Mile Stones

There are few miles stones in life. Among them are the birth of child, a marriage, death of a parent, your first job, or car or first kiss or the day your child enters college.

Mile stones of life are recognized by how they make you feel for years after. When you reminisce years later we are under the spell of these sights and sounds, they are still emotionally profound and deeply felt. They will produce a smile on the face of mother or a father that can not be duplicated, ever.

We all have experienced some of these mile stones. Some of us will only get one others do the whole mile stone collection, but we can all relate to the concept and manifestation of the mile stone of life. Think about it and I bet you can think of a few right now.

Yesterday, as it is past midnight now, I realized one of the great milestones a parent gets to experience. I drove my daughter to her college dorm and helped her assemble her shelves and position her refrigerator and adsorbed the sweetness of her accomplishments. I felt what can be best described as pride, but could also be termed, joy or thankfulness or humility coupled with a feeling of a divine favored status.

This is a pride mile stone, and this particular form of pride does not fit the “foolish pride” model. This one is the true, pure, naturally intoxicating pride that only a parent can feel at the success of their progeny.

I looked around the dorm, which will be her first adult home and I marveled at the opulence and design of the whole deal. I never made it to where she is and it fascinated me that she has made it there, against anything that impeded her path, she persevered and triumphed. She confounds me with her ability to envision a destination and then arrive there, regardless how unlikely it was to do so.

It turns out, she practiced what her mother and I preached. She saw the world for what it was and decided where she wanted to be in it and no matter how impossible her plan seemed to me, she made it happen.

When she was five and entering pre-school, or maybe it was the first grade, I noticed that she had high expectations of herself. She took pride in her work and became borderline obsessive with completing her work with the closest to perfect outcome that could be achieved, no matter how long it took.

She would come across a subject or project that would challenger her and if it didn’t flow out of her little head, she would become frustrated and would end up in tears. It was around that time that I would tell her things that I had heard on motivational audio tapes or read in positive mental attitude books. I told her to have a “can do attitude”.

She would look me in the eyes and then she would repeat “ a can do attitude” and the tears would dry up and she then reappraised the situation with a can do attitude and sure as sunrise she would do what ever it was that minutes earlier was driving her to tears.

I say she was blessed from birth with something most of us have to struggle to achieve and some of us never see. She believed she could. She took the can do attitude to a whole new realm. She took what I taught her and taught me the depth, meaning and application of it.

Parenting is by no means a science and I think of times when I was not as good of a parent as I could have been or perhaps should have been. I think it is impossible to predict or control where our children end up, but we can influence it.

On the way home, alone in the car, it dawned on me that of all the things she learned in her twelve years of education, the most potent and applicable was the one thing they do not teach our children in school. The thing that I feel was at the core of her success was something we as parents may not know our selves. Something that we have all heard but could not buy into it’s practical application for any sustained time.

To convince a child of their endless potential is, in my humble opinion, the most difficult and also most valuable thing to pass on to a child.

It is also the thing we, the parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents need to remember ourselves. It is a tablespoon of our own medicine and when you purchase your shares in that train of thought, the dividends are the things mile stones are made of.


The World is yours baby girl !