The Point

I’m amazed by my children’s reverence for me.  All I have really ever done is love them intensely, and while I think that being loved is a very great thing, I’ve never had any choice about loving them.  It came naturally, it had it’s own strength, it had it’s own life.  So there is a part of me that feels rewarded – for no effort on my part – I never had any choice about loving my kids.  It just is.  I am thinking about all of this because in the last month, I have received great warmth and support from them.  They have managed my life very well.  It is interesting how they will trade  responsibility for me around.  One takes over when there is physical work to do, one takes the lead when there is emotional work to do, one does a lot of nurturing, and medical is yet another facet of  mom-management.

Who talks to me, when, where and why, may be the result of a family council meeting that I was not invited to.  To be revered and yet “managed” is an interesting experience and can only come from your kids – there is no other place where these unique experiences are formed and then collide.

I have been thinking about why I started this blog…

It really started because in the “push me pull you” conflict of burgeoning young adulthood, I always felt that there was one more thing that I needed to either tell my kids or explain to my kids before they left the safety of home.  Now, mind you, this dilemma of mine has been going on for 18 years – I mean Russ is 36.  It’s been awhile since the first of my many flew-the-coop.  What they taught me as they teetered through their twenties, is that parenting is never a done job.  Gradually the fear that I had not taught them enough was replaced by a fear that I could never teach enough – through the end of time.  And trust me, I don’t believe that I know the secret to life, I just believe that a concept learned must be shared.

I had to write, hence the blog and the attempt at completing all of life’s lessons for my brood.  The blog gets shaky in purpose at times, and the point is sometimes lost to urgent matters of life, like health and love and romance.  But in the end, it is always really about them and my need – to not lose the lesson.  My family is a hard-headed bunch who prefers experience to wisdom.  Shake that up with this mysterious phenomena of a wildly different personality with each birth and you have no real constructive way to help others with lessons of life.  In fact, each life lesson is different for each personality.  You can be hammering away on intellectual development and that is not what child number two needs, child number one needed that.

So, there is some innate sense and depth of failure inherent in the process of parenting.  One can never tell what issue will face your child.  Then you add the confounder that each personality will handle the issue differently and you really have some confusion – or at least I do.  (Geez, on some days, I can’t even get their names right.)  Is this a self esteem issue, or is this pride, or is this insight, or is it heartbreak?  How do I respond, what if I lose this moment, this chance at wisdom given, shared?

So here I am with my blog.  Reading has always had a profound influence on my life and I can say that each of my life’s transitions were shepherded by meaningful works shared by people who – like me – had to write.  I am incredibly grateful to all of those folks who had to share by writing and I am incredibly grateful to be able to write.