This very question has left me in deep thought since my first daughter was born. There are other legacies that don’t involve children, of course. What I most want to do is make people’s lives better than they would have been, had I not born. Mother Teresa is my role model. Stop laughing! Heheheh…..
Seriously, I want to be just like her, but doing different things than she did. I want to go to the Congo and fight the Ebola virus. I want to bring two warring factions of a society together and help them make some damn sense of how everything got so fucked up. Hell, there are days when I can’t even bring my own two sides together. I guess the internal work is still a work in progress.
I want my girls to always be deeply in touch with their humanity. I want it to be second nature for them to consider other people’s feelings as well as thier own. I want them to understand that who they are will have an effect on everyone around them, far beyond what their eyes can see, so they have to work for those people, too. I have done my level best to instill in them a sense of loving themselves and self-forgiveness, even when no one else can forgive them. Humans are such fragile creatures.
I want to bring justice to those who waited for a lifetime, yet justice never came for them. I want to leave people understanding that doing something the right way, without shortcuts, eliminates almost all the pain they feel. If I can do some of those things, even without a podium, or recognition, then I will have fulfilled my destiny. I will die with no regrets, nor wistful looks back, at what might have been.