I am sitting here thinking about the things I can do with my life...I can stay where I am at, a research assistant making barely enough to pay my bills and wondering how I will put food on the table next week, or I can get back into school and get a PhD in neuroscience and go on to study the human brain - an interest of mine since childhood. Imagine that! I must have been a strange child!  Or I can scrap that idea and go for something I had considered previously, maybe go back to school and get a Masters in Public Policy. Or Maybe I could work on my writing skills and publish an account of my life. Heaven knows there are many people who have told me I should do just that. I don't know if they say that just because it sounds good or if they truly mean it, but I have thought about writing since I was about 13.

I could imagine writing about all my childhood trauma's and my adoring readers would feel so sorry for all the hardship I had endured. Can you imagine it? This young girl walking on the streets after dark to some long since forgotten destination dreaming of how she would word each sentence and phrase to bring out her readers most painful or bitter emotions.  "Oh what an ordeal you have gone through!" they would think, and they would 'of course' pay tons of cash to read the next story about her childhood trauma's and enjoy the bliss of her strength in overcoming adversity!

Well teenagers really can be SOO mellow dramatic!!!  After all it isn't like I grew up in the Gaza strip where I could see people being shot in the streets. Or like I grew up in the slums of New York fearing the next time I walk down the street will be the time I get mugged, or the ghetto's of California with gangsters doing drive by shootings on a regular basis. It isn't like I was sold into sexual slavery at 11 so that my family could eat. Honestly it really wasn't that bad at all if you consider what the kids of today are facing when they walk out the door to go to school everyday or even when they turn on the t.v at home. 

I was told that in the junior high schools some kids will put drugs on candy and then give it to other unsuspecting children. Of course in my paranoia I immediately told Haley, "Don't accept candy from anyone at school!"  I can only imagine what she must have been thinking when I gave her that advice. Maybe something along the lines of "okay, mom has really gone off the deep end this time!" But she just sweetly looked at me and smiled as if to say, "okay mom, I'm going to humor you for now."

In all honesty I think that my teenage years were kind of rough, more than they needed to be and I have given it some thought over the last little while as I have watched my oldest make choices that are so much less appealing than the choices I would like for him to make.  I started to realize that my oldest is a heck of a lot like ME!! yep you heard me right, or read... but any way, Nathan asked me, "Rhonda were you like Dakota when you were his age?"  I should have just smiled and with an innocent look said, "what? Me?" But I think he may have seen right through that so, of course, I told him that I had some challenging times as a teen.

I have a lot of "experience" in life and most of it is experience I think I could have done with out, but how do you tell a fourteen year old that they are headed down the same path you took with out totally turning them off or WORSE, pushing them along that dreaded path?? I sure haven't found a way yet. So I find myself bungling along making mistake after mistake, but I think I may actually be getting the hang of this "teenage" business! I am starting to think that the more my son calls me a jerk the better I am doing my job of raising him. He tells me to "let him live his life" Gosh I wonder where I have heard THOSE words before! I NEVER said anything like that when I was his age

So I sit here contemplating where my life is going and realizing I am where I am because of my past and it all gives me a nagging irritation with the repetitive cycles we as a society find ourselves caught up in. Why do some kids just HAVE to learn by experience when enough people have already experienced enough pain to last an eternity?  If I had made better choices I could have already been in a position making three times or more what I make now and I could be doing things with my kids that I can only dream of right now.  I can only hope that by some miracle something I do now will help my children make a better life for themselves than I have been able to make for them. I think that one of the wishes of every parent is that their children will end up at least a little better off then they were.


I believe it is never too late to turn your life around and make it more than what it is. I haven't figured out how I am going to move forward just yet but I know once I do I will just take off.  I just need a little fuel to get me started!  And hopefully with the example I have set my children will turn out to be healthy well adjusted adults who are able and willing to contribute something good to society.