Adult Kids

Can you picture the relationship you will have with your kids when they are adult? I guess some can. Some of those images might even match the reality. For me, if I could have, I would have been wrong. I couldn’t have and didn’t and the reality still stuns me. On so many levels.

Three kids. All different. The oldest the most like me in many ways, the middle one more like me than either of us will admit, and the youngest like a me that I am still discovering. She is doing things I probably should have a lot earlier in life. She lives a life of free spirit and freethinking that I am living now only she is doing it three decades before I got around to it. Try and wrap your head around that.

She did things that inspired me to do things. Things like learning and giving Bodywork. In her late twenties, she went first. In my late Fifties, I went second. We both ended up in different places……because we are different people. She comes at life in a way that questions things and how they should look. I do that as well. She just did it a lot younger than I did. So we look at things in ways that challenges what is said to be right……and we arrive at two different outlooks , both different than what we were taught and shown as what life should look like.

We are alike in many ways. Kindred rebels. It feels like she is a hippie…..and I am too. She comes at it with a naturalness even though she was born long after the 60s. I came to it eventually even though I lived the 60s and initially made other choices. I guess that makes me a Later Day Hippie……and her…..well, cool. We both question the “system”. We embrace the global community and work on being good members of the eco-system. We are considered a bit weird and embrace what we are with little regard to labels, judgments, or expectations. She is me as I should have been as I become me as I should be. That is as cool as it is freaky.

My parents wanted me to ellipse them. To have more than they did. To amass more stuff and be better off than they were. It was part of the American Dream……that our children with be better off than we were. Each generation an improvement. I kinda hit that mark and kinda missed it by a country mile. My life is much different than I expected and my parents were more inspirational to the man I became then either of them ever knew. They would like the peace and purpose I feel everyday….I am one with the world. They showed me the way. I have it easier than they did and honor them because they were very good people who deserved to have it easier than they did.

When I look at my youngest, she is on the way to be more than me in how she approaches life and touches the world. She will ellipse me……even as I move towards being more of whatever it is I am. She is on track to something important…and right….and all hers. I could not picture our relationship now back when she was that kid and I was that young Dad. It turned out better than anything I could imagine. I hope to be like her when I grow up.

Happy Birthday, Susie. Love, Dad