For the past couple of days I've been thinking quite a bit about parenting. A theme keeps coming up with many people I've been talking to lately. I have wanted to get it down here for awhile but I've been so busy - which has been frustrating. However, last night, D and I got to go out on an actual date together. We had a great long talk about Franklin, when we first met, more Franklin, moving to Edmonton or anywhere else, more about Franklin, and finally, we talked about Franklin. How can we not talk about our amazing kid?

What has been coming up recently is how easily our little idiosyncracies and the way we have been brought up can be passed on to our children. I have this immense amount of respect for a woman I know who did not have a very good childhood yet, her adult children are beautiful people. She has such a good relationship with them and she has consciously made the decision to change the pattern that she had inherited from her Mother.

Being a Mom now, I am starting to understand how our baggage from our own lives can sneak into our parenting in the smallest ways. To be present enough every day to change ingrained behaviour takes an immense amount of energy - especially when you are dealing with a lifetime of negativity.

I also have a friend who is raising a teenager and is noticing that the parenting she is dealing with now is incredibly different than the basic mode of providing and guiding that I do with Franklin. It seems that with a teenager it is not so much what you tell them but what you do yourself. I know this is true for parenting at any age, but a teenager doesn't really want to listen to your words of advice very often. It must be so scary - to have to let go and hope they have been listening to you all those years. I remember advice my parents gave me when I was young and as I went through university, but my teen years? I must have had a thick wad of cotton stuffed in there. Apparently, nothing they said would have any relevance to what I was going through - jeeeez!

I also have another friend who is preparing to have a baby and she is having all these thoughts about her own baggage, and how she wants to raise her child free from it all. You can't free yourself entirely from it of course, it makes up who you are, but to be conscious of it is such a strong step in the right direction. To blindly step into parenting thinking that you've either dealt with everything or will be able to hide it all from your kids is ludicrous.

I still find myself checking my emotions when I think someone is a bully to Franklin, or some old biddy tells me he's a "hefty" boy. I even check myself when they tell me how intelligent and advanced he is in something. I don't want him to think we value him for any specific reason other than that he is our son and we love him. I never thought that could be so hard.