My father was a country music songwriter but he was never able to be successful at it for many reasons, mostly because of the times he lived in, the commitments and obligations to a family of eight children he and my mother produced and because, in truth, he had too many demons in his psyche to ever truly be able to do what his soul called him to do. But he left this legacy for me to take up in his stead. I’m not a songwriter but I am a writer and even though it took me many years to allow my soul to have its way, I am now a full-fledged writer.
In another case, a friend of mine’s dad contracted TB as young man and was sent off to a sanatorium to live in an iron lung until he recovered. He did recover and marry and have two children but worked his whole life at something that was never even close to being a call of his soul – it was just a job. But when he retired he outfitted his basement workroom with all the tools of the trade of a wood working genius. He started making furniture and other things out of wood and his soul began to express itself in a way that it had never done before. Now, his son is a video producer, who also had many jobs he hated before he found his niche and now spends his time in his studio making beautiful visual objects for others to see and enjoy.
A woman I know recently told me about her mother, who back in the 40’s and 50’s wrote poetry in her spare time, mostly in secret, and sent them out to magazines and newspapers. She had a few of them published but was never able to fully engage in her passion due to commitments, obligations and from societies ideas of what a woman should and should not do with her time. Now, her daughter, a woman who did go out into the world and earned a Ph.D and had a successful career in academia. Now in her late sixties she has written a novel and is contemplating writing others, taking up where her mother left off.
Turning Trials and Tribulations into Art
What I see with each of these stories is that often we take up where our parents left off. Maybe they were not able to answer their soul’s call fully and died with their music only half heard or expressed but we, the baby boomer generation, who are often called the deviant generation, can deviate from this norm and take up with where they left off.
Of course, it does not have to be a direct connection such as song writing and other kinds of writing or creating beautiful objects; it could be an unfulfilled dream of another sort. Maybe your mother always wanted to go to college but was not able to or your father, as in Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle, wanted to create this beautiful home made of glass but was never able to do that. But now, his daughter has created a beautiful life for herself out of the experiences of that childhood. Rather than lament the circumstances of her life as a child or even the circumstances of her mother’s life now – her mother often lives on the street as a homeless person - she took her life experience and made art out of it. If you have not read this book I highly recommend it as a way of re-painting the picture of an experience in a way that shows the beauty of it and not simply the trials and struggles of it. If you would like to hear Walls talk about her mother and father and the life her and her siblings endured with them, then go to YouTube and put in Jeanette Walls.
Carrying On from Undeveloped to Well Developed
But maybe it’s not a particular accomplishment in the conventional sense but maybe something else they were unable or unwilling to do. My own mother was very shy and felt uncomfortable around people she did not know. She did not express herself and what she believed in to anyone but family and even then she was reticent. She had little confidence in herself except as a mother. She did not go out into the world and allow herself to be seen, so now here I am a woman who, as one of my friends said, could talk to a chair. I am not shy at all – well, not too much, sometimes Mama does show up and I get tongue tied, but not often. I saw my mother feeling embarrassed and fearful when she was put on the spot by others, so I decided early on to fight that tendency in myself.
It could be something else as well, maybe your father or mother was just a bit too big for their britches – maybe they were arrogant, narcissist and uncaring and now, what you see in yourself is a bit of that same thing. So begin there to carry on where they left off by becoming more conscious of others and their needs and not always just looking at and paying attention to your own. A narcissistic person is someone who leaves off developing themselves – we are all narcissistic to begin with but around puberty we are given the chance to see someone else’s point of view, but some of us choose to remain narcissist and arrogant. If you had a parent who was like this then it might be a good idea to check out how you relate to others to see if you too might be like them as well and decide to carry on in a different way than how they did it.
Regardless of what your parents accomplished or did not accomplish or how they were as people, there is always a way you can carry on, in a positive, life affirming way where they left off. Think about it and I’ll bet you can find something you can do now that will not only carry on where they left off but give homage to their life as well.
Blessings, Lorraine
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