Mom2...I believe you are a huge success and your wisdom is inspiring.
I spent a lot of my life dancing as fast as I could. I was running around trying to make everybody happy and fix everybody. I learned that early on in my childhood as the oldest of four, with one disabled. I grew up fast and I was a "great helper." Very capable, responsible, strong, worked hard, tried hard, made it happen.
Great qualities until I met addiction. And guess what? All of the great stuff doesn't work with addiction...and it doesn't work with people.
One time a friend of mine said to me (I remember thinking it was a great compliment at the time): You're always around when things are bad and I need a friend. But when things are good with me, I don't talk to you much.
Over these past few years, I have come to realize that statement is very telling about the person I used to be. And I don't like it. I don't want to be that person anymore.
This thread has been talking as well about how it feels when all of our friends talk about how successful and great their grown kids are. I have struggled with that too, and still do. I have to work hard to overcome my belief that everybody has to get a college degree, get married, have 2.5 children, go to church every Sunday, get involved in the community, have a great professional career, raise well-behaved kids who have every opportunity, take every lesson, excel in every sport, make straight As, etc., etc., etc.
Who put me in charge of determining everybody's life? I didn't know any different. I watched and listened to my parents, and that was what we all were supposed to do. Right? That was the prescription for a great, successful life.
Wrong. So wrong. I am having to do a lot of reality work myself over the past years, weeks and months. I am realizing how wrong I have been about so many things.
I have been dancing as fast as I could dance for all of these years to make the above "perfect life" happen, and guess what, it doesn't exist! It really doesn't exist anywhere with anybody but we are all so locked in our isolation and prisons that we don't tell the truth to each other, unless we become so broken we have no choice but to start truth-telling, like we do here.
I have so many good friends whose kids are living a version of that dream---on the surface. When/If they start truth-telling, you learn that well, there are problems. It's not all perfect. It's not all what it appears to be.
Of course it isn't. We knew that already. But somehow we isolate ourselves in our pain and we build up their lives and their children's lives in our minds to be something they are not.
Trouble is the great equalizer. And all of God's chillun have troubles. (sounding like a gospel song...: )
I am telling more truth today. I am living a simpler, more real life today. I have more peace today. I am more content in every moment today. I don't have to dance anymore.
Would I have learned any of that without all of this? Not sure of that answer, but this is where my gratitude comes from.
Keep moving forward.