Karen Hunt
(shown with family)
Arizona, USA

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Sixth-Grade Quest

“I wish I could blame the way things are in my life right now on somebody else. Things would be so much easier if I could just say it is all somebody else’s fault because of what ‘they’ did and said. And because of The Landmark Forum, I can’t. I know it is ‘me’ who is responsible for my own life!”

This was an outburst I heard when I entered my 11 year-old son’s room one afternoon after he came home from school.

David is in the sixth grade. Appropriately nicknamed “the roller coaster years,” middle school has brought with it a pendulum of exhilarating highs and devastating lows. On this particular afternoon, David’s roller coaster was plummeting, an issue around the all-important, ever-present quest for social status in the sixth grade.

If confronted with this exact scenario with David prior to doing The Landmark Forum, my reaction as a parent would have been to rush and “fix it” and “patch it up” to spare David from being hurt. I would have gone to great lengths, doing all sorts of acrobatics to ensure that David not be left unhappy. Like most parents I know, I believed that making my children happy was my job.

Now Landmark-wise, I saw that one of the pitfalls I had fallen into as a parent was that I judged myself based on whether my children were happy. Needless to say, I was frustrated with my parenting a lot of the time.

I also saw that it is virtually impossible to make another human being happy. I was able to separate my love for them from the illusion that their happiness was up to me – a relief. On that particular afternoon, I found I had the freedom to simply be there with and for David, to be able to really listen to his concerns without glossing over them and trying to make things better.

Does this mean our family no longer has problems? No, building our family is a work in progress. We are always making adjustments and changing directions.

But we now have the tools to communicate in such a way that we can support each other in whatever one of us may be going through. We now have a powerful platform from which to look together as we face not just the big challenges, but the everyday stuff in our family and in our lives.

What a remarkable outburst David had. To know that your life is up to you, not your parents, or your spouse, or your boss, or the right circumstances, is a very special gift for anyone, but especially for an 11 year old.