Reflections Remembered

I’m being propelled to write this post by that fact that I’ve finally gotten going on my boys’ memory journals. I used to write all the time when I was younger. Poetry, song lyrics, even a few short stories and reflections. It’s been a long time since I actualized that ancient art of cursive writing, rather than typing away on one of my Apple devices. It’s amazing what comes out of you when you let your pen in hand start moving you on a page.
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It’s been a breath of fresh air to put pen to paper again. The past few years have been a whirlwind and it was REALLY GETTING TO ME that I couldn’t remember Tristan (4 yrs old) at Caelum’s age (15 months). So I sat down and hammered out every season of Tristan’s life up to now, using my personal Instagram profile to jog my memory of what happened when. It has indeed been refreshing to really cement in my mind what happened in Tristan’s life at what time. I can really see more clearly now, as a parent, how Tristan’s not so little personality was affected by choices I made, though of course I do understand that nature (vs. nurture) also plays a huge part. Isn’t it interesting, in reflecting on all of that, how we are so much the byproducts of our parent’s faults as well as their strengths? Of course, it is our personal challenge to rise above what has happened to us in the past and work on ourselves and our lives to better our future; however, aside from our unique gifts and crosses to bear, the tools that we start out with, and on what level of the playing field, really are mainly a mishmash of what our parents gave to us, and their parents before them, and their parents before them… Genetics and lifestyle.
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Despite what my social media profiles may look like (I’m not very public with my personal life), our family has had a pretty rough time since getting going. We’re doing better now, but it’s been a tough 5 years since getting pregnant with Tristan, our little surprise, born just two years after we got married. We weren’t ready. He was adorable, but we were still trying to figure out our marriage and all the crap that we brought into it from our own upbringings. You know… All that stuff that comes with having the parents you have, and grandparents, and great grandparents… Your childhood… The junk most of us gotta work through. Especially if we’re to survive the life challenge of marriage lol. Two completely different people coming together to try and live life as one. Tristan maybe got the short end of the stick a little bit from two silly people who had a lot to learn about unselfishness (still do… speaking of which, I should call my grandma). I have loved Jeff and the boys so much through it all… through thick and thin. Jeff loves me and the boys too. #Grateful
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I suppose it’s cleansing, in a way, to really start to see, through writing, the flow of how and why we are who we are and why we do what we do. We are so molded by our exposures and the reactions and responses we have to them. And yet in that, we have so much control of our outcome and the outcome for our children, and their children, and even their children after that!
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I have so much more to tell you about our family and what the last few whirlwind years has been like, but I’m told long blog posts don’t work so well. For now I’ll just say that since becoming a mom, I’ve become a more purposeful person, year after year, in my attempts to give my children better than what I had, and what my parents had before that, and so on. It’s the only way to live! I guess it’s really about teaching them how to love…. To love life, people, the earth and it’s creatures… God, of course. It’s just amazing to really let it sink in that everything we do in our life literally shapes future lives – that of our family, for generations, and all the lives they affect. The boys’ memory journals for them are definitely a part of my attempt at greater purposefulness – capturing moments in time, cementing them in history, not letting their little lives be forgotten. So Tristan and Caelum are celebrated in cursive.
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2016 was an especially tough year for our family, as I know it was for a lot of people. It’s made us stronger. More on that next time. Here’s to 2017. ?
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“What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.” – Mother Teresa