make her own mistakes, and own those mistakes. 

Your children will go on their own hero’s journey.  Leaving home for college, taking a gap year for travel, experiencing a great loss, going to summer camp, or questioning their purpose can be the impetus.  Any time they leave the land of the familiar, their journey has begun. 

What Wendy’s experience beautifully illustrates is the importance of supporting your child, even your adult child, on their journey.  The support that matters most is flexible and steady.  It requires that you become aware of the narratives that may be hidden in your land of the familiar, both the land in which you are raising your children and the land in which you were raised.  It may require your own hero’s journey as a parent.   

The following three things can assist you in providing that valuable flexible and steady support: 

1.    Pausing so that you respond from a place of centeredness and love 

2.    Internally investigating what you need to be able to honor your child’s beliefs and chosen path when it differs from your own

3.    Listening to your child without trying to fix or change their perspective or decisions 

As you support your child on their journey, remember that it is not about padding their experience for greater comfort, fixing problems for them along the way, or judging their decisions.  It is not about perfection or wanting your child to be just like you.  It is having faith in who they are and finding joy in who they are becoming. 

As Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet, “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.  The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.  Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.” 

To learn more about A Long and Slow Surrender, please visit Wendy’s website at www.WendyYoung.net.