Life Stories

It has been a while since I have posted on my blog and in some bizarre way I have missed writing all of the different learning experiences that I have had recently.

In previous blogs I have had the opportunity to share about the wonderful trip that Dean and I took to Chile and Antarctica. It was an experience that has impacted my life - the people and the place changed me and helped me to grow. It was as if we were meant to be there and return back to our home in the planned time frame. Because exactly two weeks to the day, Chile was struck by an 8.8 earthquake one of the biggest in the country's history. Following were multiple aftershocks, power outages and destruction. Dean and I are thankful to be home, but our hearts and prayers go out to the people who are living there in the country's upset environment. We are looking for ways to help even though we are so far away. We are using this experience to try to teach our family that we have the ability to help people even if we can't see them face to face. Our stories of being there, make Chile real for our children and we hopefully can share the importance of helping others as well.

The last few weeks have been full of different learning moments for each of us in our home. And things that happened to me in my distant past have returned in the form of stories for my children as we navigate through life together - taking the good and the bad and making it work in our family. In the book, Kitchen Table Wisdom Rachel Naomi Remen, MD shares this thought:

"We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most of those stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity of the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with a previously unsuspected meaning. It is almost as if we have been collecting pieces of a greater wisdom, sometimes over many years without knowing."

I never dreamed that things that I had done when I was younger - my stories - would be so significant at this point in my life. But I find that when we encounter bumps in the road at our home, it is the stories that we share that tie us together. Yes, I share my imperfections with my children - I filter them but I share them. That is tough for me because I don't want them to see all that I have done wrong but I do need them to see that I am human and that I have been a teenager too. Sure it doesn't make every situation better but somehow it seems to help them see that I have walked in similar steps and that through our mistakes we can learn and grow.

Dr. Remen goes on to say; "One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures."

How grateful I am for my life experiences, my failures and my successes. Those are the things that have shaped that person that I am and those are the things that will help me to mold the person that I am to become. I just hope in some small way I can help my children to grasp their life moments, good and bad, and to glean all that they can from them in an effort to shape and structure their future and posterity to come.