A few days ago the children and I were in the car on the way home from school. Suddenly, out of the blue said the middle one, You know Mom, we see each other (the children, our little bunch…) more than we see you (mommy and daddy). I choked. The boy’s voice was not complaining. His tone was almost neutral, as if he was pointing a fact that he sees no particularly exciting breaking news in it. Still, I choked. And that is exactly why we’re going on this family adventure. Because my heart feels that now is the time, a moment before it’s too late to create that special lifetime glue we so want so badly to have with our children. That repair glue, repair the heart, repairing the damaged cross-generation chain of ours, each one of us with his family of origin, and the two of us together with the choice of correction, love and partnership.
So it is just a minute before they no longer count us, and I just pray that we will make it on time. Let this year, or whatever remained of it, pass. October 2014, here we come.
Recently in our house there is this thing around Paleo diet. The children are very enthusiastic over it, well, that’s our three carnivores. The eldest read somewhere in the internet that Paleo recommends sleeping in complete darkness (to encourage the necessary hormones to be secreted properly during the sleep, or something) so he launched a campaign for his two younger brothers to agree to sleep in the dark. He suggested heavy arguments such as “our sleep will be of much more quality” and “good sleep is important to our brain, we are still growing!”. Eventually the campaign succeeded and the little group went up that night determined to have a good quality sleep in absolute darkness. And maybe grow a bit while doing that.
But then, when arrived the moment of truth and the night lamp went off, a revolt broke out in the rows. Our small one withdrew from the hard-earned agreement. Their voices rolled down the stairs and I heard that the discourse was positive overall, so I did not intervene. At some point silence broke out and I forgot about the whole story. At night when I went to bed, I peeked in their room (our eldest has his own room, but there are times like now, that he sleeps with his younger brothers in their room) – pitch darkness. I turned on the light in the hall to see what happens there, and found the three cubs sleeping together in one little bed. Probably a democratic vote was held and the Paleo sleep ended up with the two boys personally guarding their younger sister in her bed.
Now what’s left for me is to think how to tell my young meat-eaters that in India, well, there is some problem eating cows.
And one last thing, this morning incidentally while weaving my little one’s braid, she turned to me (metaphorically, she cannot actually turn while standing with his back to me and me doing her hair) and said: “Mom, God is water. Because when he created all, water has already been there. That’s what I think.” Happy philosophical week to you too!
