This term, I am taking a course called Creative Writing through Reading and it has made me pay even closer attention to words. Yesterday, driving on my own for a few hours, I caught these words on the Broadway album for Bruce Springsteen.
We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children’s lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them, and we haunt them, or we assist them in laying those old burdens down, and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors, we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way, and some transcendence.
I am not going to pretend that, as much as I love his music, that Bruce is a profound philosopher. He is, though, able to articulate things for some people, give hope to others, and entertain millions.
The words quoted above make sense to me.
I believe that if we are self-aware, we can be better. We can be better parents, better citizens, better partners – simply better.
Not that I’ve been asked, but if I were to give advice to another parent, here it is: deal with your crap, whatever it is, deal with it.
Whatever you need to do to put down your burden, do it, so that you can walk alongside your children, and not be the barrier between them and the life they deserve.
