Say what? I wasn't listening

I love this Maya Angelou saying because it really does sum up every parent out there.  Kids never come with instructions so, each of us, as parents, struggle through life never knowing if we are doing the right thing or not.  Parenting can be overwhelming for all of us at times.  As parents, I think one of our biggest frustrations is trying to help our adult kids to keep from making the exact same mistakes we made.  Yes, yes, experience tells us it's a losing battle.

This feat is much, much easier said then done.  It also makes me laugh when my adult kids say to me: "But my kids just never listen to me."  My response is always: "Well you never listen to me, so why do you think your kids will be any different?"  Yet we somehow do think our next generation will be different, only to discover they are not.  

As adults we like to always think our parents didn't raise us right anyway.  We grow up and think we will raise our kids much, much better, then reality sets in once the kids come along.  You know reality?  It's that shit that gets in our way and kind of crushes our good intentions sometimes.  When we are teens we think: "I'll let my kid go to that all night party with people I don't know.  Geesh, parents are so not trusting of my judgement."   LOL  

We are survivors of the shit creek experiences we've lived through.  We probably didn't listen to our parents either.  Why?  Well we all think our parents grew up with dinosaurs.  So they are prudes, not with it, olden times junk, where they were prudes.  They never thought about sex, drugs or rock and roll.  They were born grownup and just are out of touch with what young people experience.

Some kids as adults, like to be martyrs.  For instance, if they go through a difficult divorce, they think they are the only ones who have ever experienced heartbreak.  The only ones who struggled as single parents.  After all, each generation thinks it invented sex and love.  What we, as parents, did in our spare time, I have no idea.  Like for example, me, myself. I never had a bad divorce.  I never had to leave my once home with only the things I could carry.  I never moved into my first apartment, with two little kids, having no furniture, not even one bed.  I guess if we parents were never in love, our kids must think we simply had some kind of bad business deal just to set up housekeeping until it failed.  

Somehow, adult kids have the notion that we, as parents, are bound to always try to ruin their lives, especially with advice.  They think we have anything but their best intentions at heart.  I guess we are cruel people, we just never knew it till the adult kids come along.  Yet, somehow, they do think a bad boyfriend, girlfriend, or bad spouse, always has their back and always have their best intentions at heart.  In high school they always think their peers, the ones no older than they are, with no more experience than they have,must have better information about life.  Information that usually turns out to be false, simply because friends have lived no longer. 

You know, we, as parents probably hate their choices for partners, just because they picked them.  LOL  Whenever we give advice, we just don't understand their situations, even though we have been in similar situations and know what the outcome will be.  I'm always shocked because do I have to step in front of a truck on the highway to know I can be hurt or killed?  I sincerely hope not, yet adult kids have to toss themselves under that bus in order to understand that fact.  Why do they do it?  Well, that is the age old question.  

Remember, as parents, you just didn't live.  You simply sat in a corner, you were model kids and never, never did anything wild in your lives.  Wow  I think our parents just might have a different opinion on how we acted as kids.  LOL

"AS kids we think our parents are always on our backs.  When, in fact, they were probably the only ones who ever truly had our backs."  Author Unknown

Stuff I could blame my parents for but don't

As adult children I suppose many people like to blame every bad thing in life on how they were raised.  When I think it over, I've met many adults who do just that.  "I had a bad marriage, I should have been raised better."  Or:  "I was spanked as a kid, that was just wrong."   Maybe all those things are true, but as adults, I just think we need to take responsibility for our own bad deeds in life, not blame our parents.  

I had a bad marriage and when I divorced, I realized that being the youngest kid, I was never really taught to take care of myself.  I was sheltered and being a girl, my parents felt the need to really shelter me.  Youngest kid, a girl, well a double whammy for me.  I grew up in a time when the thing to do, as a girl, was to find a husband.  My parents were thoroughly convinced that women needed a husband to get along in adult life.  So much so that it almost became a : "Any port in a storm" situation.  It wasn't just my parents it was a societal mentality.  I would love to tell you that in 2014 all that's changed, but from what I've observed, it isn't always so.  We are still bombarded in the media with what we should wear, how nice we should look, be pretty, be skinny and the list just goes on and on.  For what?  Well to catch a man, of course.  You can deny it all you like, but it's there, every TV ad, every magazine ad and on the Internet.  Sorry girls, but it's true.  It was so bad that not only me, but all my high school girl friends thought they too needed to be married, or else you were just nothing.  The big fear was maybe being single past age 30 and you'd be showing the world that nobody wanted you.  Why do you think romance stories are still so popular today?


My ex is a bad man, I realize most women say this, but it's probably true in their case too.  The way he acted, even in front of my parents, they should have advised me to dump him or at the very least, rethink marriage to this loser.  They never did, but instead, would cut him up verbally to me.  

I had wanted to go to college, but back then, being old school, they never knew about financial aid, so they simply told me they could never afford it.  I got no advice from my adviser in high school either other than: "Well you probably won't have a long career anyway since you girls always seem to get married and have a family and a husband to take care of you."   Sounds silly?  Well by the looks of women's pay out there, apparently society's attitude about that hasn't changed much even now.

Could I blame my parents that I finally got divorced, had to care for two young boys for a long time on my own and I finally did go to college, but not until I was 40 and it was a struggle?  Yes, I could blame them for not shoving me out the door more as I was growing up.  But they did what they knew just as we do now as parents, often times.

My parents never talked to any of us kids about sex or the opposite sex.  I was told: "Just stay away from boys who want certain things."  Seriously?  That is good sex advice?  Of course not.  My parents grew up in simpler times, more sheltered times and my mom found a good man, but I suppose they were hoping I'd 'luck out.'   A sad way to run one's life.  Toss the dice and hope you come out a winner.

I might have made better choices in a husband had I been given some kind of useful advice.  But, alas, I ended up divorced and figuring things out on my own.  It was a struggle, but maybe it made me a better person by figuring it out alone, I don't know.

I hope parents these days are enlightening their kids, especially daughters, about caring for themselves first and foremost.  The list is large, the things we could blame our parents for.

 By the way, I was spanked as a kid and I abhor violence and I turned out okay in spite of the spankings.

Finding a nanny?

This is certainly the life!

I was just reading a 'mommy' type blog that was all about how to narrow the nanny search to make it more manageable.  LOL  

Well this one must have been written for the 'Not So Real Housewives' because never in my life have I been able to afford a nanny.  In fact none of my friends could ever afford nannies either.  Wow!  Taking care of our own kids and households, what a concept that is.  We poor Mommies have it all over those rich broads anyway.  We never have to worry about our husbands running off with those nannies.  We all know, from the Internet and celebrity sites, that nannies and husbands are sex crazed and usually run off with the nanny.  We all know they are consummately insane, those nannies and they drive any otherwise respectable husband insane too.  I'm sure they all are Sirens in disguise.


So all in all, fixing our own meals, changing our own kid's diapers makes us happier, healthier and good wives and mothers.  Well I'm absolutely sure all those chores make us or made us, a lot more tired.  Oh to have to make choices like: Which nanny is good enough for my darlings?  But lack of a nanny does not make our kids any less smart or any less stunning.  Every one of us parents thinks that.

Maybe all poorer, mommies should create their own nanny service and kind of share each others expertise and nanny skills.  That would work out great as the poorer moms could hire out as nannies and solve the lack of jobs in 2013.  An idea to consider. 

Families and holidays

Holidays for most of us either mean getting together with family members or they mean being lonely and not seeing family.

Families are a strange animal, having a life of their own pretty much.  We never quite know what direction they (family members) will take.

Like, well, family members who 'friend' you on Facebook, never really talk to you and kind of just sit in the background.  Why?  I assure you I haven't a clue.  Why friend people if you have no intention of really communicating?

How about real life?  After all real life can be stranger than fiction.  You can live around the corner from your kids and never see them.  Why do kids sometimes only adopt their in-laws and pretend their biological families don't exist?  This, I find, happens very often.

My present husband finds his children (one child anyway) blames him for leaving the state she lives in and blames him for not hanging around to take abuse from his ex.  For the most art, children see through cloudy lenses, believing the parent they live with and like to hold grudges until it hurts and is unhealthy against a parent they perceive as bad.  They have to blame someone.  Adult kids often aren't interested in what really happened and would rather fabricate the scenario on their own.

We cannot crawl into their minds and switch off the misinformation.  I am amazed at how many adult kids think they never make mistakes and when they do find out they made plenty, especially when their own kids grow up, they find out the hard way what their own parents experienced.

Some parents think indulging their own kids with material items will make their kids love them.  Not so.  For is a child has not been given the gift of self-esteem from a mother or a father, they usually will grab the first person who shows them attention because they had felt worthless.  That first person is not always good for them. But how can they be expected to know this when they have not dated enough people to compare them to?  So just because an adult kid looks good on the outside, it may be a different story on the inside.

We all make mistakes as parents.  Sometimes we will pay for them for a long, long time.  But being a young, scared parent does not make one an ogre, only in their kids' minds maybe.  


If you are an adult child, remember your parents will not live forever.  When they are gone, it's too late to make amends.