Hello Dear Ones!
Our family is expanding! The most recent addition – just over one week old now – made his dramatic appearance in the wee hours of a Saturday morning to the relief and happy, tearful joy of his parents. Mike and I are now grandparents to two strong, healthy and beautiful boys, 23 months apart in age.
Due to the change in family dynamics that my son and his wife are just now beginning to experience (and will continue to experience for the next 18-20 years of their lives!), Mike and I thought to use the subject of family as our topic this week.
Families are as varied as there are people in the world. Most of them are dysfunctional in some fashion or another. If you are one of the lucky ones – like I was – your family will have kept the FUN in dys-fun-ctional. The majority apparently do not. We are, none of us, perfect. Within the structure of my own upbringing, my placement as eldest of my siblings entitled me to certain roles and responsibilities. There are research studies defining the character developments and interplay of first born versus last born and middle born children. Each of us has our own strengths and weaknesses. Interactions between the differing birth rankings also adds to the family equation.
As a parent, we often swear that there is no way we are going to treat our children the same way our parents treated us. We may have had the best of upbringings, however we are determined we are going to do things differently, perfectly.Yet we all find ourselves blurting out words or behaving in certain patterns quite familiar. And we become distraught when we realize that is exactly what our parents did or said – and with the exact same inflection! Horror upon horrors!
I swore I’d be the perfect parent. My children were going to have the ideal upbringing. Well, it didn’t happen. Years later, I berated myself for not being a better mother, for doing this or not doing that. I’d go back in time in my thoughts and my emotions to relive a scene and make it better – to say the right thing or do something differently. I see the effect my words and actions have had on my sons. Both because of and in spite of my parenting skills, they have turned out to be wonderful men – my sons! Yet I ache knowing they are likely to repeat the very things that I was so emphatic about not wanting to inflict upon them – the things my parents had done. Despite good intentions on my part to ensure my children, as adults, avoid the same pitfalls I did, here they are carrying what I saw as imperfections in my parents and in myself possibly – and according to statistics, very likely – to be extended into one more generation.
If you are a parent you know how often you have to bite your tongue to keep yourself from saying something you will regret – something you know that could potentially do more harm than good. It is a fine line we tend to live moment by moment and day by day.
Yet there is something that I’m finding has made a difference for me in recent years. I would have liked to have had this wisdom and knowledge while my sons were small and growing up. I did not. Fortunately for my sons as adults and for their children (my two grandsons at this point) I am now living the life of someone who is more spiritually aware, someone who knows of and lives the Law of Attraction and is becoming more and more consciously aware of my impact within and upon my own life, the world around me and upon those with whom I interact.
Fully understanding and appreciating that each and every individual with whom I come in contact is – whether adult, infant or somewhere in between – a unique, powerful, multi-dimensional, spiritual being. Yes, even an infant. My one week old grandson has an innate, dynamic presence all his own. Physically he requires the ministrations of his parents for the very fundamental sustenance of life – someone to feed, clean and nurture him – but he is a spiritual being come to experience a physical life. As such, he is already mature and wise in ways of the spirit. It is merely in the ways of the physical that he needs to be taught.
Sadly, in many current societies – including mine – we teach the spiritual right out of us. The physical has become dominant. Obnoxiously so. Seeing auras, talking and listening to plants and animals, having invisible friends and loving all people unconditionally for who they are no matter their physical or emotional challenges, these become detriments to social and educational conditioning rather than an honouring of the spirit within themselves as individuals and within all things.
As a grandparent, my role and responsibility is now to help buffer the negative impact of society as a whole and to allow each child to be themselves with me – totally. That means offering unconditional love, support and encouragement in order to honour and accept them for who they truly are at the core of their being – their very soul. It means I get to play and to see and to interact and to live life as a child once more – through their eyes and with their imaginative and more holistic recognition of reality as it can and should be – not as society today has chosen to limit it. And the gifts that I brought into this world with me back those many, many years ago can now come forward and be expressed fully, freely and with love. A love that I can give out and receive back. A love that fills me up and that flows out from me – to my grandsons, my sons and their wives, my dear husband, my extended family and friends and, most importantly, to mySelf. (Yes, that was an intentional spelling – with a capital S!)
We are, all of us, dear reader, family. All That Is. We are connected one with the other. There is no separation. Physical reality is merely a mask that makes us believe, for a mere lifetime, that we are apart from one another. We are all as close – maybe closer – one to the other as a mother and her unborn child. The Earth herself, and we as her children, we are all family.
Now, where is the closest puddle … I’m ready to jump in and make waves … or mud pies if I choose!
In Light and Laughter,
Marcia
Follow this link to read Mike’s View.