As you age you learn a whole lot but most younger people think they know everything already so they don't want to hear it. They want to have their own experience. I was like this too. I wouldn't listen to anyone either so I made a lot of mistakes during my life. After all, I've been married three times and I only planned once among other things. I remember when my parents told me I couldn't marry my then pregnant girlfriend as they said something like, "Even though she has a 170 IQ she has had a really rough life and we don't think you should marry her." My response then at about age 26 was to throw a chair through a plate glass window that was about 5 feet by 6 feet in size and then my parents realized I wasn't going to let my wife to be waltz off alone pregnant just because they didn't think she was a good permanent life choice. After all, she was going to have my baby (son) who is now by the way 37 years old. And yes, they were right by the way we broke up and divorced when my son was about 3 years old and I got custody. But did that matter to me at the time I broke the window? NO. Not at all. Life doesn't often give us perfect choices. Life just gives us choices and besides I had always wanted to be a father because things had not been going very well for me since I was about 21 (18 was when I really noticed things (because of the Viet Nam War) were not going well for ANY of my generation at that time. So I was just one of millions of my generation both in and out of Viet Nam who were very very upset about the whole thing (50,000 of us died over there and 250,000 of us were wounded). We all took this very personally and felt sort of like the government or police had come into our high schools and colleges and machined gunned some of us to death back then. This was a pretty universal feeling in California where I lived among college students and thinking A and B High School students. So a lot of the craziness back then was from a complete mistrust of our government regarding the draft as a way to kill many of us back then.
So, today I often find myself in the position of my father and mother. Of wanting to tell my kids or God Children or their friends the truth about everything. However, kids between 15 and 30 or so don't usually want to know the truth about what likely will happen given jobs and relationships and the like. As very experienced adults we have often already suffered through many of the kinds of bad decisions that kids (under 30) are making today. And I must tell you it is very hard not to tell them of the kinds of problems they are facing.
For example, my son's girlfriend from Brazil when he was 29 told him that he should marry her. When I had first met her I thought that she might kill him. He was very intelligent with an IQ of 150 or more and so was she but she had a 3rd world ruthlessness about her. And I knew if she had been my girlfriend it was somewhat likely that she would have wanted to kill me so I feared for my son. But luckily my son is not me and was always faithful to her (despite how difficult she was) and it was she after about 5 years that walked out on him. So, even though I was right about everything and even told him of my fears he still married her and everything turned out pretty much exactly as I thought it would. And then he was suicidal because she was incredibly beautiful and he missed her. So then his next girlfriend was 12 years younger than him so this was very disturbing to me in another way. This time the problem was the 12 years difference and another very beautiful and attractive woman who was only about 21 years of age. So, this time he was with someone who if he stayed with her long enough it just might work out. It has now but this is about 4 years later and it was a pretty rough 3 of the 4 years because of just how hard it is for anyone to grow up. So I don't worry so much now as things are going much smoother now.
So now, this time it is my God Daughter that we pretty much raised after age 18 and partly from about age 15. She started out with a scholarship to a very good prep school and graduated with honors there but after her mother became to ill to longer care for her or herself we took care of her as best we could and saw her through good and bad boyfriends (one who beat her up and stalked her that was arrested) and then the one she is with now who stood up to the bad one and whose life was threatened. So anyway the good boyfriend graduated from college and now they want to get married. But everything keeps changing and it is looking more like a career driven marriage (his and hers) and all the pitfalls of two very beautiful and intelligent and well educated people moving down a (two career path) with all its pitfalls. He was going to accept a good position near us here but now he has suddenly decided they don't want to move back here as he wants to be a lawyer. (He's definitely intelligent enough for that). However, like I said before once people move from a very happy relationship driven experience and then go to a twin career kind of experience often they have about 5 years or less as a relationship. And children don't necessarily make things better. (They usually get much better or much worse or sometimes both things happen at the same time until you want to scream) (Uncle!) (Stop the world I want to get off!) And at this point this is where many relationships break down because they prioritized their careers over their relationships and their families. It's a hard road and when you are young you don't know all these things. It's only through hindsight that we all get smart enough to actually understand a lot of this stuff. When you are young everything is just so emotional and intense and often times you think you know everything and older people are just full of it. (Well sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't). So how do you know? That's the 64 million dollar question for people of every age right there!
No comments:
Post a Comment