“You must be so proud!”

I heard those familiar words, more than once, after our daughter appeared on stage at Medford Leas last fall. Knowing they were well intentioned and sincere, I properly smiled and said thank you. That routine ended the matter for the speaker, but not for me. I assented because even momentary hesitation about being proud of my youngest child would demand an explanation and complicate what should be a simple exchange. Yet whenever someone congratulates me in this manner, it takes an effort not to qualify my response. Here are my problems.

First, I have three children, whom I love and treasure equally. That one performs in the concert hall while the others make their contributions to family and society outside the limelight gives the performer an unfair advantage in the public esteem. But unfairness is also reality, and even as I acknowledge the plaudits for her I recognize my complicity in devaluing my other children by default. How to avoid doing so without trying people’s patience is my recurring dilemma.

Then there’s the larger issue of pride itself. I have a habit of scrutinizing rituals (sometimes quite cynically) even when submitting to them for convenience. Consenting to be proud of my child, even were she my only one, is a ritual I’m particularly uncomfortable with. Something’s not quite right, it seems to me, with the concept of one person being proud of another.

This is not an exercise in semantics. Never mind how pride is defined in the dictionary, or how it ranks on the register of cardinal sins. The important thing is that these kind well-wishers are expressing two thoughts without articulating either one. (Let’s skip over “She played beautifully,” or “I so enjoyed listening to her,” which sometimes precedes the call to pride.) First thought, “Your daughter is successful,” meaning she has gained status in her field, her success the greater because the field is so brutally competitive. But I hold that her success, taken in isolation, no more entitles me to be proud than if the performer had been Vladimir Horowitz or Serena Williams.Then there’s the second thought, that I deserve credit by virtue of being her father. I call this credit by parenthood. How, supposedly, have I earned it? Contributed a substantial part of her DNA? OK. Encouraged her to play from childhood on? OK. Paid for her lessons, and driven her to her teacher’s home and back? OK. Paid for her undergraduate education at conservatory? OK. (She earned and paid for her own graduate studies.) Offered unconditional love during the difficult, stumbling, often discouraging ascent to the top? OK. Dealt quietly with my own ambivalence — so that I could continually assure her of my support no matter what — as she struggled with the decision whether to continue or chuck it all for a different vocation? Yes, all that. But millions support their children in all those ways; it’s what parents do. Yet if the children don’t reach the top, only the most insightful observers will stop their parents in the hallway and tell them they should be proud (of the effort, one assumes). The critical difference is success, and that belongs exclusively to my daughter. It was she who studied, she who competed, she who dealt again and again with rejection, she who agonized over her prospects, and she who, in the end, found recognition. It is she who should be proud. I can only be thankful.

If only people would say, “You must be so thankful!”

I’d have no trouble with that.

There’s a subtext to parental pride in their children. It is possession. The possessive my can denote different relationships. My finger belongs to me; my friend does not, and neither does my child. It is easy for parents — especially those of limited accomplishment in their own right — to blur the distinction. The temptation to achieve vicariously through a gifted child can be hard to resist, and it is dangerous. If I depend on my daughter to fulfill my ambition, I risk investing irrationally in the effort, driving her crazy, and being irrationally proud of her success or disappointed in her failure, because I’m thinking of those outcomes as my own. How many of us can claim to be free from this sort of self-deception? If anyone suggested that I myself am guilty, I’d have to think carefully before denying it, for of all the things missing from my incomplete childhood none has caused me more regret than not having learned an instrument. I could be accused — without justification, I’d like to think, because of my genuine love for music — of urging my children to practice their instruments because no one urged me at their age. Being aware of that hazard gives me extra incentive not to claim as mine that which doesn’t belong to me.

Khalil Gibran had this to say about children:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not their thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
    which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
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.

It occurs to me that the central thesis of this verse would make a fitting companion piece to the Fifth Commandment. It has helped me understand my relationship both with my parents and with my adult children.