Exactly what I want to read on Monday mornings: it describes and confirms my experience from different areas of life, whether it's coding, yoga or DJing; your life is for you and it's supposed to be fun. Then it's original and, with a bit of luck, others will enjoy the things you do too. However, if you do everything just to please others, then you are enslaving yourself to them, copying things that already exist and your originality is gone. My humble opinion...
In several different ways at the same time. One moment, it's obvious your life is for your children; another, you're thinking in frustration that it should be for you, at least a bit.
Gets tricky to find a balance, but balance is needed, because your children learn from example; if you sacrifice 100% of your own self to them, they'll never learn how to live.
While I thank my parents for having invested so much of their lives in me, I do hope that they had the chance to do most of the things that they liked while bringing me up, and I surely hope they do that now that we're all grown up and independent (unfortunately, in my case, one parent is dead and the other doesn't really have the energy anymore... I wish she would just have fun and enjoy life, but it's easy to say when you're young and healthy).
Well, I have orbited the sun 55 times, 24 of them together with another person besides my life partner. I understand that some parameters in life were chosen by others (my name, place of birth etc. even my gender I could not choose myself), but many other decisions were, are and will be made by me and their consequences are sometimes quite different from what they were planned or expected. In any case, this is still my reality that I have to deal with - everything else is illusion or wishful thinking. The best I can do is to accept things and situations as they are, as happily as possible. This means that I can and perhaps even have to adapt within the scope of my possibilities in order to be as happy as possible.
