Mirrors

May 25,2026

Issue 3

“I used to stare at the mirror, now I don’t cause when I do I see a ghost.” – Zevia

The beginning of our existence is shaped by others. Before we ever choose who we are, we are already being formed by the homes we live in, the love we receive, the fear we absorb, and the people who teach us what the world is supposed to be. That beginning becomes the foundation we walk on until we eventually leave the bubble that first developed us. Once we do, identity becomes a choice as much as an inheritance. Some people bury old wounds. Some build a false self in a new environment. Some go searching for meaning. Some leave only to return to the very place they tried to escape. But at a certain point in life, we stop only shaping ourselves and begin shaping someone else. Whether as a parent, aunt, uncle, teacher, mentor, influencer, or even a stranger passing through a child’s life, what we believe in to survive becomes part of what they inherit. In that way, children often become a mirror. Not a comfortable one, but an honest one. They reflect back the wounds we never healed, the fears we never named, and the parts of ourselves we hoped would end with us.

The question of who we are is never fully settled. Even by death, it feels unfinished. Identity is too alive, too shifting, too affected by what is seen and unseen for it to ever stay still. We are constantly being reshaped by belief, pain, addiction, coping, love, loneliness, and understanding. None of these remain private forever. In time, they become the atmosphere of a home. We judge because that is part of being human. We watch parents with their children and quietly decide what kind of parent we hope to be, or what kind we are afraid of becoming. But those judgments are not formed only by what we see in strangers. They are formed most deeply by what we lived through ourselves. What we judge in our parents, especially the things we promise never to repeat, often becomes part of the architecture of our own identity. We may grow beyond it, but we are still standing on that original foundation. And when a child enters our life, that foundation becomes visible again. In them, we often see our insecurities, our wounds, our habits, and the parts of ourselves we thought we had buried. Too often, we try to correct the child before we ever confront the broken parts of the one doing the shaping.

Do bad parents exist, or am I a bad parent? Both are fair and honest questions. But maybe the harder truth is that not every struggling parent is a bad one. From the outside looking in, it is easy to judge. We see actions, reactions, and consequences, and we make conclusions from them. But parenting is rarely that simple. A parent may love their child deeply and still parent through addiction, fear, insecurity, loneliness, or emotional absence. A parent may even convince themselves that stepping away is better than passing down what they have not learned to fix in themselves. Does that make them bad? Does feeling like giving up when parenting becomes overwhelming make someone bad? Does recognizing our own anger in the way we punish, react to, or speak to our children make us bad? It is difficult to answer those questions in absolutes. Deep down, love may still exist in the parent, but maybe the more honest question is: how much of that love is being buried beneath what they are giving power to?

What we give power to never affects only us. It follows us into our homes, into our relationships, and into the way we raise the lives in front of us. Other people will always have opinions, advice, and judgments about how children should be taught, loved, corrected, and understood. And sometimes that advice matters. Sometimes it is needed. But no one fully knows the private weight of another person’s life, or the battles that shaped the way they parent. That does not mean all advice should be ignored, and it does not mean all advice should be followed. It means reflection matters more than pride. It means asking ourselves what we are truly giving power to, and how that is shaping the child in front of us. Most of the time, we believe we are giving power to the right things long before we are willing to change. That does not automatically make us bad either. It makes reflection an active part of growth, because nothing in us stays fixed, and nothing in a child’s mind stays untouched.

Regardless of whether we have children of our own, they are everywhere in our lives. We see them at parks, on the way to work, in grocery stores, at family events, on vacations. We do not escape them, and maybe we are not supposed to. The truth is that children often reveal who we are and what we are still struggling with. Why that is built into us is harder to explain. Maybe it is the insecurities we spend our lives trying to suppress. Maybe it is a reminder from the God we believe in of what still needs healing. Maybe it is our desire to become something we have not yet reached. Whatever the reason, the questions are difficult, and I am not sure they will ever be fully answered. The fabric of identity has been questioned since the beginning of time, and it will continue to be questioned long after us. Who we become is shaped by experience, by influence, and by the people we come across. But the identity of the parent is not the identity of the child. We are ourselves. One of one. And children are one of one too. No amount of previous teaching, theory, or experience can fully account for the uniqueness of a person. There are no copies. Because of that, who we are should not be measured by who someone else is. Who we should become should not be based on who we are not. And who our children are, or how they should act, should not be forced into someone else’s mold. Maybe that is what children are here to do: not become us, but reveal us, and ask whether we are willing to heal what we were about to pass on.