Counting Down To Yet Another Birthday

Some thoughts as I countdown to yet, another birthday......

Good or bad, we are defined, as adults, by who our parents were.

We all take into our adult lives, traits and characteristics from the two people who influenced us most during our formative years.

Depending on your childhood, that can be a wonderful thing or a pretty awful thing.

Being like one's mother and father can mean something as simple as having blonde hair and blue eyes or being tall vs being short. It can also be the difference between growing up happy and secure and taking that security with you into adulthood or it can mean growing up unsure, insecure and never really knowing if you matter enough for anyone to love you.

If you are the latter, you spend years trying to escape your past. Inevitably, our pasts catch up with us and turn us upside down, inside out. We fight against it, but we are the only ones who can make peace with what was before, in order to move toward what will be.

Our personal relationships can suffer because we simply cannot believe that anyone could really love us. After all, you grew up thinking that the 2 people who should have loved you the most didn't, so how can ANYONE else love you?

We bumble around trying to escape the timestamps of our childhoods, knowing that when we lay our heads down at night, we are faced with the reality that everything we are today, is because of who we were yesterday.

The problem with running away from the hurts of yesterday, is that we never truly allow ourselves to recognize the good things from those days. All of us have someone, or something that gave us self esteem and some feelings of worth. Someone validated us enough to make us able to get up everyday and move in the right direction. We often find it hard to remember the good times because the bad times are so powerful and that power controls us.

In embracing the good and the bad, and in taking control of our lives and coming to terms with our past, with all of its sadness and despair, we begin to heal and we begin to also forgive.

We come full circle and even tho our childhoods might have been flawed and not what we wished they might have been, we find a way to understand.

Parents are far from perfect. Perhaps some of us had parents who were severely imperfect. It is in forgiving them and all of their flaws, that we can finally begin to accept and love ourselves.