A few days ago I was chatting with an elderly man who has experienced a slight onset of dementia in his later years. He and I were doing activities that required him to reminisce about days gone by and to try and recall information about his family. As we were talking he began talking about his “original parents.” My first thought was that it was a slip of his tongue, or his mind as he was talking about the people who raised him. As time went on I began to understand that he was talking about his birth parents, but it turns out that he was adopted. The conversation got me to think about how many people, even those that have had the same parents their whole lives, continue to have issues surrounding their childhood. They get stuck on things that their parents did, or didn’t do as they grew up. Many of us hold it against our parents that we didn’t have some of the things we felt that we needed when we were young. These things may not only be material things, but can also be the love, attention, or adoration that we now feel like were missing in our lives. I know many adults who struggle with the fact that their parent had a problem with substance abuse, or that their parents divorced when they were young, or one of a million other things that their parents struggled with. These are people that to this day continue to struggle with some of these issues. Even to the point that they sometimes blame themselves. Through my discussion with this gentleman I came to realize that all of our parents were in fact our “original parents”. What I mean by this is that the people who are our parents today are not the same people they were yesterday, and definitely not the same people they were 40 years ago! They have lived, experienced, struggled, and grown just like the rest of us have. This man has learned to forgive the people who gave him up for adoption because they are not the same people they were when they were 16 and 17 years old. They are no longer his “original parents” so to speak. Through this man’s jumbled, disorganized and at times tangential thoughts he taught me a lesson that went straight to my heart. He taught me that we must understand, overcome, and learn to forgive our physical parents here in the natural, and realize that they continue, as they have always done, to do their best with what they have. More importantly, our earthly parents are not our “original parents”. Our “Original Parent”, who is in heaven, is perfect and has always been there for us and always will be…no matter what. You can count on that! “Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” 1 Corinthians 8:6.
