Necessary Mistakes

Mistakes are embarrassing. You messed up and it shows. Once you get passed this, and accept that mistakes are important, you will see how much difference it makes. If no one made mistakes there would be no learning. Our lives would be so boring. Sometimes you have to look at the world in from a different view. If you start to look at mistakes not as failures but as new opportunities to learn from the situation you will be able to grow as a person. The moments after a mistake are the most pivotal in determining if you will learn from the situation or let it consume you.

My mother was a mistake. A big one. Yup my memere and papa had my mother when they were just 17. A baby should be the last thing a 17-yr old has to worry about, but without this mistake I wouldn’t be here. This one mistake would influence the rest of their lives. Their families were filled with anger and disappointment. Although it felt as if the universe was against them, this adversity only made them stronger. With another mouth to feed, both of them had to work tirelessly and harder than ever before just to make ends meet. It was definitely a rocky first start.

Having the youngest parents made my mom’s childhood pretty interesting. As my mom got older she basically able to do whatever she wanted, because her parents were always working. She would tell me stories of how she would be home alone, and her and her friends would always be doing things they weren’t supposed to. They would go on adventures through their low-income neighborhood and get into trouble all the time. One day they almost started a forest fire, because they were “camping” and they thought it was a good idea to start a fire on dry leaves. They quickly put out the flames with Kool-Aid and sleeping bags, but their ash smeared faces decided their fate. She was grounded from the woods for a week. After that they were right back at it, with the shenanighans. My mom made the best of what she had while having fun at the same time.

My memere and papa have always seemed put together, for as long as I’ve known them, it doesn’t show at all that there were times where they felt like quitting. They loved each other and their commitment to everything they had in their life made them a force to be reckoned with. They turned their life around so much that there are only distant memories left of that small house on the lake. My memere and papa have worked their way up the ladder with extreme discipline. They flipped houses together, every time making a profit to be able to buy another home. They are currently in the process of selling their house right now. This summer they will finally be able to build their dream house, just 2 minutes down the road from us. They never gave up on each other and their perseverance and resiliency inspires me to never dwell on my mistakes.

“Hackberry General Store – Route 66 : Big mistake… Many make… Rely on horn… Instead of brake… BURMA-SHAVE” by www.nathaliecapitan.com is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0