The Shit We Carry, The Love That Remains

Somewhere between the people we raise, the people we become, and the stories we tell ourselves, there's a whole lot of life happening.

There are songs that entertain you, songs that remind you of somebody, and songs that reach into places you don't always know how to explain. Then there are songs that make you sit with yourself for a minute because they touch something you recognize so deeply that you almost wish they hadn't.

Family is one of those songs for me.   

Family is a strange, beautiful, complicated thing. These are the people who knew us before we knew who we were. The people who share our history, our mannerisms, our stories, and sometimes the very things we've spent years trying to understand about ourselves. They can make us laugh until we can't breathe, hurt our feelings without realizing it, and remind us of who we used to be when we're working our asses off to become somebody different.

And sometimes, the people we love most are the people
who see a situation completely differently than we do.

That's the part nobody really prepares you for.

I Didn't Raise My Kids to Be Quiet Around Me

I raised four children. Four entirely different human beings, each with their own personality, their own way of looking at the world, and their own ideas about how things work.

I wasn't interested in raising kids who simply repeated what they were told. I wanted them to think. To question. To look at something from more than one angle before deciding what they believed about it.

I wanted them to understand that there is a difference between what happened, what somebody intended, what somebody else experienced, and what each person remembers afterward.

Those things don't always line up neatly.

I tried to teach my kids to consider the other side of a story. To recognize that somebody can be wrong without being entirely wrong about everything. That two people can experience the same moment and walk away with completely different understandings of what happened.

I wanted them to be well-rounded people, capable of thinking beyond their own experiences. I wanted them to have enough curiosity to ask questions, enough courage to challenge what they thought they knew, and enough humility to consider the possibility that they might not have the whole picture.

And I did my best to live that way myself.

I was blunt. I was honest. I was open with them as much as I knew how to be. I didn't want to build a relationship where my children had to pretend around me, hide their questions, or worry that telling me the truth would mean they couldn't be themselves. 

We could talk about real shit. We could laugh about things other people might find uncomfortable. We could call things what they were instead of dressing them up in pretty language to make them easier to swallow.

Braden, my Navy boy, once called me and casually informed me that all they did was watch the fishes fuck.

I can still appreciate the sheer matter-of-fact delivery of that one.

That's my family. That's how we are with each other. Real, unfiltered, and perfectly capable of saying the shit that needs saying without holding a committee meeting about whether it's appropriate.

I didn't want my children to grow up believing they had to perform some polished version of themselves around me. Life is already full of places where people feel the need to edit themselves, hide their mistakes, or pretend to be something they're not. Home didn't need to be another one.

But here's something I've learned: being able to speak honestly with one another and being able to understand one another are two different things.

You can give people permission to tell the truth and still discover that truth is complicated. You can teach somebody to consider another perspective and still find yourself wishing they'd look at a situation through a different lens.

And you can raise your children to think for themselves, only to discover that eventually, they're going to reach conclusions you don't agree with.

That's part of raising human beings instead of trying to manufacture little versions of yourself.

The People We Raise Eventually Become People We Have to Meet All Over Again

When your children are little, you're responsible for so much of how they experience the world. You teach them what you know. You correct them when they get something wrong. You help them understand things they haven't encountered yet.    

You explain why people behave the way they do. You tell them that the world isn't always fair. You try to teach them how to recognize bullshit without becoming cynical about everything. You hope they'll learn to trust themselves without assuming they're always right.

You spend years helping them build the tools they'll need to navigate a world that doesn't come with an instruction manual.  

Then one day, they're adults.

They have their own homes, relationships, children, responsibilities, opinions, and memories. They have experiences you weren't there for. They see things through eyes that have been shaped by their own lives, not just the life you shared with them.

And suddenly, being their mother doesn't mean you get to explain everything.

You can tell them what you meant, but you can't dictate how they experienced it. You can offer another perspective, but you can't make them consider it. You can explain the circumstances surrounding a decision, but you can't force somebody to interpret that decision the way you do.

And they have that same reality with you.

They can tell you how something felt to them. They can explain what they remember, what hurt, what confused them, or what they wish had been different. You may recognize their experience immediately, or you may remember the situation in an entirely different way.

Sometimes both people are telling the truth as they understand it.

That doesn't mean every version of a story is equally accurate. It doesn't mean facts stop mattering or that accountability disappears just because somebody has a different perspective. It means that understanding what happened can require more than listening to the first version and deciding you've heard everything there is to know. 

I tried to teach my children that.

I'm still trying to practice it myself.

Because it's one thing to talk about perspective when you're discussing somebody else's situation. It's another thing entirely when you're the person being misunderstood.

I Am a Person, Too

This might be one of the strangest parts of motherhood: people can know you better than almost anybody else in the world and still not know every part of you.

Your children know things about you that nobody else knows. They remember the house you lived in, the way you talked, the things you said when you were frustrated, the moments you made them laugh, and the moments you disappointed them.

They have their own memories of growing up with you. You have yours.

And while those memories overlap, they aren't identical.

You remember what you were carrying at the time. You remember the circumstances nobody else could fully see. You remember what you were trying to do, what you were struggling with, what you understood then, and what you hadn't figured out yet.

Your children remember being the children in those circumstances.

Neither position gives a person a complete view of the other.

I can look back at my own life and recognize things I would handle differently today. I can see places where I could have done better, spoken differently, made a different decision, or understood something sooner.

I can also recognize how much I was trying to figure out while living it.

Both things can be true.

I don't have to pretend I got everything right to acknowledge that I was doing the best I could with the understanding, resources, and capacity I had at the time. And I don't have to erase the difficult parts of my children's experiences to explain my own.

That's what perspective means to me. Not making excuses. Not keeping score. Not insisting that one person's pain cancels out another person's struggle.

It means being willing to look at the whole picture, even when the whole picture makes you uncomfortable.

And it means remembering that mothers are human beings, too.

We have histories before our children are born. We have struggles they may not understand until they're older, if they ever understand them at all. We make mistakes. We grow. We change. Sometimes we spend years learning things we wish we'd known when our children were small.

We don't stop being people when we become mothers.

We don't become incapable of hurting, needing, struggling, or making mistakes.

And we don't magically become finished products just because our children grow up.

Love Doesn't Make Us Mind Readers

I think one of the most painful assumptions we make about family is that love should make understanding automatic.

If you love me, you should know what I meant.

If I love you, I should know what you need.

If we've known each other for decades, surely we should be able to figure each other out.

Except that's not how being human works.

You can love somebody with everything you've got and still misunderstand what they're trying to tell you. You can know their history and still miss what they're experiencing right now. You can have the best intentions in the world and still say something that lands differently than you expected.

And sometimes you don't realize how differently something landed until much later.

That's why I believe in asking questions. In looking for context. In being willing to say, "Wait. Is that what you meant?" instead of immediately deciding you know what somebody meant.

I believe in being able to say, "That's not how I remember it," without automatically accusing the other person of lying.

I believe in leaving room for the possibility that there's something you haven't considered yet.

Not because everybody deserves endless chances or because every relationship can be repaired. Some situations require boundaries. Some require accountability. Sometimes people simply cannot meet each other where they are.

But there is a difference between recognizing that you disagree and deciding that disagreement means you have nothing left to learn about the other person.

There is a difference between protecting yourself and convincing yourself that your interpretation must be the only possible one.

And there is a difference between being right about a particular thing and understanding the person standing across from you.

I don't always get that right. Nobody does.

But I know it's worth trying.

The Shit We Carry Into Our Families

None of us enters adulthood untouched by life.

We carry what we learned at home. We carry what we didn't learn. We carry the things people said to us, the things they never said, the ways love was expressed, the ways it was withheld, and the ways we learned to survive situations we didn't know how to change.

Then we grow up and start building lives of our own.

Some of us repeat what we were taught. Some of us spend years trying to do the exact opposite. Some of us don't recognize the patterns we're carrying until they show up in our relationships, our parenting, or the way we react when somebody pushes a particular button.

And some of us spend a good portion of our lives trying to figure out which parts of ourselves are genuinely ours and which parts were shaped by the circumstances we grew up in.

That's life.

We learn as we go. We get some things right and some things spectacularly wrong. We make decisions based on what we know at the time, and sometimes we have to live long enough to understand what we didn't know.

Then we have children, and they grow up with their own interpretations of the world we created together.

They see things we don't see. They remember things differently. They develop beliefs and boundaries and ways of understanding life that we may never have anticipated.

And we do the same thing with them.

We see them through the eyes of the parent who watched them grow. We remember their childhoods, their personalities, their struggles, and the little people they used to be. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that the adult standing in front of us is not the child we remember, even though that child is still part of who they are.

Family is a constant process of meeting each other again.

Not because we never knew each other, but because we're always becoming somebody new.

Four Children. Four Different Lives.

I have four children, and each one has his own life, his own personality, and his own way of moving through the world.

Gavin has been doing construction work. Talin is raising Levi, my grandbaby and quite literally the key to my heart. Tyler served in the Army, married Gracie, and brought his family back home. Braden served in the Navy and now lives in New York.

Their lives don't look the same. Their experiences aren't interchangeable. What matters to one may not matter in the same way to another.

And I wouldn't want them to be.

I didn't raise four copies of myself. I raised four people.

I have watched them become adults, make decisions, build relationships, and create lives that belong to them. I have watched them step into roles I once tried to prepare them for, and I've had to learn when to offer advice, when to listen, and when to recognize that their lives are theirs to figure out.

I have grandchildren now, too. Little people who are growing up with their own personalities, their own ideas, and their own ways of seeing the world.

Watching my children raise children of their own is its own kind of experience. You see familiar mannerisms. You recognize pieces of the people you raised. Sometimes you see something that takes you straight back to when your own kids were small.

And you realize the story keeps moving.

The things we teach don't always travel in a straight line. Sometimes our children carry them forward exactly as we hoped. Sometimes they reinterpret them. Sometimes they don't understand their significance until years later.

We don't get to control what gets carried forward.

We can only do our best to give them something worth carrying. 

For me, that meant honesty. Curiosity. The ability to think beyond the obvious. The willingness to consider another side of a story. The understanding that people are complicated and that life rarely fits into neat little categories.

I wanted my children to know they could be themselves with me.

I also wanted them to know that being themselves didn't mean they had nothing left to learn.

That applies to me just as much as it applies to them.

There Is No Perfect Version of This Story

I could tell you a pretty story about motherhood. I could talk about the beautiful moments, the sacrifices, the pride, the laughter, and the love that never goes away.

All of that is real.

But it wouldn't be the whole story.

The whole story includes the hard days. The mistakes. The things you wish you could go back and do differently. The moments when you know your heart was in the right place but the outcome wasn't what you hoped for.

It includes watching your children become adults and realizing that loving them doesn't mean you'll always agree. It includes learning that honesty can open a conversation, but it can't guarantee the conversation will end with everybody understanding each other.

It includes accepting that people can have different memories of the same experience.

And it includes the uncomfortable realization that sometimes you can explain yourself as clearly as you know how, and somebody may still walk away with a different understanding.

You can be honest about your intentions without demanding that your intentions erase somebody else's experience.

You can acknowledge somebody else's perspective without pretending your own doesn't exist.

You can take responsibility for what belongs to you without taking responsibility for every conclusion somebody else reaches about you.

Those distinctions matter.

Because I don't believe love requires us to lie about ourselves. I don't believe being a good mother means pretending I've never struggled, never made a mistake, or never needed somebody to see things from my side.

And I don't believe being a good child means agreeing with your parents about everything.

We're allowed to be complicated people who love each other.

We're allowed to have conversations that don't resolve everything in one sitting.

We're allowed to keep learning.

What matters is whether we can remain honest about what happened, willing to examine our part in it, and open to the possibility that understanding may require more than one conversation.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it takes years.

Sometimes the understanding comes after the moment when you most wanted it.

And sometimes it doesn't come at all.

That's a hard truth, but it's a truth worth making room for.

What Remains

When I think about family, I don't think about perfection.

I think about the people who have been part of my life in ways nobody else could ever fully understand. I think about the stories that belong to us. The ridiculous things that still make us laugh. The memories that surface unexpectedly. The familiar voices, the shared history, and the little details that might mean nothing to anybody else but mean everything to the people who were there.

I think about the fact that my children are their own people now, living lives I cannot live for them.

I think about the grandchildren who are still discovering who they are.

I think about all the things I wanted to teach my children and all the things life has continued to teach me.

And I think about how much of being a family comes down to learning how to see one another as we are, rather than only as we remember each other or as we believe we should be.

That's not always easy.

Sometimes we get caught up in what we meant to say instead of listening to what the other person heard. Sometimes we cling to our own version of a story because letting another perspective in feels like admitting we were wrong about everything.

Sometimes we forget that understanding another person doesn't require us to surrender our own understanding.

We can listen without disappearing. We can reconsider without abandoning ourselves. We can admit we got something wrong without deciding that everything we've ever done was wrong.

And we can love people without pretending that love makes every difference disappear.

I am still learning. My children are still learning. We're all living, changing, figuring things out, and doing the best we can with the people we've become.

I don't need our family story to be perfect.

I need it to be real.

Real enough for laughter that doesn't need to be cleaned up. Real enough for honesty that doesn't require everybody to agree. Real enough to acknowledge that we've all had our own experiences, our own struggles, and our own ways of understanding the life we've shared.

Real enough to recognize that the story is bigger than any one person's point of view.

And real enough to leave room for the possibility that we can keep learning about one another, even after all these years.

Because family isn't just the people who share your blood or your last name. It's the history you build together, the ways you shape one another, the things you carry forward, and the memories that remain yours even when life takes everyone in different directions.

It's the laughter. The hard truths. The mistakes. The growth. The things we understand now that we couldn't have understood then.

It's the people we were, the people we've become, and the space between those two versions of ourselves.

And sometimes, it's simply the recognition that no matter how much we learn, there will always be more to understand.

That's part of being human.

That's part of being a mother.

And that's part of being family.

Not perfect. Not always easy. Not always understood.

But real.

I tried to raise them to see beyond themselves, because the world is bigger than any one person's version of a story. And I'm still learning what it means when the people I love most see a story differently than I do.

XoXo- JstJenni