I like to live in a world called Denial.
I know you want to teach me your morals because you believe they're right. But I also have morals that I think are right.
Your job is to teach me and state what you have to say; my job is to listen and take what I can from it and to make what I will of it.
As parents, your advice and life lessons can only get you and your child so far. Your influence and power are so limited by the limitlessness that stands before your child. The endless possibilities of results A, B, C, D, and so on stands before the child's very choice. Of course you, as parents, would only know the results behind A or B because it is the result of the choice you had already made. You made a decision and have seen only one result of the potential many. However, for the child, the possibilities are endless because the choice hasn't been made yet.
As children, we are aware that in the end, our parents want the best for us. Of course, we share that same goal but it is the process that we're most curious about. We see the end already, we're expecting it. But how we get there is the exciting part. Maybe not exciting, exactly, but consists of some type of unpredictables. As we mature, we become more aware. Usually our parents fail to see this self-awareness and growth and instead see a version of our younger selves, walking around in our diapers and singing to Barney. They yearn those easier days when the world was less scary and our lives were easier to understand, before the complexities, heartbreaks, and heartaches consumed our lives. They worry so much that they've placed themselves in a world of Denial.
But one day, they wake up and see that we, their children, have all grown up. They've missed a huge chunk of our lives all because they were stuck in their own world, a place they escape to when we hit middle school and come back from on our wedding day.
I'm just saying that even those closest to us, share the same blood, spent most of our lives with, don't know all of us. We never do, know all of ourselves. We grow left and right, trying to shape ourselves in all of the right places, but we're never satisfied. We place our own minds into Denial and like to dwell there during our struggles and stress. But here's the problem. As we've seen in parents, what good can dwelling in Denial do? Time passes, as it waits for no one, and by the time we get back from that world, we would've missed a huge chunk from our lives.
