The “John Fitzgerald Kennedy” Facebook page posted this yesterday (8/16/22):
"Our mothers are our first teachers, and we teach others the same lessons we learn from them. As a child, when your mother believes in you, you believe in yourself, and when that happens, there is nothing you can’t do. As a mother, that is the greatest gift we can give to a child." -Caroline Kennedy
Which I shared on my Facebook profile with this:
[About the above:] “I love this.
And I love this model of being a human: we thrive when we internalize a great mother (because we had one or we learned to self-mother, and self-father), a great mother who says, "There, there. You're safe. I love you. You'll always be safe. I'll always love you. Everything's alright. Everything's always going to be alright."
And internalize a great father who says, "Come on! We got a lot to do. We're going to do a lot of exploring and see a lot of things. We're going to make a big mess and make a lot of mistakes and learn a lot of things and make a lot of things and then clean it all up and go home and eat and tell everyone what we saw and what we learned and laugh at ourselves, and then go to sleep and dream great dreams about doing it all again tomorrow!"
Mom ourselves = we're safe. Always safe. Always loved. Unharmable. Able to love and appreciate and enjoy.
Dad ourselves = we can do anything we want! Find anything we want. Learn all we need to, all we don't know now. And have a blast doing it.
Mom says, "You're safe."
Dad says, "You're able."
To mom is to love.
To dad is to empower.
We can mom and dad ourselves and each other.”
That's GREAT Bruce! Thank you for sharing.