Why the blog...

I have just begun work on the blog sites for my parents and my hubby's parents. Frankly, I hadn't done so just to create a "lest we forget" Internet monument to four archetypal parents. I really wanted to provide venues for reflection on what we understand about our moms and dads.

Barring the two or three posts to jumpstart these blogs, I don't intend to be the primary contributor. Just thought that my siblings, siblings-in-law, and I have reached a point in life where we have done enough living and observing of our fellow men to come to some understanding and wisdom. No matter what the dynamics were in our individual relationships with our parents, negative or positive, surely now we can see how everything fits in the scheme of things that we call "life."

As younger adults, we were all so busy "getting and spending" and jockeying for position in the human rat race. Now in advancing middle age or beyond, we have the time for some serious reflecting and evaluating. Most of us are parents and grandparents ourselves, and I bet there isn't a one of us who hasn't seen one or both of our parents in ourselves in the way we have interacted with our children-- an action here, a reaction there that validate our common gene pool.

Even if we aren't parents, we all share that same "switch" in our consciousness that turns on the light of transcending awareness that we truly are our fathers' and mothers' children.

The resulting conclusion--at least mine, anyway-- is that it's all good, even the bad. I mean what I say in the biblical sense of "good." Can't I substitute "just" for "good"?

We have seen and sampled enough trees to turn our study to the forest.

Our parents have/had virtues and vices, beauty marks and warts, yet the sum of their parts is admirable (in our mothers' case, almost saintly). All four of them lived through the horrors of war. They emerged from their crucibles stronger and more resilient people than their children can hope to be.

We can stuff that thought in our pipes and smoke it.