Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

“In the beginning children love their parents. As they grow up they judge them. Sometimes they forgive them.” –Oscar Wilde.

Beth and I are now in the stage where the White progeny are judging us. Comparing us across all kinds of parental times and domains as it were. I think Beth is going to fare quite well in that process, with little for them to forgive, and anything that might require forgiveness done so without much fanfare. As parents we have searched our memories as children in order to bring forward those things we cherished in our own parents, and to banish (as much as possible) those things for which we found it necessary to forgive them.

You see, the rules of parenthood are in may ways the same as the rules of childhood because the currency is the same for both. Whether Mom or child we have but two coins with which to carry on the commerce of our relationships: love and forgiveness. Mothers don’t always like their children, and children don’t always like their mothers, even on Mother’s Day! But almost without exception they love one another, even during times when they may not really like one another too very much at all.

It’s in the forgiveness, I think, that we recover from those periods where we don’t like our parents, and indeed where we don’t like our kids. This part of both motherhood and childhood lasts as long as one is privileged to be some Mother’s (or Father’s) child. As children we should strive to remember this, strive always to spend not only the love coin but also the forgiveness coin, today and for as long as we are privileged to have a Mom.

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