Our lives aren’t single-tracked– we have parallel lines running all the time. These lines each satisfy a need we have, and when combined make up our whole person.
What we need to teach our kiddos, and each other, is the strength to look at all of our lines running parallel, acknowledge which ones we need, and pursue those instead of killing ourselves pursuing all of them simultaneously… or just one of them singularly.
…we adults lose our minds when someone treats us differently because of our gender or skin color, but in a restaurant we immediately segregate our children with crap food and lowered expectations and think it’s normal; do the math.
…when we’re told we can’t have something, even if it’s something we didn’t want, we tend to falsely value it more.
…we can’t shift the burden of those desires to recapture past freedoms onto the people around us by bringing our kiddos somewhere we, deep down, know we probably shouldn’t.
…but we can find a middle ground of respecting the space of non-parents (or solo parents), and also seeing if parents in a bind need a few minutes of help and kindness. Or even just patient understanding.
Peel & Cleaver 