I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A FAMILY MAN(Charles E.J. Moulton) I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A FAMILY MAN

Article by Charles E.J. Moulton

There is a deep truth and fundamental importance to the word family. Our vehicle, and red thread through time, if you will, is love and family. The soul wants to experience itself on Earth and does so, among others, by finding love of a family.
We are spiritual travellers. My dad died in 2005. My mum died in April 2011 after sixty years as a professional opera singer. We sang duets even this year before she passed away. And yet I can still hear them sing. They are not dead. They are just in another place. What does all this mean? That seasons come and go and that we are souls on a journey.
Looking back, I now really value their influence. The wonderful thing about my parents was that they respected my opinion. They never said I should go play in my room when grown-ups came to visit. I did so occasionally, of course, and when my friends were there I did so with greater enthusiasm rather than sitting among the adults. But if I wanted to stay, I did, and when I wanted to say something, my parents and the guests listened and took me seriously. I had an opinion.
And there were some really interesting people that came over and they didn’t just talk about the weather. They talked about really cool stuff like theatre, art, ocean liners and wild tigers. They also brought great stuff like flutes and English fruit cake.
My parents were intellectuals, academics, artists, singers. Both of them performers with twenty, thirty years experience already when I was growing up. We made music and sang, performed, talked about art and theatre. My dad showed me great artwork and I painted my own drawings that my dad hung up in his room. I saw my mum perform some role on stage and went into my room and dressed up as a prince or a cowboy or a vampire. It was obvious what I wanted to become.
Growing up at home with my dad Herb Moulton and my mom Gun Kronzell was great fun, because they were great artists and great people. They also told me they loved me, which was the most important thing of all. Despite their tight schedules they always had time for a good night story, an ice cream or a laugh.
The greatest thing was that this wonderfully mutual musical love affair connected with family continued and my parents and I kept on singing and acting together until they died.
This wonderful tradition continues. My wife, my daughter and I went to Sweden to bury the urn of my mum in the family grave this year. As sad an occasion as it was, the fact that all my relatives were there and got to meet my five year old daughter and my wife was great. My daughter played with my mum’s old dollhouse that her cousin had kept in her summer house. My daughter got to play on my old playground in my home town. Pure nostalgia. My mum was there.
My daughter once said to me: “Dad, you are always so nice to me. You are my hero. Thank you!”
What more can a dad want.
Life has taught me that families bring you strength.
Families give you love and love turns into a creative force.
For an artist that is so valuable.
We artists create from our souls.
Art is technique, it is a craft that we have learned, it is multitasking, it is remembering your lines while following hundreds of cues during a show while watching out for traps in the stage floor and keeping cool.
But having a family makes you so strong.
I could not achieve all of that if it weren’t for my family.
Families bring you so much happiness.
We’ve just bought a house. It is so much work to renovate it and decorate it, but seeing my daughter's glow when she says that she is getting to have her own house makes me sing inside.
As I said, I have always been a family man, even as a child.
Why? Because my parents always respected me as their equal while letting me be a child. Also because they were never afraid to be childish, which is something artists learn to remain.
My times playing horse and cat with my daughter or acting out a scene as princess and king are among the finest in my life. I love my wife, I love my daughter. I love my parents in heaven, whom my daughter speaks of as her guardian angels.
The more childish I can allow myself to be, the more of a responsible adult do I become. Being an adult also means being able to remain a child.
That to me is the essence of family values.
Realizing how wonderfully vast God’s creation is and that children respond to honesty of spirit in an adult who speaks to them as spirits, souls who love to explore the wonders of the universe. Let us not forget that God gave us the world so that we could reinvent ourselves and experience him anew.
To me, the best way to experience that is when I am with my wife and daughter telling them how much I love them.
Within those words the secrets of life lie embedded like a rose among daffodils.

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