The Final eight lessons

Again, another late entry! So I am happy to report that we finished building our shade structure in the patio! It came out so nice! I like how we finished it just in time for another heatwave. Side from it not being so hot on the deck, the shade structure has helped with bringing in less sun inside so it’s less hot there too.

As September is about to end, here are my final eight lessons. I can’t believe we made to 35 lessons for my 35th year. It’s been good to reflect on what I’ve learned and where I grew and where I hope to grow out of.

28. It’s not necessary to say “yes” to everything. When coming across a decision, ask myself if it will make my life harder or easier. When I say “harder” I’m referring if something will become an inconvenience.

29. Write out your day-to-day schedule. And I mean physically write out your schedule. We keep so much in our head it just gets so cluttered.

30. Some people just don’t deserve to be parents. There I said it. Through adulthood, I’ve seen some questionable things parents do to their kids. One example I could think of is a mom who was so upset that her son needed glasses because it would make him less cute. After a week of her son wearing glasses, she could not take it anymore so she told her son to stop wearing the glasses. That was many years ago when he was in kindergarten. He’s in high school now and through the years I’ve seen him have a hard time learning anything. In order for him to read, he has to place the paper really close to his face. I find it so effed up that his mom is so devoted to her son “staying cute” that she would rather prevent him from learning.

31. Your friends can also be your family.

32. Gossip can do good. I’ve been crowned Gossip Girl through middle school, high school, college, and through a good part of adulthood. There was a time when I decided it was best to stop gossiping because deep down, I was always uncomfortable being called Gossip Girl because it always implied I was doing something bad. Just FYI, the gossip was never petty and catty and will absolutely never be about someone’s appearance, intelligence, abilities, or socioeconomic status. But recently I’ve revived my relationship to gossip earlier this year when I went around telling everybody that BIL #2 got the whole house pneumonia because he got pneumonia and did nothing about it for weeks so we’re kicking him out. My mom did admonish me for gossiping, but guess what? People need to know the moral of that story is to take care of your health and see a doctor if you have to. I believe gossip can teach people lessons on what’s okay and not okay. Without gossip, we would think it’s okay to lie and cheat and steal. I don’t see people reading Aesop’s Fables for life lessons, so gossip is the best social currency we got.

33. It’s up to us to end generational trauma. My husband prefers keeping his childhood a boilerplate — it’s simply “We grew up very poor and I finished high school a semester late with a GED.” My husband distances as much as he can from that former life. He has gone a long way experiencing a lot of social and economic mobility through adulthood and I am rooting for him. When my BILs first moved in, my husband was optimistic that they were taking a step closer to turning their life around because he believed he was able to do it, then maybe they could too. When they moved in, it has brought in a lot of unprocessed past trauma. I don’t know the details of his childhood aside from growing up poor, I just knew his dream was to break away from that old life. You just can’t put one foot out and the other foot behind to keep a small part of you in that that space; the best solution is to move forward.

34. Read something everyday. I’ve grown to enjoy reading for pleasure over the last two years.

35. Nostalgia is not all that great. I remembered when people were memorializing the Choco Taco I asked, “when was the last time you had a Choco Taco?” The common reply was childhood because they would get it from the ice cream truck at the park. For them seeing Choco Taco being discontinued was seeing a piece of their childhood gone. Then I guilt trip them to not chasing ice cream trucks as an adult and/or buying Choco Tacos in bulk at the grocery store because I am sure it would have stuck around. Has it occured that maybe Choco Tacos are not as good as they remembered? I only had a Choco Taco twice and both times were in chlidhood and from an ice cream truck. I’ve seen a package of Choco Tacos in the grocery store but I have not bought one because I preferred other ice creams.

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