CHOICES BEFORE COMING FORTH

All right. I’ve got a very important question. Not that these haven’t been.
I have eight children.

[Playfully] You have    our condolences.

Well, before I had any children, I had eight theories about how to raise
children. And now I have eight children and no theories about how to raise
children. I have a daughter; her name is Serena. And when she was about
nine or ten years old, she used to always complain to me about my
fathering, about my parenting, you know, giving me lots of advice about
how I do this wrong and that wrong.

And I had been listening to some of the things that Abraham was saying
and then one day I just got fed up with her complaining and I said to her,
“You know, if you don’t like the kind of father that I am, the kind of parent
that I am, then you shouldn’t be blaming me. You should really be taking a
look at yourself and asking yourself why in the world you would pick me to
be your father.”

And she put her hands on her hips, rolled her eyes at me—you know, that
ten-year-old kind of look—and she said, “You’re telling me that I actually
picked you to be my father and picked Mom to be my mother?”

I said, “Exactly right. And when you’re making important decisions like
that, you should really be very careful about them.”

Also, “You are right now evoking the kind of parent I am being. Your
expectation is so powerful, I cannot override it. We seem to have rendezvoused
on a vibrational spot that makes each of us want to blame the other for what’s
going on here.”

So her final response to me, which was the best response I think I’ve ever
heard from one of my kids, was “Well, then , I must have been in a hurry.”

And so my question to you, Abraham, is: Do we have access to knowing
or choosing who our parents are going to be before we show up in this