Phillip Allen
08-11-2005, 05:47 AM
My children are all three in their thirties now, some closer to forty than to thirty. I have seven grandchildren but only see three on a regular basis…the three granddaughters who are now 16, 12 and 6 years old and really wonderful people…in my opinion. I never again married and now have been single longer than married…by quite a bit.
I may have posted this before but can’t remember…I never do. It’s just a bluzy thought but with (hopefully) a little smile in it…
So tell me, how would you feel if someone else raised your children, someone you know to be immoral, you know to be a liar, someone you knew to be methodically inoculating your children to believe that you are the liar, the failure, to be pitied and not respected. How would you feel if all your children’s spare time was given first to the one/s you know to be least interested in raising your children with your values? How would you feel if, knowing it is too late to be effective, and in what small, brief moments you are allowed with your children, that trying to press training in life…the training you meant to provide them as they grew up will be spurned and thrown back in your face. How would it feel to be a villain in your child’s eyes, a candidate for vitriol and mistreatment? How would it feel to be powerless to correct the wrongs by yourself and by others done to your children? How would you feel to be, in effect, turned out by your own children? Do they have any idea what it feels like to see disaster approaching and to know all along they will not listen to you trying to warn them nor even provide a moment in which to do so? To know that they have been deliberately trained, in fact, not to listen to their father? To know that the negative training has taken on a life of its own now…?! Hell is trying to instill lost, fleeting, flying moments into the adults wherein exists your lost children.
Today I showed my six year old granddaughter how to mark a radius cut on a boat rudder. She watched then went back to petting the cat, apparently not interested…but she herd and will remember the point years from now. “My grandfather showed me how to do things to wood and make it turn into a boat”…that IS the point. It was not important that she remember how to scale a radius, it was/is important that she remember Grandfather showing her things…perhaps even wonderful things. Those moments are lost for us with my children and I don’t think they even know it…but I do. I know it again each time I have such a moment with a grandchild…sweet misery I would not pass the chance to repeat again and again. I believe values, life training, manners and a myriad other things are given to a child in little bits and pieces…a moment here and there…in the watching of wood shavings fall from the bench. Each shaving is a precious moment in a child’s rearing to be carried in remembrances later. They are to be brought out at odd moments or even subconsciously. They are seeds in the vessel that is your child…the vessel that becomes an adult to carry on the training with his own children and they, in turn, with their children. I desperately want to pass on the seeds of thought I received from my grandmothers and from my mother and father…it is of such importance that it cannot be trusted to others.
I may have posted this before but can’t remember…I never do. It’s just a bluzy thought but with (hopefully) a little smile in it…
So tell me, how would you feel if someone else raised your children, someone you know to be immoral, you know to be a liar, someone you knew to be methodically inoculating your children to believe that you are the liar, the failure, to be pitied and not respected. How would you feel if all your children’s spare time was given first to the one/s you know to be least interested in raising your children with your values? How would you feel if, knowing it is too late to be effective, and in what small, brief moments you are allowed with your children, that trying to press training in life…the training you meant to provide them as they grew up will be spurned and thrown back in your face. How would it feel to be a villain in your child’s eyes, a candidate for vitriol and mistreatment? How would it feel to be powerless to correct the wrongs by yourself and by others done to your children? How would you feel to be, in effect, turned out by your own children? Do they have any idea what it feels like to see disaster approaching and to know all along they will not listen to you trying to warn them nor even provide a moment in which to do so? To know that they have been deliberately trained, in fact, not to listen to their father? To know that the negative training has taken on a life of its own now…?! Hell is trying to instill lost, fleeting, flying moments into the adults wherein exists your lost children.
Today I showed my six year old granddaughter how to mark a radius cut on a boat rudder. She watched then went back to petting the cat, apparently not interested…but she herd and will remember the point years from now. “My grandfather showed me how to do things to wood and make it turn into a boat”…that IS the point. It was not important that she remember how to scale a radius, it was/is important that she remember Grandfather showing her things…perhaps even wonderful things. Those moments are lost for us with my children and I don’t think they even know it…but I do. I know it again each time I have such a moment with a grandchild…sweet misery I would not pass the chance to repeat again and again. I believe values, life training, manners and a myriad other things are given to a child in little bits and pieces…a moment here and there…in the watching of wood shavings fall from the bench. Each shaving is a precious moment in a child’s rearing to be carried in remembrances later. They are to be brought out at odd moments or even subconsciously. They are seeds in the vessel that is your child…the vessel that becomes an adult to carry on the training with his own children and they, in turn, with their children. I desperately want to pass on the seeds of thought I received from my grandmothers and from my mother and father…it is of such importance that it cannot be trusted to others.