We tend to tell the story of a young person's launch as a hero's journey: the hero leaves home, faces trials, conquers something, and returns transformed. Ursula K. Le Guin was wary of that tidy shape. In her essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," she argued that the hero-with-a-spear story is only one kind of story, and that a life is often better described as a bag, something you carry and fill with whatever you gather along the way. The years after college look a lot like that to me. Nobody slays a dragon and rides home in triumph. They come back with a bag full of half-finished plans, new languages, hard lessons, and good friends, and they're still working out what it all adds up to.
Last week, the Facebook reminded me it was National Daughters Day, so I posted a recent photo of my two girls together at the train station in Macomb, the place our family has always used for pickups and dropoffs. My Australian sister Christine, who also has two daughters, commented, "So happy to be back together!" I inserted a laughing emoji and wrote back that Maren now lives in Rome. Mallory, a friend from grad school days at the University of Florida, wrote, "Oh, the places we never knew they would go!" Her daughter Maya had flown back to Spain that very day, after a stretch at home following college, followed by the Peace Corps and a stint teaching abroad. One of Mallory's friends called this stage of life: the "boomerang years."
When I went looking for the term, I found a graphic memoir by Kate T. Williamson, At a Crossroads: Between a Rock and My Parents' Place, about moving back into her childhood bedroom after college with no plan and no job. A few months turned into nearly two years. The story is told entirely from the kid's side: the awkwardness, the small humiliations, the odd comfort of a bedroom that remembers who you used to be while the future refuses to take shape.
What stayed with me is that nobody writes the parent's version. We are the ones who keep the refrigerator stocked, who leave the porch light on a little longer than necessary, who learn to ask, "how was your day" instead of "what's the plan." To be a boomerang parent is to hold a door open without hovering in the doorway, trusting that the wandering belongs to them, even when every instinct says to hand over a map.
In the three years since college, Willow and Maren have weathered more than most people expect to at their age, including a mother who almost died and a father who did. Willow spent a year in graduate school in Salzburg and is now taking the time to discover what brings her joy. Maren spent a year at home with me before starting graduate school in Rome. Neither path has been a straight line, and I don't expect either to become one anytime soon.
I have told them both, more than once, that finding work that makes you happy and pays the bills takes time.And that the road there is almost never linear. I say this as someone who is nearly sixty and still has no clear idea what she wants to be when she grows up. I tend to reinvent myself every few years, riding out whatever wave life sends my way. Le Guin wrote in The Left Hand of Darkness that "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end,” and I have come to believe her, even on the days I would happily trade the journey for a destination.
So, when my daughters call, unsure and mid-boomerang, I try not to rush them toward certainty. I try to do what they and my therapist have both suggested, which is simply to listen. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin's old mage Ogion tells his young apprentice, "To hear, one must be silent." I'm still learning that lesson, and I'm still not very good at it. But I've come to see the wandering not as a detour from the plan. For most of us, it is the plan: messy, circuitous, and, if we're lucky, headed somewhere worth the trip.
Heather McIlvaine-Newsad is a Professor of Anthropology at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on collaborative action for sustainability.
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the university or TSPR.
Diverse viewpoints are welcomed and encouraged.