I Am Not My Father, I Am Not My Mother

I am not my father not that I didn't love him but my dreams deferred along another path and I have no desire to make the mistakes he made. I see the past in a haze recalling youthful observations of love and lust and foolishness of failed obligations and any responsibility. He was a good man with a kind and generous heart but his attention always focused elsewhere to frely love and laugh and play with women not his wife. I am not my mother, an infatuated, naive young girl loving a married man and bearing four children with no plan for raising them in this world. She was just a lost and wishful bride to be anticipating love, trust and commitment but dreading its arrival, choosing instead to abandon those children as she did. She was a woman obsessed, lost and bedeviled by fear, youth, insanity deprived herself of love and care having herself no parent knowledge or foundation. I am neither my father nor my mother, there was no child for me to bear, no lasting, permanent love for me to share, those that were, are too forgotten to recall. I am but myself, living, loving while trying to find my way, lonely and stuggling here along my path, taking and facing this journey myself each day I am but myself, just me.