Worse for the Wear

Brought on by a conversation with some coworkers (read:friends), I have been thinking a lot about how extraordinary our children are. Weather they are our own, our nieces and nephews, our cousins or our best friends' babies, they are ours. I have always felt that it takes a village...

And, subsequently, I've been thinking about how scary it is that the world chips away at their innocence a little bit at a time, until...well...they end up like us.

Sure, it's not so bad to be like us. We're funny, right? We're well rounded. We're good, we're kind, we're honest. Well, we should be. We try to be.

But we're also jaded. And selfish. And unforgiving. We're harsh, untrusting and self indulgent.

But our kids! Our kids are innocent. They think of others. Their worlds are simple:
Be nice.
Say sorry.
Move on.

As adults, it somehow seems that whatever and whomever we try every day to become, is what our children already are. And the world slowly but surely riddles them down into...us.

And we watch it. We see them slowly start to be unkind. Or talk back. The eyes begin to roll. The requests get ignored. Feet are stomped and doors are slammed. We've all had that moment where we overhear our sweet, innocent baby say something that horrifies us.

And then they spend the rest of their lives, just as we are, trying to be the way they started out.

Sometimes, I wish I could freeze time; capture their simple innocence and bottle it so I could force feed it to them for the rest of their lives.

But then I realized, that within the rough edges and jaded years of adulthood, we also have a gift. We give up our innocent views, but we gain experience. We walk away from our days of childhood in order to be a part of the early years of our own babies.

And ironically, though we lose our starry eyed innocence, we gain perspective and experience.

And sometimes, I think that the goal is less to be perfect, and more to just avoid being worse for the wear.

Here's to that, everybody. Happy Friday!

-L