My song today is, ‘Remember When’. This song was written and recorded by American country music artist, Alan Jackson. Released in October 2003, it spent two weeks at Number 1 on the U.S. Billboard ‘Hot Country Songs’ chart in February 2004 and peaked at Number 29 on the ‘Billboard Hot 100’ chart.
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Whatever stage a person is at in their life should represent a different part of one’s journey through life. Each phase of life is different and brings corresponding emotions of pleasure when things are going well. While most people would prefer to stay forever young, it will never happen, and even were it possible, I would not think it desirable. There is a time and place for each of us, and some stages of life are happier than others. Whatever remains our emotional experiences at each phase of life as we journey through, each stage is usually characterised by a predominant emotion.
Young children live mostly in a world of exploration and constant astonishment. No other stage in life can produce the ‘astonishment’ seen in a child’s face as they delicately hold a butterfly in the palm of their hands, or watch a spider weave a web, or see a ladybird slowly crawl up a little person’s hand, or see the reflective splash that can be created by jumping hard in an unsuspecting puddle. So, it is as each stage in an individual’s passage through life holds its own learning curve for the traveller.
Young teenagers seem filled with the added zest of life as they become more ‘daring’ in their games and pastimes. This usually occurs as they start to engage in experimental behaviours, in conjunction with their body changes. Older teenagers, on the other hand, become more aware of their ‘sexual identities’ as their bodies start to produce involuntary responses both above and below their waistlines at the sight and touch of the opposite sex. In their mid to late teens, there is an estrogenic and a testosterone collision between the developing sexes which results in a sexual explosion, leading young men and young women to occasionally succumb to their physical desires and to jump in puddles of promiscuity together.
The marriage phase of life can ironically be that part of life’s journey where our decision making in choosing the right partner to wed, set up home, and start a family with is put to the most stringent of tests that any two people will ever be asked to negotiate together. The marital experiment can produce the widest of experiences for each of the couples ‘jumping the broomstick’ depending upon the satisfaction of the love match, along with their mutuality and compatibility in taste and all manner of customs and practices. In short, the individual experiences enjoyed, endured, or engaged in can depend greatly upon whether they meet one’s level of ‘marital expectation’. Nobody ever gets married with thoughts of ever getting divorced, but sadly in just over half of all marriages entered into this life-long experimentation will fail. There are many reasons which lead to a marital breakdown that are not necessary to go into here, but one I will cite is a weird peculiarity of human nature; the need of one marriage partner (usually the wife) to change the man she married as soon as the couple return from their honeymoon and crosses the threshold of domesticity. As soon as a new wife looks across at her new husband and thinks “That is certainly an area for improvement!” then the groom stops being her husband and becomes her ‘project’.
The next life phase for most is parenthood, shortly followed by the seven-year itch when the shine has clearly rubbed off the couple’s sparkling love life and relationship. The coming of children into the household makes much more of a mess in a father and mother’s life than any pile of dirty nappies ever could; much more than any non-parent could ever imagine. Sleep is lost, weight is gained and marital stress between husband and wife becomes an increasing occurrence in the daily life of husband and wife. As the woman becomes a mother 24 hours a day to a dependent infant who cries loudly more than smiles cooingly the increased pressure of her multiple household roles has its toll. She is left with absolutely no time to be a wife or even a stressed individual with five minutes to spare, and this pressure is merely added to when her husband starts to feel left out of her attention and affections. There are only 24 hours in any day and she only has one pair of hands. It is their baby who now preoccupies her attention and has unfettered access to its mother’s breasts. Her husband feels pushed out and starts to think that he no longer counts in the equation of the distribution of love that his wife hands out.
The young child develops and learns most of the behaviour they adopt from their homes, long before they enter the classroom of their first school. I believe that the best way to make a child good is to make them happy, and the most certain way to make a child happy is to make them a part of a happy home. One thing that chimpanzees have taught me over the years when I watch a parent with its infant, is that the young should have fun!
While it should always be the parent’s aim to build children of strong character, it sadly remains too easy to break them down instead and make them feel insecure and unloved by failing to enthuse and compliment their efforts. Any parent who can pass enthusiasm along to their child provides them with a family estate of incalculable value when they die. I strongly believe that children are apt to live up to what their parents believe of them. One of the proudest things that please me about all my offspring is their non-racist attitudes. Each of my children possesses a natural sense of fairness, equality, and justice they display as adults. I always taught them that in the diversity of mankind there is a beauty and strength never to be found in any manner of uniformity. Not one of my children has a racist thought in their head or feeling in their hearts, and all enjoy friends of different skin tone, colour, religion, and nationality.
Children should not be forced to grow up too soon. Their childhood years should be ones to treasure and be filled with memories to be looked back on in later life in fond remembrance. On the other hand, there is a parental responsibility that children should not be allowed to enter the adult world unprepared for what they might face. We do our children no service by overprotecting them from the cold realities of the world. As Walt Disney observed: “ Most things are good, and they are the strongest things, but there are evil things too, and you are not doing the child a favour by trying to shield him/her from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good will always triumph over evil.”
If a couple can get through their first seven years of marriage with their trust in each other and fidelity remaining intact, they usually adjust to the following thirteen years as they gradually settle into their more independent lifestyles that run in tandem with maintaining a satisfactory family unit.
Then, between the ages of 40-50 years (menopausal years) there is a change of life that sorely tests their marriage bond once more. Some men develop a growing dissatisfaction with any sex life that still exists outside the seasonal times of birthdays, Christmases, annual holidays, and complete lockdown periods during electricity blackouts and pandemic virus spread. Without realising it at first, both husband and wife allow their eyes the freedom to wander elsewhere as quick glances gradually develop into more searching visual observations. They probably become aware of a gradual increase in their flirting behaviours whenever in the presence of other attractive men and women but are unaware of the dangerous game they are now playing. Unknowingly, they have made themselves ‘emotionally vulnerable’ and more accepting of predatory advances by someone whom they find sensually appealing. By this stage in their journey through married life, the children have grown and flown the family nest, and a husband and his wife have more time to assess the overall situation and their part in it. They look at their spouse and think about the type of person they are living with and begin to ask themselves unpleasant facts they do not enjoy facing. Questions asked of themselves may include, “Am I happy? What am I getting out of life? What lies in store for the future? Is this enough or do I deserve more during the latter part of my life?” As they tussle with the answers they are in the process of deciding if they really want to maintain the status quo of marriage mediocre? At this stage, many marriages come to a natural end as it is reluctantly accepted by one or both partners that the ‘sell-by-date’ has passed, and what is left of their married shelf-life appears less attractive and romantically inclined than it once did.
However, the marriages which carry on surprisingly grow from strength to strength. It is as though, having mentally, psychologically, physically, and emotionally decided to ‘’stay married’ to your spouse, you get on and start to make the best of custom and practice. Retirement often sees married couples out walking together again more often and it becomes self-evident that the wife has made progress in ‘her project’ as one sees her husband push the trolley of shopping around the supermarket as they discuss the price of bread this week and the merits of eating perfectly straight carrots at double the price of smaller bendy ones that have a longer tail on them!
If a married couple can get to the stage of old age holding hands, and are able to preserve their minds and bodies well enough to sit, stand, walk and perform their basic functions, they will be able to look back from their rocking chairs of contentment on the lives they have lived. As the husband and wife celebrate their golden wedding anniversary and looks across at each other fondly, they may each wonder in the secret alcoves of their own mind, “ If I were to live my life again, would I make the same choices?”
Love and peace Bill xxx