Evolving From My Parents: A Better Future

“Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.”- Bill Cosby. My mother once told me that when I grow up, I will be just like her. I remember, till this very day, I would see children say “ I want to be just like my parents.” As I thought about it, I ponder, Would I want to be just like my mother? Or my estranged father? Then I told myself, without a doubt, NO. As a child, I got to see my parent’s behavior, their good and bad characteristics, how they treated my siblings and I, and the suffering of what my mother went through when my father left her. As they say, “history repeats itself” but to repeat the same mistakes, actions, and consequences they did, I honestly would not want that. Not just for me but for my future generation that is to come. So how exactly do I evolve from them? Take in the good and leave out the bad? Go a different path of what they took? Well, these questions are the right answers. Evolving from our parents is and should be taking the good from them, leaving the bad they did, and take a different path for a better future.

As the reader, you might be thinking why would I not be like my parents? Well before you read any further, I’m about to share with you of is a little of what my childhood consisted of. My childhood was not a normal one. What I went through was probably a traumatic experience, but it was reality to me. When I was young, I saw my mother suffer a lot. My mother got pregnant at the age of seventeen, could not finish her high school or go to college, and was forced to marry my father. When she was married to my father, my father would abuse her violently especially when h...

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...at I do and not struggle for food etc., Of course there is trials, obstacles, and predicaments that come in the way that may be similar to what my parents have gone through. To be completely honest, I have failed. I have made mistakes probably just like them but that is the process of evolving. It’s ok to make mistakes like them and our own mistakes but the point is to not repeat the same mistakes over and over again but to learn from them so when they try to come another time around, there will be a different outcome, a different consequence, a different future. As I leave you with this quote, think about your future. Think about if you were to evolve from your parents and not be like them, would you have a better future? “If you don’t see what is beyond your parents, you are not evolving, you’re just looking at yourself of what you will be in the future.”-M.L