A Wicked Cycle of The Struggle

Game Rules

The Goals

No matter what your struggle is, your ultimate goal is to emerge victoriously from the game. Your secondary goal is to make it out of the madness with most of your dignity and soul in one piece. Your merciful striving to maneuver the errors of your past and wake up on the next level of reality will become an everyday occurrence for you.

Your Trophy

You may eventually reach the upper level. When you do, you will strike a pose and wait for your trophy, only to expose how your bravery, strength, and persistence to provide for your loved-ones has, instead, weakened the boundaries of their future and incapacitated their skills to survive.

 

Please explain, you ask!!!

Your heroic efforts cause you to:

• Buy things for them that you never had 
• Shelter them from the ugliness of the world that you faced
• Keep them out of the darkness and push them to the light

The Pendulum

Yet much to your dismay, your abundant attempts to prevent your family from enduring the full force of life’s game has created within them a sense of entitlement and exposed them to eternal weakness. 

The result: your actions have lowered their mental, physical, and emotional abilities to respond to the “Struggles” of the real world. The pendulum will now swing from you to your offsprings, as you attempt to understand the imbalance you have caused.

Think Again, The Reality

In your Herculean efforts, you didn’t consider: 

• if each level of life’s game was planned for them
• all the secrets and shortcuts provided 
• and all the weapons preloaded

… that your actions wouldn’t somehow diminish their survival skills.  

Master Gamer

Parent Guide

Now, their struggle begins and you, as a so-called Master Gamer, are lost on how to instruct them. You will forever move in battle mode with cat-like reflexes, but they have no experience. Sadly, it is you who has declawed them. Your manual was self-taught and based on heartache, pain, and The Struggle. 

What do you mean you can’t continue? (Parent: I never had time to stop.)

Why are you devastated? This is nothing new!  (Child: To me, this is.)

You can’t give up. There are too many people relying on you! ( Child: I have never had to worry about this since you always handled it.)

Why do you feel the ground is about to crumble beneath your feet? (The Truth: The path they walked on was always pre-inspected and maintained by you.)

It slowly begins to dawn on you that the absence of fearing what comes next, never experiencing going without, and lacking the resistance you built from pain have all weakened the compass of your offspring.

I’m not sure if any of you remember the game Qbert: Just when you almost finish painting the board, the nasty critters drop down and leave dirty footprints or change your sunset blue squares to a puckish-pink causing you to backtrack (possibly back up to the first square) and start over. This is where you will now find yourself, STARTING OVER. 

However, this new game will be like the Yin and Yang sign.

• Your knowledge vs their resistance

• Your strength vs their weakness

• Your views vs their views

• Your parenting skills vs the parenting skills of family and friends on both sides

Shred the manual as it doesn’t assist in this struggle game. If you give too little you lose, if you give too much you lose, and if you attempt to create balance, remember balance is different from one person to the next. Try to stick to doing your best and move delicately to avoid looking back later with any regrets. Keep an open line of communication, no matter how uncomfortable a subject is to you. Don’t respond before you process; an angry mind is an unclear one. Remember times are different and what worked for you may not work for them.