Escaping from my job and my city was one thing, but what about escaping from your history, is it possible? Can you truly learn from the mistakes of the generations before you and make better, more informed life choices? I mean that is the goal of evolution, right, to be better, to do better, to achieve more. It is also part of the American Dream too; that each generation will surpass the one before.
It was these kinds of things that I also thought about on the long road of El Camino. Women often look to their mothers, aunts and grandmothers for examples as to how to live their lives, and what happens when you don't want to follow in the footsteps of those that came before you? In my case, the things that immediately come to me is the idea of not having trouble before my time. Practically everyone in my family had a baby or babies out of wedlock, and this one thing made me re-evaluate my own decisions and really think about what I wanted for myself. Also, I was truly afraid that if did become pregnant as a teen that my mother would kill me. Don't get me wrong the women in my family took care of the children and are good people, they just had happy accidents along the way. Yet, they would stress the importance of education before all else, especially sex.
This didn't deter me from having sex but I was always hyper-aware of the consequences and had come to the decision that I would not be a teenage mother and would do what I needed to not to become another family statistic. Does that mean I wasn't reckless, a lot. Many were the days that I skipped school to hang out with my boyfriend to "hang out" which usually involved sex many times in one day. So yes, I was a dumb teenager, at times, but I knew that no baby would get in the way of my future.
And it was never an issue, I made it through high school, college and graduate school without the complication of children. So yeah, I came out ahead of the game, surpassing my forebears, but what did I have to show for it, a fancy education? And that is when the pondering begins, what else did I miss, what else had they done that I did not want to do? What more could I strive to be or do, that would show them that I was different? That I hadn't made their mistakes. Well dear reader I don't know. But I knew that I had already begun making mistakes in my life that my daughters and granddaughters would want to run from too. What were my mistakes? Well, they mostly had to do with men. The wrong men, bad career choices and generally tomfoolery, that would leave me still single and still trying to figure out who I am in my thirties.
It was these kinds of things that I also thought about on the long road of El Camino. Women often look to their mothers, aunts and grandmothers for examples as to how to live their lives, and what happens when you don't want to follow in the footsteps of those that came before you? In my case, the things that immediately come to me is the idea of not having trouble before my time. Practically everyone in my family had a baby or babies out of wedlock, and this one thing made me re-evaluate my own decisions and really think about what I wanted for myself. Also, I was truly afraid that if did become pregnant as a teen that my mother would kill me. Don't get me wrong the women in my family took care of the children and are good people, they just had happy accidents along the way. Yet, they would stress the importance of education before all else, especially sex.
This didn't deter me from having sex but I was always hyper-aware of the consequences and had come to the decision that I would not be a teenage mother and would do what I needed to not to become another family statistic. Does that mean I wasn't reckless, a lot. Many were the days that I skipped school to hang out with my boyfriend to "hang out" which usually involved sex many times in one day. So yes, I was a dumb teenager, at times, but I knew that no baby would get in the way of my future.
And it was never an issue, I made it through high school, college and graduate school without the complication of children. So yeah, I came out ahead of the game, surpassing my forebears, but what did I have to show for it, a fancy education? And that is when the pondering begins, what else did I miss, what else had they done that I did not want to do? What more could I strive to be or do, that would show them that I was different? That I hadn't made their mistakes. Well dear reader I don't know. But I knew that I had already begun making mistakes in my life that my daughters and granddaughters would want to run from too. What were my mistakes? Well, they mostly had to do with men. The wrong men, bad career choices and generally tomfoolery, that would leave me still single and still trying to figure out who I am in my thirties.
