It can be a sacrifice to stay alive to protect your children:

And on some level it usually is:

However, more than anything else in my life both God and all the people in my life honored me because I always stood by my children and took care of them and protected them no matter what.

Staying alive is a sacrifice before God (it was for me) because I found this world too painful to endure any longer before my son was born. And after he was born in the mid 1970s I realized it wasn't about me anymore it was about him. And then later when my two daughters were born one by one years later it was also about them as well.

So now, when I look back at my life I stayed alive to raise my children right because that is what my parents did too. I carried on with the family tradition of raising my kids right like my father and mother raised me right as well.

Except for whooping cough and blunt trauma childhood epilepsy I had a relatively easy childhood. My father and mother were mystical Christian ministers and so they neither smoked nor drank. Neither of them beat me up like many children I knew were beat up or in the hospital a lot in the 1950s. Or they were kept from the hospital after they were beaten up while parents were drunk so the parents wouldn't be put into jail.

So, compared to most children I knew in the 1950s I was treated very well. my parents were good people and I was very close to them and an only child.

But, that doesn't mean ANYONE's life in the 1950s was easy and that didn't mean that everyone in the 1950s didn't have some form of PTSD from all the bad things that had happened to them along the way. There was much more fear and paranoia and death in life in the 1950s than now even with coronavirus.

The paranoia of people in the 1950s you could almost taste with your mouth as you walked through your life then. It wasn't just black or hispanic people that could be killed easily then, it was everyone.

Anyone could be killed and buried in someone's back yard or cemented into a building somewhere. This was just relatively normal then because so many people were crazy from the Great depression and World War II then.

At least half of the people if you met them today from the 1950s you would say they were nuts.

But, they were also survivors and without them we could not have made the progress we have made since then as a country or as a world.

By God's Grace