Today is my youngest child’s birthday. Eddie is 8.
I went into the family room and laid on top of him on the couch and kissed his whole face wishing him happy birthday in between. He’s my cuddle bug. He loves attention like that. He loves to be cuddled and hugged and kissed and squeezed and tickled and held.
Michael isn’t like that. Michael enjoys verbal praise. He doesn’t care much for being touched a lot, but he’ll sit across from you and talk for hours about whatever you want. He’s extremely intellectual.
Alan, being the oldest, is much different from the young ones. Alan is the oldest son in two different households. He’s grown up in his father’s house while visiting ours on weekends. Still he has two younger brothers in each family. He’s more athletic than ANY of his brothers. He’s got that mature, oldest son way about him.
It’s funny to me how people can grow up under the same influences and still grow into such different people. It’s amazing how so much of our experience is our own and no one elses. Eddie and Michael have grown up under the same roof with the same mother and father and still, they couldn’t be more different.
Eddie tends to go his own way. If he’s not liked, he feels the rejection but moves on in little time and continues on unscathed.
Michael tends to go his own way, but mostly because no one else will allow him to follow their way. He feels that rejection and it affects everything about his day and possibly the entire next day. He’s not like the other kids at school (which I can completely empathize with) and no one really cares to spend time with him.
He wants to fit in. I spend much of my one on one time talking with him about how wonderful he is and how the things that make him different from those kids are the things that make him special… and one day people are going to love you SPECIFICALLY for those things… BECAUSE of them.
We’re all different people. We’ve grown up watching the same tv shows in the same neighborhoods with the same parents in the same schools and we all have amazing stories to tell. Everybody has a story for their life and if you could sit down and hear them all, you wouldn’t believe how VERY much you actually have in common with the most unexpected people.
We all grow up together in this planetary household with the same influences and the same love and the same lessons. Some of us grow up whole and wise. Others grow up broken and victimized. The thing is, even the broken and victimized are whole and wise. They just choose not to see it. Sometimes it’s easier to be a victim than to not.
Just like I tell my kids, “You’ll never get what you want by sitting down in the dirt and crying about not having. If you don’t get what you want, stand back up, declare what you want, and move toward it.”
You are who you are. You’re not just like anybody else, and yet you’re not very different from anybody else either. All you can really do is take your influences and love, and learn your lessons the best you can, and bloom where you’re planted.
Enjoy my post? Visit my Donation Box or recommend me to a friend!
