What I Tell My Young Son When He Asks About His Future
I’ve taken lessons from my own mother but also chose to do things differently
“Everything’s going to be fine; it will all work out, you’ll see.”
My mother has uttered these three phrases to me so many times over the years that I have welcomed them as truths, as if she had some direct line to the cosmos that allowed her to know something I didn’t.
When I moved to California to become an actor, I called her crying, “What if I made a mistake by moving to L.A.?” It had been months, and I still hadn’t found work.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” she said calmly, and I tried to believe her.
After years spent writing my first novel, I called my mom, again, full of doubt. “What if after all of this, no one wants it?” I said, staring at my fiftieth agent rejection. She was quiet for a moment, and then, confidently, she said, “It will all work out. You’ll see.”
Yes, I enjoyed the old idioms that she repeated with confidence: The squeaky wheel gets the grease! My time would come! But I didn’t dare ask how she knew. Honestly, I didn’t want to know. I liked believing that as a mother, she just knew more than I did, that her years of being a parent had not only honed her intuition but that her experience raising three children had given her a sixth sense of how their future would unfold.
I didn’t need proof, I needed comfort, and my mother — with her twice-daily texts, phone calls, and weekly visits — has always been a great comfort. There were times when she was wrong and things didn’t go my way. But even then, instead of thinking that she had been wrong, I found myself thinking that things just hadn’t worked out — yet.
Now that I’m a mother, I’m learning a lot about giving out advice and about the powerful need to comfort my young son when he looks to me for reassurance. At night, after reading aloud and acting out all the different parts in the Harry Potter series, my son and I will lie amongst his vast stuffed animal collection and talk. It’s this time that I cherish, the minutes before I say goodnight and leave him until morning when we laugh, and he shares his deepest thoughts and feelings with me.
“Why was six afraid of seven?” he asks.
“Why?” I say.
“Because seven ate nine!” he yells, and I crack up.
“I miss grandma. She’s so far away, and seeing her on Zoom isn’t the same,” he tells me, and I agree. He collects the covers around him like a giant cocoon and turns to face me, holding his stuffed animal tightly, and I wait, knowing the big questions are coming next. “Mom, what will I do when I get older? How will I be able to live on my own? Who will look out for me when you’re gone?”
I look him in the eye and drape my arm around him. Unlike me, he is not easily soothed with platitudes, and will challenge me by asking — How do you know? Are you just saying that? And what if it doesn’t? Like the bond I have with my mother, ours is a close one. But I don’t want him to only take my word on things, or to trust in the universe — I want him to trust in himself.
I want my son to know that the reason everything is going to be okay is not only because he has the love and support of his parents, but because he is developing the tools to meet any challenge. I want him to understand that my faith has everything to do with my trust in him. And I want him to learn that sometimes things don’t work out the way we expect them to — they can be better.
I use myself as an example of taking a winding path to get to where I am. I was an actor and then worked in marketing before becoming a novelist. They’re all different careers, but they’re also all about telling stories which I love to do. My husband and I were together sixteen years before we became parents; I didn’t think I’d be a mother, and yet, being his mother is my greatest joy.
Sometimes, it’s okay not to have all the answers because our questions are always changing. Instead of telling him, you’ll see that I’m right, I say, let’s see what happens. I say no one knows what the future holds, but whatever comes your way, we’ll manage it together.
And I reassure him that when I’m gone, he’ll be able to handle things on his own.
“Are you just saying that because you’re my mother?” he says.
“No,” I answer, “I’m saying it because you’re my son. And if there’s one person you should believe in, it’s you.”
After two decades of working as an actor, Gina Sorell returned to her first love — writing. A graduate with distinction from the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, she is the author The Wise Women (HarperCollins; 2022) a New York Times Editors Choice, Good Morning America “Buzz Pick,” and one of Parade Magazine and the Today Show Read With Jenna’s Most Anticipated Books of 2022, and of Mothers and Other Strangers, a Great Group Reads selection, and a 2017 Best Book in Refinery 29 and Self Magazine.
Gina balances the solitary hours of fiction writing with work as a creative director and brand storyteller under the banner of her own agency, Words Make The Brand. Originally from Johannesburg, Gina has lived in New York and Los Angeles and now lives in Toronto with her husband and son.
