Life Isn’t Fair

What’s a saying or piece of advice your parents often repeated to you when you were growing up?

I chose this topic from the 2 suggested for Monday ‘ME’ Hop at Cinful Cinnamon’s place because it’s not  only something mom used to say frequently, but I said to my own kids all the time.

When I was a child, growing up with 3 siblings, 2 brothers squeezed in between me and my baby sister, there was periodic chaos and squabbles.  Okay likely it was far more than periodic.  Without a doubt there were going to be days when someone got the red cup for the second day in a row, or got to sit in the front seat and ride shot gun next to mom, or maybe was permitted one more library book than the rest of us, had a bit more Kool-Aid in their cup or slightly more pudding for dessert.  Try as she might, mom was never going to be able to equally square things between all of us.

Sooner or later, seems like every single day, one of us was yelling “but that’s not fair!”.  Mom would turn and say to that whiner, “no where on your birth certificate does it say life is going to be fair”.  Trust me, I  looked, all over that puppy with a magnifying glass for some kind of fine print that guaran-damn-teed my life should be fair.  No such luck, it simply isn’t there.

As I have  grown up and grown older (okay the grown up is debatable), I’ve learned it is a good thing that life is not fair.  Grandma used to say if you piled everyone’s problems in a huge pile and had to chose, you’d take your own back when you saw what others were dealing with in their lives.  It might not be evident by their happy faces, seemingly happy-go-lucky road, but count on it, they carry burdens too.

My kids would roll their eyes as I repeated mom’s revelation about their birth certificates,  but now they too know it is true, and a good thing.  And some day I have no doubt they will repeat it to their own kids.  Heck, they’ve periodically fed that morsel of wisdom back to me!