Heart’s Delight
Ok, I think I can post this sentiment because it’s not coming on the heels of any one particular visit or conversation; I do hope the mothers reading this understand my sentiment. In fact, really, I’m asking if you do. I’m hoping you do.
Whenever I watch my children play with other children, my heart wells up with gratitude for my own particular children.
Ok, so, maybe not EVERY SINGLE time. Mine have their share of moments.
But overall, it is true. I just think I have the best kids. It feels to me like an objective truth. My mother-in-law would point out how hard we work at bringing them up; my mother would point out that so far we’ve had easy kids. :) Both are right.
I am not prone to sappy sentiment or emotive effusions, but it must be motherly bias. Bias based on knowledge, personal knowledge, intimate knowledge. Just as I know it to be an objective fact that I’m married to one of the best men out there. It must be a factor of that knowing, for I do tend also to think that of all the children I have come across, our play group is populated with the choicest. I have seen them all twice weekly (at least) since they’ve been born, so I know them and love them with an affection that is different than any I might have for any other friend’s child. It just is. That’s what time, what community, does.
And I see my own for most of their waking moments. I tend them and direct them…or at least, I try to…and it is most apparent to me that this is a good work, perhaps the best work, when I see my children set against a backdrop other than daily home life. It is seeing them with new eyes to see them in a different place and different people, and it is then that I am most grateful for them, most spurred on to continue the good work, and feel most blessed among women.
And that, of course, is when Jaeger will bat some other kid across the head just because he wanted to see what would happen.
No! Stop intruding the present moment into my beautiful reflections! :)
My children are my heart’s delight. I do delight in them. When I take them to the grocery store, Hans bags the cans together and the boxes together. At an outdoor function Jaeger finds a long stick and jumps with rejoicing and shouts with his “big,” boasting voice about how he will kill the dragon. And I sigh and think, “You know, actually, I love my life.”
So I’m hoping that you think that, too. I sometimes become afraid that my rejoicing is in the objective truth and that would make me sad. It would make me sad to think another mother who has reasonably good, well-trained children (and that’s all mine are) would envy me my children. It would make me sad if another woman were jealous of my husband, though the woman in me in both cases feels like such sentiments would be completely reasonable. I am content with my lot. I rejoice in my lot. And I hope you do to.
Look at it. Rejoice in it. Keep working.
