Never let your own limitations limit your children.

For years I chose not to go to college because my mom took out student loans and was upset when they charged her extra interest when she didn’t pay them back. I let her words effect my decision to move forward. After all, if your mother warns you about how horrible something is then it must be something to fear.

She also discouraged me from taking statistics because she said it was impossibly hard. To this day she can’t calculate a price when the tag says 20% off.  I have been somewhat intimidated all of these years because of her constant emphasis on how difficult statistics is. I’m pretty sure that it was what caused her to drop out of college.

I love numbers and to me statistics is just another class. It isn’t extra difficult. For me it isn’t going to be a limiting factor but in my head it was a huge barrier because my mother built it up as some great obstacle.

My message in all of this is that your children have different abilities than you do. Try to do everything in your power to refrain from instilling your limitations on your children.  Words are very powerful. You can do a lot of harm without intending to.

I think about this every day. Getting caught up in the moment can make it harder to think rationally but I try to take the children in to account every time that I talk to them.

It gets difficult when you deal with a child that is limited by only having 9 years of experience. It gets more difficult when they believe that they know everything that there is to know including things that they have never experienced.  Don’t let that interfere with your guidance. Take a step back, take a deep breath and remember that you have no way of knowing what a child’s purpose is.

You have no way of knowing what their strengths will be as an adult. You may think that you know and you may push a child where you want them to be but that can seriously limit a child possibilities especially if you push them somewhere that you should be and not where their strengths lie.

That being said, it’s almost impossible to calculate statistics for a college class while the cats are tearing around knocking things over. I started writing this as a status update for facebook but it turned into this whole spiel about not limiting your children’s choices because something frustrates you. Where do we draw the line though? I think that a whole blog could be written about making a choice to have an animal in the home when having that animal in the home lowers the quality of life for one of the other people that live there. This really has nothing to do with the original topic except for the fact the question “Is it right for me to try to impose my extreme revulsion for cats on the family?” I clean the litter box, I feed them, I clean up the stuff they tear up. I clean the fish tank so I can find the air bubbler that they ripped off of the hose; I rewash the table and the dishes when they track their nasty litter box dirt on to things. I stop what I’m doing midway through dinner to clean litter off of the counter that they tracked up there. I deal with them chasing each other through the house knocking things over all day long, back and forth, back and forth. This place is no longer my sanctuary. A home is supposed to be a place where you go to shed off the bad things. It is supposed to be a safe place where you can recuperate from the outside world. The cats have ruined that for me. Sometimes I think about being anywhere but home because of them and that isn’t like me. I used to love being home.

The average life expectancy of a cat is 12 to 14 years. I can put up with the unhappiness for that long. I just hope that no more of those nasty beasts make their home here. I wake up every day thinking, one less day that I’ll have to deal with those filthy disruptive furry beasts. There are very few things in this world that I truly hate. The idea of cats walking in their litter box and then walking on the table and counter tops haunts me. I despise them, but I’m only one person in a household of four, I have to take everyone else’s wants and needs in to account.

 I think I’m going to find a place where I can spend more time away from home; maybe I’ll fix up that little piece of trailer and hang out there when Mandy is at work. That will give me back a sanctuary. I have to do something; you’re not supposed to feel like this in your own home.

12 to 14 years, approximately 5100 days, maybe I’ll find an online countdown that will tick off the day till the peace comes.

 Countdown to no more cats