Your Parents are the door to Jannah.
Open it or close it.
Your Choice
We live in a culture of blame. Everyone from politicians, celebrities and our kids, seem unable to admit they were wrong or take responsibility these days. It’s something we learn from fairy tales when we are small. Every story has to have a bad guy and a helpless victim. The blame is always shifted to someone else. We have all done it at some point in our lives, blamed our bad decision, qualities and experiences on our parents. Trouble is when do we own up to these things and take responsibility?
I’m talking about grown-up adults. The nineteen-year-old who blames his mum and dad for the uni course he/she hates. The 30-year-old who blame his parents for the wife he hates or the woman who blames her parents for the husband they encouraged her to marry. Ok yes, parents want to see their kids settled and do their best to matchmake but for most modern families the decision comes down to their child.
I say child but it is a fully grown adult who I am referring to, who is more than capable of deciding if this is what they want. So why is it that a few years later when things don’t work out, they automatically blame their parents? It’s them who didn’t finish the coursework. They were in that relationship and for whatever reason it didn’t work out.
Are parents meant to have a crystal ball and therefore should have predicted this outcome? Should they have seen this coming? I don’t deny that they have a lot of life experience behind them but they still don’t have all the answers. While they hope for the best for their child, they are usually powerless to stop marriages falling apart or their child dropping out of uni. It is about time that the blame game stops and we all take responsibility for the decisions we make.
A marriage is a partnership between two people. Ultimately it is those two people who make it work or break it up. No doubt, outside influences can play a significant part on how successful a marriage is or any other life decisions. The truth is, we as the decision makers bare total responsibility for that decision, not our parents. So, we really need to stop the blame game, own our decisions and the paths they take us on.
If we dig deeper, then it is one big victim mentality. In this story you are the victim and your life should have been so different but you can’t play the victim card forever. We have to remember, our parents were doing their best and if their best wasn’t to your standard then that’s your issue, not theirs. Don’t let past mistakes make you bitter and ruin your relationships. For some, it’s a way to cope with their life and that’s fine but forgive your parents and move on.
On the flipside of this, if we are going to blame our parents then we can’t be selective. We may blame them for the bad things that have happened but we need to also remember the good too. We all have some good qualities, however bad we think we are. Those good qualities are what we learned from our parents. No matter what kind of upbringing we had, our parents moulded us. Now that may show itself by having a caring nature, being smart or having a great work ethic. It’s all from our parents. Now you may blame them for one bad aspect of your life but they did well in so many others. The way they brought you up may be the reason you are independent and using your initiative to change things in your life.
At the end of the day, they did the best they could. No one has a manual on how to bring up perfect kids and get them to have amazing lives. Blaming others is unhealthy and pretty much pointless but every generation does it. Our parents did it too and theirs before them. It really is time to break the habit and take control of your life. Learn the things you need to do to move forward without having a baddie in your life story.
Take ownership of your decisions and put your trust in Allah because he has it all mapped out for you, Alhemdellah.
