I thought Starbucks was for rich people.
At friends houses I saw the boxes of gushers, fruit roll-ups, and Doritos and I thought my family was poor.
At friends houses I was amazed with the massive DVD collections, TVs in bedrooms, and eventually iPads and cellphones.
And I thought my family was poor.
When we joyfully shuffled through bags of hand me downs and searched endlessly at thrift stores for cute clothes instead of going back to school shopping, I thought we were poor.
But the thing is we had a basketball court at our house. The thing is we had a pool so big, it could easily fit 20 people.
We had horses. And chickens, cats, dogs, goats, and pigs. Heck! We even had a coy pond.
We had a field where our family played football, soccer, and freeze tag. Some summer days my sisters and I would lay out our blankets and read together as the sun shown down on us.
There were luscious gardens with rows and rows of veggies of every kind that we planted from seed. Flowers, fruit trees, and bird feeders surrounded the house from every angle.
My mom was a culinary expert.
We cooked food from every culture with names I still can’t pronounce. She was the kind of woman that rarely needed a cook book. She just knew. She baked, canned, pickled, and more.
All from scratch.
Every year we would take massive road trips and travel the U.S. during the summer. I can’t even express how much fun we had in these trips.
During Inner Child Healing, I was able to gain an entirely new perspective.
It was never that we were poor.
It was that my parents had different values than many of those around us. They valued experiences, hard work, and adventure.
I’m so thankful I get to bring even an ounce of this hard work, knowledge, play, and adventure from my unique childhood to my daughters.
The absence of something is not always that the item is unavailable,
sometimes it’s that more precious items were chosen to fill the space and time instead.
