I love you just because are my past and therefore my hero…

I’ve watched my kids grow, and with the years flying by they’ll be gone soon. For now though, I realized I’ve learned a few things.

1. They are all pieces of me. Meaning more than biologically, they do things and say things and have specific behaviors that were  never told to them, but weirdly they do and just know.
2. I will never know what the crap I’m doing, at least until they are grown and it’s too late to change any damage I’ve done.
3. It’s ok to make mistakes when parenting, and it’s ok to apologize to your children.
4. It’s ok to cry in front of them.
5. I am my mother, and my children will be me.
6. We are tied to our past through our behaviors whether we know it or not

On #6, I mean more than just the actions and events in our lives, I mean our ancestors and our inherited ‘family jewels’. We all pick up certain parts of learned behaviors from those who raise us. However, biologically I believe we carry some silent traits that we may never know existed in our family line, but are passed down through our genealogy only to surface as an oddity. Some of us are fortunate enough to have grandparents and parents to point out that your laugh is identical to a long-passed paternal grandparent. Or that your tendency to ‘adopt’ stray teenagers is something that your great aunt used to do.  My children do things some times and it’s so close to something I put my mom and dad through growing up, it makes me wonder if it’s something more set in their DNA. So then I wonder, if I got my worrying problem from both of my grandfather’s, passed through from my parents, could I change the behavior now, and spare my kids or their kids from chronic worrying? Or is this trait one of the ones that runs so strong in our blood, that no matter what we do, it will always be there? You may say that I learned to worry from my parents, but honestly, while growing up, there was not alot of worry or stress in our house at all, at least not any that was passed on to us kids.

If you split my personality into equal, but different parts, and then made physical manifestations of them, you would get my kids. Each of them uniquely different, but each of them a very accurate reflection of me.

Could I start a behavior and affect it just as much as stopping one? If so, would 6 generations later repeat that behavior not even knowing it’s something I once did? Or is it more about the learned part of things and less about the DNA? I obviously want to set a good example as my parents did for me, but if my parents weren’t as awesome, would I still have turned out as much like my grandparents as I am? So I wonder, if one of my kids were raised by someone else, would they love art because it runs in their blood? Would they care for the unloved, even if no one told them to? Would they worry about things they have no control over because their great-grandparents did? And mostly, would they bring up disgusting topics over food because that’s what grandpa and mommy does?

Whether the influence that shaped me and will shape my children is learned or imprinted, it all works out to the same result. You are going to be our future’s history and your behaviors are the best way to connect to them. So when you sneeze like your great aunt, like to wear different colored socks like your mother, or have a work-ethic like your dad, instead of trying to understand why you are the way you are, embrace it… it might be in your DNA.