Fret for the Next Generation

I know of parents who don’t want their children to exceed their accomplishments.

These people confound me.  I don’t get narcissistic, parent-child competition – I don’t have enough of an aura to go around for myself on most days, let alone enough to make my progeny sparkle in my shadow.

I am so intent on my children being better versions of my husband and myself that sometimes I deny the nature that makes them ours in the hope that I can nurture them into erasing the innate attributes they inherited.

Examples abound but let’s start with tonight.

Sometimes even though it is after your child’s bedtime, despite their exhaustion, they’re not ready for slumber because like their parents – darn that mirror – they need electronic ‘wind down’ time.  For my daughter, it is her newly-acquired iPod, for my younger son, Dr. Seuss (in video or book form), and for me it’s a Podcast….  I am annoyed and afraid that my children are so much like me in this, and so many other ways.  I want them to be more practical, perform better and thus just ‘know’ that their bodies need sleep so drift into unconsciousness.  Alas, they are mine – for better and worse – and so I hold the remote control in my hand hoping that they evolve into the best of me … and ready to click off my worst.