leave a mark that can’t be erased, neither time nor space

I’ve been thinking about my childhood a lot lately. I think it’s because I’m surrounded my children whom I feel like are my own. Well that, and because I’ve had Jay-Z’s Young Forever on repeat (don’t judge).

~

I have this intense desire to create a happy, peaceful, stable childhood for these children – one that resembles the way I grew up. I know that it is an unrealistic ideal to want a two parent home where Mom and Dad love Jesus more than each other (and that is A LOT), where they dig underground houses and caves because there are no trees to build tree-houses, where they have to pick up the house before they leave (but they always come home to a clean house), where their daddies buy roses for the girls on their birthdays — but a realistic thing is that I want these years to be a time that these kids can look back on and smile.

~

I was reading a book on my Kindle (<3 ❤ ❤ the Gouches! Everything cool I have is from them – my purse, my wallet, toys for kid-dates, my kindle, need I continue??) and I came across this paragraph and it super struck me.

~

“I sat on a bench in sight of three teenaged boys playing with a soccer ball. I wondered if they were allowed to play in the gardens; I wondered if they cared; I wondered if years from now, when they were middle-aged, married fathers, they would remember this carefree morning in June. Who was it that said that without forgetting it’s impossible to live at all? Whoever said it was right.

But that lesson is one you don’t learn for some time. When you’re young, you’re absolutely convinced that you’re going to remember forever, and in vivid detail, every moment of joy or heartbreak, whether it be of your own making or caused by some outside force. You’re absolutely convinced that the moment will utterly define the rest of your life.

And then, over time, you start to forget, not every detail, but a lot of them, and some time after that, the emotional impact starts to dull, and after that there come days when you don’t consciously thing about the moment of joy or heartbreak you were so certain would actively pursue you to the grave.”

~

Now I can’t remember all the profound things I was going to say about it. I’ll think about it and post later, maybe.

~

xoxo I miss you all loads.