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So, I kinda dropped the ball on posting for a little bit.  A combinations of things (being busy, being stressed, lack of content, being stressed, trying to relax) made it a bit difficult to keep on top of this.  Hopefully I’ll be getting back into the rhythm of posting soon.  With any luck, this will be the first post in a long line of regular postings.  The impetus for this post was a set of conversations I had with my parents recently and the realizations that came from that.

Everyone knows growing up is hard.  Everyone has a different experience of it and learned thing from different places.  When they have kids, everyone also seems to either forget what growing up was like, or had a different enough experience than their children that teaching certain things gets lost.

From my experience, it seems children never get to see or hear about the troubles the adults they know also went through while growing up.  Sure, parents talk about stories from their childhood here and there, but how often do they talk about the one time they were really drunk in college and went home with some random person.  It doesn’t seem till after kids go through the same or similar experience that their parents bring it up.

Growing up, I always viewed the adults around me in positions of authority as relatively infallible.  It was just something I noticed and it seems became a bit ingrained in me as I aged.   As I grew up, my parents never really talked about their childhood mistakes or the hardships they went through growing up.  Who likes talking about all the times they screwed up, or made morally questionable decisions anyways?

I know that parents tell kids that it’s OK to make mistakes in life, but how often do parents give examples of themselves making mistakes before their kids make the same ones?  It wasn’t until recently that the infallibilty perception began to wear off for me.  My lack of posting recently has been caused by some trying times in my life, but as part of that, I’ve found my parents are more human than the perception left from my childhood let on.   It wasn’t until one night at dinner when my dad came out and said he’s made the same mistakes before that I felt on the same level as them.

Perhaps this is an experience unique to me, or maybe I’m just a late bloomer (wouldn’t be the first time), but  I have a feeling that this is something everyone goes through.  Knowing what mistakes one’s parents made makes it that much easier to understand that mistakes aren’t something to be feared, but are something to learn from.  Though, it’s not like I can blame parents for keeping their mistakes to themselves until their children make the same ones, they are human too afterall.