Saturday, September 4, 2010

Building a Foundation of Wisdom

"Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them".....Oscar Wilde

I think there are complicated layers in this parent/child concoction. There are personalities, dispositions, styles of communication, values and substance. In a perfect combination, these layers merge together effortlessly. One thing though.......there is no perfect storm, so to speak. Just a layers fusing and overlapping creating obstacles along the way. Take, for instance, the layer of disposition. Some people are hard wired to be brittle or mellow. Some of us grow to develop direct styles of communication. Sometimes it's abrupt, hard hitting and/or blunt. Other people have soft, diplomatic, inquisitive styles. A direct communication style delivered to a brittle disposition can result in spontaneous combustion. There's a parental style too. My Achilles heel was always respect. It was pretty obvious. It was my daily mantra. Oddly enough.....it is the respect that I required that is MIA with my adult child. My reflection tells me that my most important line in the sand became the weapon of retaliation. Could I have tempered that position with less rhetoric and less intensity? You betcha. But I cannot go back and change the template. I did a lot of right things too. I loved like a mother bear. I protected, guided, laid down boundaries, rewarded with pride. It hurts a lot to have him overlook my benevolence and cherry pick my faults.

"A vessel is not truly empty until it is broken".........Confucius

When I heard this quotation, I knew it was the first ingredient of wisdom that I needed for my personal redemption. I will not become an empty vessel, broken into shards with my essence evaporated on the floor only to fill another vessel with the characterizations that he assigns to me. I am not the names my adult angry child labels me. To wear his characterizations gives him more power than he has the grace to handle. I have to be the person my values dictate. It is not helpful to buy his version of who I am. It locks him into his prison of persecution. It doesn't offer him the freedom of wisdom and perspective. It simply fuels his anger.




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