SO NOW, THIS

Admittedly, I've made errors that will echo and reverberate for generations to come and the realizations, regrets and insights that I've acquired since making those mistakes have come way too late; but still I must move forward, and in doing so I hope to set a positive example for my now grown children.

My first step in moving forward has been honesty. I have expressed my regrets to each of my children. I admitted to dropping the ball as a parent. I fell short of my own parenting goals and allowed their father's dysfunctions and mine to directly and adversely affect the well-being of my children. We failed to lay a solid foundation within each of them upon which they could've built their adult lives. Being honest about our failures was the first step toward salvaging.

The second step was recognizing, that because of my inadequacies as a parent, I am now obligated to pick up the pieces and I can do that by helping them complete the task of preparing for adult life, even though they are all of legal age. In practical terms, it means continuing to provide a place to live - rent free - for a few of them as they finish their education, decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives, and reach a higher level of emotional maturity. It means that when my kids need my help, I do my best to provide it, looking not so much at their age, but at their developmental, social, emotional, and psychological maturity. I must finish the task, even if they are beyond legal age.

Concurrent with those first few steps that I've taken, I am continuing my own education in an effort to become self-sufficient. In doing so, I hope prove to my children that it is never too late. As I continue to pursue my vocational goals, even at my stage of life, I hope that my children will benefit from my determination and persistence.

In six months, I will begin working on my master's degree in community counseling with the goal of becoming a licensed mental health counselor. If I can dedicate even just eight or ten years of my life to a vocational endeavor, to financial independence, and living life as a self-sufficient adult, I will have accomplished much.

I recall when I was younger, I used to insist I could, in fact, have it all - just not all at once. I believed in the concept of sequencing my life. In my thirties, my focus was childrearing. In my forties, my focus was furthering my education in preparation for a professional life. And then in my fifties, my focus would be on being productive in my chosen field. Looking back, I am amazed that I accomplished as much as I did, considering the level of dysfunction at play in my life during my younger years: marital discord, immaturity, poverty, substance abuse, and mental illness. Today, I am no longer with my childrens father, I am much more mature, living more comfortably, but still economically dependent, no longer dealing with substance use/abuse, and although I still struggle with anxiety, I continue to pursue a life as if the anxiety was not there.

So yes, the wisdom that comes with maturity comes way too late to prevent any of the mistakes that come with youth. But the insights I have gained will help me help others and will prevent me from continuing in dysfunction. "I can see clearly now, the rain is gone."

IT JUST DOESN'T SEEM RIGHT

That wisdom comes with age, maturity, and experience just doesn't seem right - or fair. By the time we learn how to cope with Life and to successfully contribute to Life, it is too late; the damage has been done and generational cycles continue to spin.

As I approach my fiftieth birthday, I can look back with perfect hindsight and see with painful clarity just how little I knew about who I really am when I was busy with building what would become my life story, a tragedy in the making.

For example, when I was in high school and was being pressured to decide what it was I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I did not have a clue! I knew that I felt a maternal urge to mother, but that desire was probably rooted more firmly in hormonal surges than it was in my innate talents and skills. Those urges may have been better fulfilled had I invested in a pet to nurture.

I also knew that I wanted to be a schoolteacher, but as a young girl without the experience of childrearing, what did I really know about child development? What kind of teaching skills would I have had at such an early age other than the simple book knowledge and psychological theories and precepts that would've been imparted in college coursework? While I believe I was innately primed to be a teacher, I would not have become a truly good teacher without my direct experience gained through years of motherhood.

What I did not realize in my youth, and what did not become apparent to me until I was well into my thirties is that I probably should've gone into mortuary science and become a funeral director. But, that is not a career presented to high school students for consideration, so it escaped my consideration until it was way too late.

In my early thirties, as I began to become acquainted with my Authentic Self, I realized that I am a teacher-healer-helper. No need for vocational assessments; those terms adequately define my truest and most innate skills. They define who I am. It explains why I have been drawn to teaching, homeschooling, support-group facilitating, midwifery, counseling, ministering, and funeral directing. But those parts of me were elusive and ill-defined when I was just a teen. How could I have known?

It just doesn't seem right - that it would take me living life before I could know how to best orchestrate my life. And that's not fair.

So while it is true that I have applied my authentic skills throughout my life - as the founder, coordinator, and facilitator of a mother's support group, as a home-school educator and tutor, as a "counselor" and "minister" to friends, neighbors and strangers, as a "teacher" and "mentor" to a flock of Girl Scouts, and once as a "midwife" to a young mom who needed a home birth attendant - it is only now, as I approach fifty, that I am working on becoming a licensed mental health counselor so that I can finally receive recognition and compensation for what I've been doing all these years!

So while it is true that I can look at this next stage of my life as the culmination of my life's experiences and the opus of my being, it also seems horribly unfair that it would take this long for me to know who I really am, to approach self-actualizing, and to be able to finally apply the wisdom that comes with age.