▸ Column · Star Wars original-trilogy era — a reply scrawled from the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, with Leia reading over his shoulder.
HAN SOLO replies.
Replied to by Han Solo, with a rebuttal from Leia Organa.
The letter
My nine-year-old gets exactly forty-five minutes on the holo-arcade on school days — no exceptions, the cooker timer's set and everything. Last rotation his whole friend group linked up to watch some big podracing-sim tournament together over comms, and my boy just sat there with a borrowed datapad reading, because his time was spent. He didn't whine or cry, which somehow made it worse — he just shut his door and pretended in there that he didn't mind. My husband says I've built an entire law of parenting around a number I more or less pulled out of the air three cycles ago, back when the kid was six, and that I'm more loyal to the rule now than to whatever good it was supposed to do. I honestly can't tell anymore: am I keeping him off the spice, so to speak — guarding him from the screens — or am I just the parent who turns him into the odd one out while every other kid is making the normal memories together? How do you know when a limit that once made sense has gone rotten into plain stubbornness?
Han Solo replies
First thing — your husband's right, and you know it, or you'd have picked the fight with him instead of writing me. Three cycles back you picked a number. Fine. A number's a tool. But a tool that worked on a scared parent and a six-year-old — that's not some law of the galaxy, sweetheart, that's a setting. And settings get changed when the run changes.
I fly the Falcon by feel. The manual's got a lot to say. Half of it'll get you killed, because whoever wrote it never flew the actual ship.
Here's the part that'd stick in my teeth. The kid didn't cry. He shut the door and ran the cool act — "I don't care." Look, I invented that act. Been running it since before you were born. Nobody bothers with it unless they care plenty. That's your answer, not the timer. The thing you were guarding him from Friday — a kid alone in a room — you built that one yourself.
I'm not saying torch every rule. You asked how you know one's gone sour. It's gone sour when you're protecting the rule and the kid's the one paying for it. Let him in the room with his friends. Don't make a whole thing out of it.
— Han Solo
Leia Organa weighs in
Han hears the closed door. I hear the question. "How do you know when a limit's gone rotten" — that's not a question, Solo, that's a hiding place. She's known since Friday. What she wants is permission to keep not-deciding, and I won't hand it over. The number is doing for her exactly what a title does for the useless — letting her feel like she's parenting without making one hard call. So make it. Tonight, before he's asleep: you're in for the next tournament, with your friends, and we'll sort the rest as we go. Protecting him and letting him belong were never opposites. You don't choose. You decide — then correct course, like anyone who's actually led.
— Leia Organa
▸ Read next