A GIFT FROM MY CHILDREN: THEY HELPED ME SEE My TRUE SELF  

When I was a child, a daughter growing up, I reflected my mother’s image—her habits, nuances, even her opinions.

I  was a mirror. She could look at me and see aspects of herself. But then, I didn’t truly know who I was becoming, though later I changed, advanced, fell backward, tried again, grew. Others saw the changes. I did not…growing up is equal to change. I was just me.

When I became the mother of two girls, they began to reflect and mirror my image, my words, ideas, habits and actions. Gazing into their faces, listening to their speech, observing their choices revealed things about myself. I could see my tendency to be over-cautious in one daughter. “Mom, you shouldn’t carry all those books down the stairs.” The other sometimes reflected my crazier moments, “I’m punk today, Ma, just call me Punky Weirdo.” One liked her room neat and tidy (so me). One liked a sunny messy corner to read in. One would cry easily when hurt by a friend. That’s me too.  And they both were tender to our cat and any child who visited. So okay, I must be doing something right.

VERBAL INFLUENCE

So much of what we do and say around our children, and now around our grandchildren, they take into themselves. Listen!. You will hear phrasing, tone of voice, word choice. My daughter remarked recently that she gets why she uses the word “literally” as emphasis. “Both you and dad just used it in the last five minutes!”  To underline her statement, moments later when Keegan was only four, he walked into the kitchen and said, “It’s really hot out there, Mom, I mean literally.”

This word usage thing is generational, stretching forward and backward. Sometimes when I’m speaking I have no control over what comes out—it is my mother: her inflection, her vocabulary, and often her ideas. I can be my mother, so kind and gentle with a sick child, yet so impatient when things aren’t flowing my way. Is that a good thing?

The answer: we do finally decide, I want to be myself. My own self. Not my parent as we grow, make our own decisions and even as we use our own way of expressing feelings and thoughts. 

And luckily, for both parent and child, we don’t become exact copies. We are finding the paths of choice. Yes, we bring along parental things, but we also change things up—more and more we grow to be just ourselves.

I guess we’re like pieces of glass, catching beams of light, casting them off into the darkness or bouncing them into other pieces of glass. We affect and reflect one another.

And if we have performed our parental tasks well, our children give us back the gift of seeing the best parts of ourselves.  They change others’ lives for the good. They earn a degree, a paycheck, start a company, make a good marriage—and there is something of us in those choices. There is also something of us in the first argument or maybe a divorce, or a job loss. When we parent, we bargain that most of the gifts from our children and grandchildren will be positive and confirming. It’s always been our responsibility to be good models, so that the mirror we eventually look into—the lives of our children—will be good, the light they are beaming out will be mostly bright and positive. It’s a light that we started and that will be carried along to the generations that follow—it’s that gift from our children.

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