POGO: Parents of Grown Offspring. You know, the graying couples sitting at brunch, hugging the waitress who brings a rose at the end of the meal because somebody notices and somebody cares. (And please feel free to come up with suggestions as to how to celebrate this new sub-holiday!)

Not that the grown kids aren’t trying. The cards and gifts, if they come at all, come late. If offspring actually show up at dinner or lunch or brunch, it’s scheduled around their other priorities. The phone call is less likely a call than a phone message. If there is cross-generational communications, it may well end with an abrupt “well, gotta run.”

And you know what—until Sunday, as much as I know my children love me and I them—I would have been sad, sad, sad about it, because there will never again be a handprint in clay waiting for me at bedside, along with scrambled eggs on a doily made by the little tykes.

But something happened Sunday. With plenty of time to read (a good thing—the flip side of all the losses associated with children growing up) I picked up a galley preview of a soon-to-be-published book titled When Parents Hurt by Joshua Coleman, Ph.D.

Faithful readers of this blog may recall that I wasn’t enamored with a book on a similar subject—boomers and their grown children—titled Walking on Eggshells, because it seemed to measure the quality of one’s parenting by the brevity of mileage of the adult child from one’s current domicile. With kids on both coasts, and neither within brunching distance, I felt worse and worse about myself with every page turn.

On the other hand, this amazingly helpful book had quite the opposite effect. In fact, I was so transformed into a fit of forgiveness and self-love by page 35, that I had to take a break to blog about it.

Here are a few of the transformative highlights.

First, Dr. Coleman explains that a mother or father is but one quotient in the complex formula that goes into making a child—not the least of which is the genetic temperament of the child him/herself.

“Since parenting is a science of approximations, there is often no perfect outcome or intervention for every single child. In an attempt to make a sensitive child feel safe, we could be accused of being excessively protective” (for instance…) He goes on to write that for mysterious reasons, some mediocre parents seem to be worshipped by their children while some exceptional parents are rejected. In other words, it’s at least not all entirely the parent’s fault.

This message is the right-on next stage message for boomers, who from the days of “My Mother, Myself” through “Passages”, onto “Simple Abundance” and “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” have looked for external affirmation that what they’re experiencing is “normal” and that they’re really “okay.” And as long as when boomers go to the bookstore, they don’t already assume that they know it all, this book could really hit the spot for many, perhaps even spawning its own line of greeting cards. “Happy POGO Day. It really wasn’t your fault.”

Carol Orsborn