Lessons From my Parents 1/3

Who are the people that poured in to you or took from you to teach you some of life’s hardest but important lessons? Can you picture at least three of them for better or worse? Do you see the benefits or downfalls as you continue to learn these lessons time and time again?

It could be a lesson on the beauty in the small things, self protection from those who have tilted your world, the strength it takes to get back up or a your drive to move forward. Not all lessons are learned the first time, the easy way, or at the right time. But experiencing those people and their lessons in your world creates a ripple of impact on you.

I hope that you see friends, family and/or parents on that short list, people who have built you up through lessons and taught you about the power of your humanity. Taught you that it’s your soul, faith, that fierce independence, and your times of weakness that are the power in the person you are.

My parents taught me countless lessons and I’m certain they didn’t know that I was learning from them, from their example. They gave me the space to understand that my heart on my the sleeve comes with challenges, breakage, battle wounds that may never heal but mostly it comes with the strength that they built in me to approach the world this way.

I was told my Mother had the ability to “love people through it.” Read that again — to love people through it. That takes a courage beyond my reach most days and that I sometimes fear I didn’t inherit.

She had a deep well of love for those around her that often left her heartbroken but never beaten down. Love was how she went head strong into everything. To be clear, love isn’t always rainbow and sunshine as most people know. Love comes in many shapes and forms that define how people see it and equate its value in their world.

Think about the couples who “complete one another” — trust me, you were complete before that version of love lit up your world and you will be complete after it. For these couples that version of love has changed how they see the world and themselves which is both breathtaking and heartbreaking while you are in it or when you have to come to terms with the loss of it. Love finds the people in this world that will help it rebuild itself time and time again.

My Mother continuously showed me her versions of love and how that could both make or break her day. She showed me that being able to stand tall in your love of self, family, friends, life could be the thing that pulls people to you. It can be the thing that leaves you crying at night but never the thing you give up on.

Her love was endless in her care of my Father and I. She used her skills — numbers, banking, planning, lunches made, security in a home that was far from perfect but always open for me to return to even as an adult- this was her loving me through it, through my growth, through my life.

Imagine moving through the world with the unspoken drive to love people through it. There were times when I saw the exhaustion of this heart wide- open strategy in her, more than I can count. But she got up the next day, living in our imperfection and starting again from that same place. Starting from how we can love one another through the battle ahead.

To love people through sadness, disappointment, madness, ups and downs, because at the end of the day they are figuring out how to use their lessons learned as well. Not everyone sees this example of love and I can’t even count the number of times I yelled, fought, pushed and pulled for my independence from what I thought, at the time, was her shadow.

I see now it wasn’t a shadow but a path, one that had dark patches and that scared me. But it was her ability to still see me, her daughter at the end of the day. She waited for me to return to the person I was trying to become and by her example built in me a fierce love for the people who have come in and out of my life.

If you had asked my mother what she taught me she would have said very little and that I was raised by the community, our village.

Yet, even in the village you have the people who are your home and my parents continue to be my home — they continue to love me through it as I grieve them. They continue to shine a light for me to follow, in the darkness that only I can see.

Love Ray