Restrictions, Self Imposed They May Be

I keep hearing this statement, told in various ways, but the meaning is the same. The statement references that everyone has a point in their life when they realize their parents were just trying to figure things out when they were simultaneously trying to raise us, doing the best they knew to do but still being human all the same.

And this is such an obvious statement, and one that I believe we all inherently know on a subconscious level. It just takes someone to slap us across the face with that information before we actually make the conscious decision to think about it.

My parents were quite young when I was born, and I am the oldest. My mom was eighteen, my dad was nineteen. They were children still. They had no idea what they wanted out of life, they had no idea how they wanted to spend their lives, they didn't even know what life really was. I carried that information with me for pretty much my entire life.

With that information, I placed a lot fault on myself for their lack of space to figure such things out. They were forced into total adulthood before they had even tasted a drop of what it would truly consist of. I honestly thought this was an accidental pregnancy because of such things.

It wasn't. My parents decided to get pregnant with me so they could get married. Truly a sign of impatient youth, as they could have just waited the same length of time it took to have me and gotten married either way. I didn't find out it was intentional to get pregnant with me until well into my twenties, close to my thirties. I still cannot even begin to fathom why someone would do that to themselves intentionally at such a young age.

My ex wife's mom got pregnant with her at the ripe old age of fourteen. This one truly was an accident. She never even told the father, not authentically, that it was his. She saw him exactly one time afterwards and apparently joked that it was his, but didn't give him any real space to comprehend it wasn't a joke. It wasn't until just shy of a year ago that he found out he had my ex as a daughter.

And in a lot of ways, neither of her parents have grown up from that point, either. Her mother is one of the most narcissistic and manipulative people I've ever encountered. Seeing my ex and her mother's interactions were nearly vomit inducing with just how toxic they were. In a lot of ways, it was easy to excuse the abuse because of this, but that is an entirely different topic.

Her biological father only contacts her when he is fucked up drunk, at least, if not on other substances, and it is vastly summarized into conversations about himself. He takes no interest in my ex as a person. Nor does her mom. It is incredibly sad to see two people be so self absorbed that they don't even care to ask how my ex's day is going, but rather just delve straight into their own egos to a point of their daughter being completely replaceable in the conversations.

Every one of them are just human. Whether it be my parents, one of which has a pretty severe substance abuse problem, and the other who suffers through abuse because they are terrified of what life would be like on the other side of it more than what they've always known. "We love one another, Dustin," I'm told repeatedly, as if that is all it takes to accept such behavior and make it okay.

But what would it have been like if any single one of these four parents would have been given the space to figure themselves out? What would it have been like had they been able to figure out what they wanted out of life, and actively worked towards more than just surviving into the next day?

Well, it could easily be the same as what it is now, just minus my or my ex's existence. The world will never know, but in the case of each of them - as well as everyone else for that matter - they are just doing the best they know how to do. Each of us as individuals can only see so far as to what we can understand, and we can only understand insofar as what we experience. When limiting our experiences, we limit our comprehension, and in limiting our comprehension we limit our ability to grow.

It is never to late to expand, though. My mother has decided to finally start doing things that, even 5 years ago, she would have been terrified of doing. She is traveling without my dad. She is experiencing places she has never been before, and through those things, she is growing. Watching my dad attempt to hold her back is a really hard thing to see, of course, but at least she isn't letting him hold her back.

Overall, however, we are all just trying to survive. Each and every one of us are just trying to do what we feel is right in a given point in time. We are trying to be the best version of ourselves. It is just that our best version is limited by the space we have to delve into how we can be better - whether that space is limited by fear or the traps we have laid for ourselves.

So, keep growing. Keep bettering yourself. None of us, not a single one of us, are perfect. So let us just keep figuring out ways to be better.

-Dustin S. Stover