Back before I became a parent I spoke to a friend of a friend who admitted to me that some evenings after a bad day she’d come home and feed her daughter Oreos while she had vodka for dinner.

I’m not one to feel cocky about my parenting skills but I thought, ok there’s a bar that I can use as some kind of standard.  As long as I can stay *above that* I’m doing alright in the parenthood department. 

And it’s worked out all right.  While I have oft-times respected the sacredness of Happy Hour whether it’s been a bad or a good day there’s always been real food on the table even if I pay someone to bring it to me.

I was thinking about this as I’ve been reading Glass Castle.  The story starts off (ok page 2 spoiler alert) with the main character at 3 lighting herself on fire because she’s cooking her own lunch at the stove. 

The people who raised her are the titans of parental slackerhood.  And I’d recommend the book, it never falls into self-pity or woe-is-me.  Mostly I loved it because it showed me a whole bunch of additional parenthood bars I’ve managed to stay above.  For example, I’ve never woken my son up and taken off in the car to move to another town to avoid creditors.  I won’t go on because I don’t want to spoil the whole book, it’s a good one.

It makes me wonder if the writer would have become the scrappy hard-working person, determined to work in her chosen profession if she’d grown up in a BMW stroller with a silver spoon in her mouth and a fist full of flash cards.  She had one crazy childhood but it didn’t stop her from becoming a great writer.  And heck, it gave her something to write about. 

The question is interesting to me because I believe that we choose the families we’re born into.  I know, that can be a weird one to swallow and trust me I should be the last one to believe this.

I am, in some ways so different from my family.  But we love each other and that’s what matters.  But what I’ve concluded on this front is that my path is to find my own path.  That would not work if I came from a family of Corilee Clones.  Actually that’s a really frightening thought.

But there are similiarities too.  My mom was a school teacher and loved it.  Someone read my tarot cards once and told me I’d be a teacher and I was like, you’ve got to be kidding I’m not hanging out in a room full of amped up children. 

But I ended up teaching yoga.  Last year my Mom took one of my classes and besides giggling through parts when she couldn’t figure out which hand should go forward in Warrior 2, she did great.  And then she had feedback about my teaching afterwards.  I was like, oh yeah, we share a profession here.  So I’m starting to notice the similiarities more these days.  I value them too.

I think that our souls plan a lot of stuff they want to experience when they decide to come to earth.  It can’t just be random, they need a certain set-up, a certain context to do the things they need to do.  So I think it makes sense that we choose our families.  Now that doesn’t always mean it’s a great situation.  But whose to judge what’s good or bad?

A calm safe suburban childhood might be perfect for me and completely stifling to you whose going to be a ground-breaking rebel.  Or that might be the perfect context for you to find your inner-rebel.  If you grew up in a punk rock family, maybe you’d get bored and become an accountant.  Make sense?  Yeah, not to me either.  Thank god you’ve got a lifetime to figure out what what you were thinking.

It bugs me when people say – oh you don’t want to bring a kid into this awful world.  So what, all kids are victims before they even start?  Somebody’s got to make this place better.  Who says it won’t be your kid who’s the next Gandhi? 

You just have to try to avoid making dinner out of Oreos.  Or who knows, maybe it’ll be a steady diet of Oreos that kickstart them into making the world a better place.