Expectations: Computers, Kids and Bradford Pear Trees
Sometime during my high school years and college, Bradford pear trees became the horticultural rage in the U.S. They had a nice straight trunk with a round crown, scads of beautiful white flowers in the spring and no messy fruit to clean up. They were the quintessential flowering lollipop tree. My hometown planted them everywhere. Homeowners and landscape developers planted them in courtyards and lined driveways with them. From where I sat, you couldn’t see George Washington’s cherry trees anymore and my state’s official native tree, the flowering dogwood, was in danger of becoming extinct as a landscaping plant.
Then, the young pear trees began to age. They had not come by their lollipop shape naturally, they were grafted—a shrubby pear had been fixed atop a sparse one. The genetic heritage of their trunks was not selected to support a shrubby crown, and the crown was not meant to be suspended in mid-air. The small trees’ perfectly spaced, lollipop arms grew into writhing Medusas with powerful limbs, or at best, huge fans that overwhelmed the landscape spaces they had been chosen to accent. They weren’t, after all, dwarf trees. Homeowners sawed them back, and as shrubs and Medusas do, the crowns only sprouted more limbs. As the limbs grew heavy, they split off where they joined the trunk, which was nearly in the same place as the other limbs. Needless to say, there were no perfectly lollipop-shaped older Bradford pear trees, just war-torn Medusas squeezed into spaces meant for medium-sized lollipops, or rows of giant fans with gaps where trees had lost limbs during high winds or ice storms.
And annoyingly, the trees began to produce fruit. The pear crown’s barrenness was due largely to the fact it could not cross with other clones—the other Bradford crowns in the surrounding area that had been grafted from the same genetic stock. However, with all the landscape maintenance going on around them, accidental collisions involving lawnmowers and weed whackers caused the root and trunk stock of the grafted trees to sprout. The crowns that could not cross with each other could easily cross individually—the crown of a Bradford pear could cross with its own trunk or root stock. The Bradford pear was, in fact, a humanly engineered hermaphroditic tree that became invasive—especially in the Southeastern United States, joining the ranks of kudzu and English ivy.
Bradford pear trees, for most homeowners, became a medium length saga of disappointment and failed expectation. The errant trees could be eradicated with a chain saw and shovel. A different tree—a cultivar that has endured the tests of time—like one of Washington’s cherries, or even a spring-flowering native tree that was more simpatico with the local environment could be called in as a replacement. A few homeowners even modified their expectations and made peace with the trees. They let go of their need to have floral lollipops and learned to enjoy the spring flowers as they were presented.
Though not involving manual labor, shovels or chain saws, replacement of a constantly irritating or disappointing computer is not so simple. Every time you upgrade, how new the thing looks! What expectations of performance! All the miraculous deeds you will accomplish together! Within a couple of days, you find out your new computer won’t quite do what you expected and you give it a brief benefit of doubt—maybe I don’t know all I need to know. You do more research. Within the week, you know it’s not what you had hoped and you cut your losses. In a few months, the next generation is announced and you spend the rest of your relationship with your new machine wishing it were improved and yelling at it when it glitches and when it is processing slowly—or perhaps that’s only your irritated perception of its speed. Whatever—we have high expectations for our tech and their producers keep raising the bar, so we are in a constantly disgruntled state in relationship with our computing machines.
Even when we do upgrade to a smarter, improved version, our technical devices so often fall short of our miraculous expectations. For example, when I use talk to text, if I select a word that is slightly unfamiliar, serious app to garble it and I must go back and untangle her discombobulation’s oh and punctuation mishaps constantly. What I dictated in the previous sentence was: For example, when I use talk-to-text, if I select a word that is slightly unfamiliar, Siri is apt to garble it and I must go back and untangle her discombobulations and punctuation mishaps constantly. Sometimes her autocorrects and misinterpretations are so hilarious, my friends and I send the texts anyway, but most of the time the process, that is supposed to be freeing, is mightily frustrating. My southern accent, which sneaks in with more or less strength depending on how excited I am, helps not one whit.
Though taking a chain saw to one of our irritating devices may be tempting, they cost quite a bit, so we usually just shut up and put up until our new machine really is malfunctioning, or the upgrades have reached a point where it is worth it to spend the cash for a replacement. Tech, we find, frees us and frustrates us on a continual basis. Finding something in our lives that is more frustrating is difficult. Cars run a close second in the frustration department, but it is becoming easier to live without a car than it is to live without some kind of tech—a tablet, a smart phone, a laptop—something that connects you to the web. Besides, more and more, autos are morphing into tech-on-wheels.
The only entities I can see that trump computers in the realm of producing frustration—and downright anguish—are kids. Parents deal with the overt expectations they hold for their children from minute to minute, every day. I think most parents will freely admit they also harbor expectations that run silent and undetected like submarines during a battle. At key moments, a submerged expectation reveals itself by launching a torpedo or fully surfacing and shocking the heck out of everybody. The difficulty here is that no matter what evil intent you may project upon your tech, the tech is not sentient yet—for now, if it seems that your computer is out to get you, that is your imagination. Your frustrated growls will have no effect on your laptop. Rolling your eyes will engender no resentment in your iPhone. However, children incorporate parental expectations into their emotional growth patterns the way young Bradford pear trees soak up sunshine and convert it into energy. If you were a kid once, with parents or any kind of surrogate parents, it doesn’t take much to figure this out.
One summer between a couple of my college years, another lifeguard and I stood behind two moms at the pool where we worked. I didn’t know the other guard very well. She was quiet and kept to herself. I wasn’t all that outgoing either. I think she was a student at a smaller college nearby and I was a student at one of the large state universities. The moms were chattering the way mothers do when they get a few moments to themselves without their kids in close proximity. They sat in folding chairs, with their backs to us. All four of us were looking at the pool. We, the two guards, were scanning it. That was our job. The mothers were relaxed. They were with their kids, but others, namely my sister guard and I, were the responsible parties of the moment.
Kids make a lot of noise in a pool. Music blared behind us. The moms were talking loudly. I remember only one piece of their conversation. Referring to her teenaged daughter, one mom said: “I’ll have birth control ready when she asks for it, but I won’t give it to her now because that would be like giving her the go ahead to do it. It would be like giving her permission to have sex.” The first mom made her statement with authority, as if she had it all figured out. The other mom agreed immediately. I don’t know what the second mother really thought. The force of the first woman’s statement was overwhelming. I was shocked at how naive the mothers were. The arrogance of the opinionated one just made me sad for her daughter. I looked at my sister lifeguard and whispered, “They have no idea what their girls are facing.” The other lifeguard, who was always so very quiet and contained, looked back at me. She shook her head slowly back and forth. I could see in her face the kind of sadness I felt— the mother’s comment bothered her also. We both turned back to scanning the pool. Neither one of us said anything to the moms. The one was so headstrong—we had encountered her many times. We would not be able to change her mind.
Later in life I had another encounter, a much more direct one, with a mother who refused to help her daughter with birth control. I was the treatment coordinator for her teenager at an adolescent psychiatric facility. It was near discharge time for the teen. She had been in psychiatric treatment for weeks. She had made a lot of progress, but I felt sure she would act out again and certainly she would not curtail her sexual activity. I implored her mother to help the daughter procure birth control. “It’s against my values,” the mother said. I told her, “that may be, but your daughter is going to do this. Wouldn’t it be better to keep her safe until she is emotionally able to control her impulses?” The mother just kept repeating, “It’s against my values; it’s against my beliefs.” I calmly laid out my arguments anyway, just in case on a future date she might replay them in her head and actually hear them. I liked this mother very much. I was sad she could not hear me. She was not like the opinionated woman at the pool. This mother was trying to do the right thing, but her daughter was as impulsive and full of fire as any teenager we had ever had in treatment during the three years I worked there. I told the mother birth control would be a stop gap until her daughter was mature enough to sort out her own values and her own beliefs. The mother would not change her mind. She was not arrogant, but I felt she was setting herself and her daughter up for a troubled time ahead.
I have held these two conversations about teenaged girls and birth control in my memory for years. At another time, I recall a conversation with a third mother about her newly adult children, one male and one female. “I just don’t want them to do anything that damages them permanently, ” she told me. I thought that was it, wasn’t it? That was the core of her motivation for decisions about her kids. She had arrived at the central issue and named it. Compared to the mothers from the other conversations, there was something fundamentally different about the way this mom approached her thinking about her children. “That’s what I’m the most afraid of,” she said. She began with her own fear—her feelings—and progressed from there. Her kids are successful now, and happy. They did not mess up or do anything that damaged themselves permanently, and although I cannot know this for certain, as far as I can tell, she didn’t do anything that damaged them permanently either.
During the coming months, this third mother’s grandchildren are some of the teens and tweens that will be moving from our pandemic cocoon back into the person-to-person world. Their parents are a generation closer to the more modern world than their grandmother. These younger parents deal with cell phones and tech more competently than she does, but It seems to me the world of teenagers never grows less confusing or calmer, less dangerous. It is like the soil beneath a farmhand’s churning disc. Always turning, never in the same place, so that no parent has the experience needed to deal with the constantly changing terrain their teenager will face. The truth is parents really do have to let go and trust their offspring—and teenagers, a little like the rest of us, do not always make the best decisions. You think your kid knows better than to fiddle with controls for the radio while the car is moving, or not to a peek at the text message the just arrived, but then your car ends up in the neighbor’s yard with a piece of the neighbor’s new fence pinned between it and one of those old Bradford pear trees. At least no one was hurt, right? RIGHT?
The way parents respond when their expectations are dashed upon the rocks can be as damaging as the things kids do to dash those expectations. I saw this over and over when I worked in adolescent psychiatry. Kids are neither Bradford pears nor computers. You can’t dig them out of your lives or upgrade to a different model. You are stuck with a person who is not you, a person you cannot and never will be able to control. As parents, something about acknowledging your worst fears and most wonderful hopes for your children is key to letting them become themselves, and thereby supporting them in avoiding your worst fears and fulfilling their most wonderful hopes.
As the pandemic finally subsides, as teenagers and tweens-just-turned-teens return to the wider world, it might be prudent for parents to dig around inside themselves to discover what their deepest fears and hopes for their kids may be. For these will generate the expectations that you lay upon your children’s shoulders. Knowing the feelings that drive expectations and being able to verbalize those fears and hopes can dispel the negative effects of the expectations that may burden children and teens. And even more than that, in the face of what appears to be a catastrophic screw up, deciding to respond with appropriate measures of responsibility—and grace—can defuse the catastrophe. Mistakes are just mistakes, no matter their apparent size. Failures on report cards, teenage sexual experimentation, these things will be long forgotten in a year or two. Drug use, blackouts from alcohol, cigarettes, depression—these are damaging for years to come. Guns, weapons are immediately life threatening. Know the real dangers.
When dealing with teenagers, distinguishing fire from kerfuffle can be difficult. Keep an open line. Your lollipop tree might look like Medusa for a while, but you can enjoy its blossoms while it sorts itself out. What emerges may be different from what you had in mind, but chances are it will be much more wonderful than anything your expectations could have molded.