jkeyes
Senior Member
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Afterlife Knowledge Member
Posts: 368
Tucson,Az
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Linh,
Great dilemma to pose! Having choices can sometimes be a bummer. As I get older, I like to see the dilemmas posed by the younger generations. Also I like this thread because it discusses parents and children, a topic dear to my heart. I haven’t seen my children in a long time, as it seems to me. Actually it’s probably been over a year since I saw then but we do keep the heart connection going thru phone contact.
I do want to mention that my experience with having children was one big learning curve. Originally I thought it was all about me teaching them. That’s how naive I was. They’re all grown now-one’s mission is to insure that our big companies don’t do funny accounting, the next making sure our California wines are of the best quality, and the last helping to bring the 2005 poker championships into our homes. Two of them were unplanned and the other; their father and I worked very hard to bring him into the world. (I early on imagined that he was a monk meditating in a cave in a former life?) That one was the most challenging, translated means that I learned the most about being a decent human being from. One of them, so far, has provided me with, what I suspect, is one Indigo child and one Crystal child. I was devastated and had a systems crash when I had to leave them all with only an average of 10 years each hands on parenting by me. I decided to step back and give my sons the father that neither of their parents ever had. They also had the side bonus of a loving stepmother who has since died. I also believe/imagine that the three of us parents sat down with our guides and divvied up our roles or chores that revolved around the raising of the 3 brothers before we all came here. That may be just a fantasy because I haven’t really checked that one out yet on the other level but I did mail the tale to my former husbands wife and it did help in healing our relationship the year before she died. (But Hey, the crazy things we do in attempts to heal a relationship) But the upside was that I was able to start my spiritual journey in earnest without the worry of passing my belief systems about spiritual matters on to my impressionable young sons. My value doesn’t include teaching religion to children except maybe in a very general historical way. I prefer to model my values, which include my faults and acting like a jerk sometimes as my human right.
When I was a live-in parent, I had attempted to give them the truth that they were lovable, capable, and unique. I think that the message took because it’s obvious to me that they’re each unique and capable and the love that I feel from them when we talk is palatable to me. Concerning the unplanned ones, I tend to view them more as having chosen me as their mother. And if it wasn’t for them choosing me, I would have spent a lot more time debating, as any responsible prospective parent tends to do, the should I and shouldn’t I question. I was further complicated by their father leaning definitely towards not wanting children. But then I remembered that I had always wanted 3 sons-3 years apart because I imagined it would be as fun as it was for me having my 3 younger brothers. My remembering this brought on the should we stay married or not dilemma. We did stay married till the children were here and once I learned to mellow out after taking Gordon’s PET classes and becoming a PET instructor, it was as fun as I had imagined. As far as the difficulty in raising them, it ran both ways, and then I came across Ashley Brilliant’s question, “Is it harder to be the parent of a child or the child of a parent?” and laughed. And as to an attitude to take towards raising them, I always agreed with Gilbran’s Speak to Us of Children from The Prophet. It’s right on for me.
To comment on whether or not you should have a child, I wouldn’t dare to persuade you either way except for stating that by having a child you might interpret it as your personal sign that you have hope in the future. I do not envy your 2005’s predicament; there are no guarantees what direction yours or your child learning curve might lead or how you or she/he might react to the experience. When I was at that point, 1950’s values dictated that of course a woman did have children especially if she didn’t have a career and she had to have a hard working husband to do it. I usually balked at the word duty because it bordered on the dictate that it was a woman’s duty to have children and I usually rebelled at the shoulds. I feel them in my gut and I’ve learned that I need to really weigh them before I automatically rebel against them and cut off my nose to spite my face. At the time, I also felt a little guilty that I was using being a mother as a cop out from getting a high education and a paying career. Now a days, it’s assumed that the mother has to be prepared to do it all. I think that’s as sad as the other extreme. As it turned out, I was the first woman in my family to go to college and started when my first child was only 2 years old. I finally graduated at 60 years old, over 35 years later and started my first official career within a month of graduation. Who would of thunk that life for me would have turned out the way it did? But then again, I loosely quote that great prophet, John Lennon, Life is what happens when your making other plans. Or if you believe in God, I pass on the joke, “If you want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans!”
As an aside, when I am in the grips of feeling fearful, I picture them and the love we share, going in either direction in my heart area, and it desolves my fear instantly.
Thanks for giving me this opportunity to blab and share my story regarding children. I hope it helps. It certainly brings me closer to my sons.
Love, Jean
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