Do You Know How Your Parents Met?

It´s not easy to be happy, to find the way how to live the life you have always wanted to live, to cope with all those tiny (and sometimes quite big) things which try to complicate everything. But what makes things a bit easier is to know yourself. To know who you are, where you come from, what your background is, what has made you to be you.

Yesterday I was teaching my adult students. They are all around twenty. We did some reading tasks and then there were some talking points. One of the questions was "Do you know how your parents or grandparents met?" And I asked my fifteen students who were in the class. And only one of them knew how his parents met. It was a shock for me. I told them that I couldn´t believe they didn´t know. And I was asked "Why should we know? We have never even thought about how our parents or grandparents met." My reply was quite long and I do believe they started to think about it. But I don´t know if somebody is going to ask his or her parents about it.

I think it is important to know your past. And the past of your parents and grandparents. Because those things can influence you. Even you don´t know the past, it influences you the same way. And it´s always better to know what you are facing, is it.

I know the influence of genes, but I am talking about seeing your parents coping with things, about seeing them how they treat themselves or other people including you. Because it is very possible that when you are adult, you will treat yourself and other people the same or similar way. Of course, nobody chooses their family, and I do believe everyone of us has their own path. But we should be able to understand and want to learn from the "mistakes" our parents made not to repeat them.

For example I have a friend. She is a glamorous intelligent woman and loyal and supporting friend. But, as all of us, she has some demons. One of them is her mother. The problem is for quite a long talk, but to abridge it - there was a long time during her childhood and teenage years when her mother wasn´t supportive as mother should be. Things got better later on, but it was too late for my friend. Those things are inside her, influenced her a lot. She has taken a long journey to cope with all these and I know that she will be a great mother one day and that she will not allow herself to repeat the mistakes her mother made.

Or. My wonderful grandmother didn´t have a nice childhood in some ways. It was a difficult time for her. And when she was seventeen she met my grandfather and many things changed. At that time his family was quite reputable in our town. And my grandfather opened a new horizons to my grandmother. But her childhood and what happened influenced her. I didn´t know her when she was young, of course, but since I have remembered she tries to help everybody. She can´t say no often. She is very caring. She is the person who cements the whole family together, she needs to do so. She needs people that she loves to be around her. And I know why she acts the way she does.

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It is nice and interesting to know your background. Your background is you, can influence you. And you should know who you are. Or at least, you should try to find it out.

By the way, one of my grandparents met in a canteen. They both worked in shops. My grandmother was a shop assistant at goldsmith´s and my grandfather was a watchmaker. They went to the same canteen to have lunch. And they fell in love.

My other grandparents got to know each other thanks to one of my grandfather´s sisters. She and my grandmother went to school together.

And my parents met on holiday. They spent a week with their parents (my both grandparents) in the same lodging house.