Your True Self
Sometimes in the future, you may want to be a parent. You will convince yourself that (despite how good your parents have been and continue to be) you will be a better parent than your parents and their parents have been. But being a good parent is not generational, it is deeply personal, and it all comes down to this: If you can bring to your children the self that you truly are, as opposed to some amalgam of manners and mannerisms, expectations and fears that you have acquired as a carapace along the way, you will be able to teach them by example not to be terrorized by the narrow and parsimonious expectations of the world, a world that often likes to color within the lines when a spray of paint, a scribble of crayon, would be much more satisfying.
For the sake of those children, you must look backward instead of ahead, to remember yourself from your own childhood days, when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scarwl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws as well as the many strengths. ~Anna Quindlen
