There's a sense of Deju vu

It can be SO hard to be different from one's parents, unless one has a strong determination not to follow.

This afternoon Ben asked for help with a soldering job again. Yesterday we replaced a component in the CPU of his Mazda MX5 that should make it run cleaner and today it was fixing a loudspeaker by re-attaching the flexible braid for the voice coil. This is JUST how things used to be for me growing up, where my father had all these skills and I had some jobs I just knew he'd do so much better than me. When he was in hospital with the mangled leg, again the echoes of things that happened to me were so strong (I mangled my left leg too, although I was hospitalised properly for a week with a broken rib, punctured lung & concussion after falling from a motorcyle).

Our children are such a mix of us though. In some ways he's much more like Chris, in others very like me. I hope he's able to make many of the good decisions that I was mercifully able to, and not end up with the trainwreck of a life that might also have been mine. He is his own man though, and I'm glad for that.