Monday, January 28, 2013

Don’t settle for less than beautiful and delicious


Dear Cam and Scott

Bits of your childhood break off like candy floss. They float – sweet colour sticky – around the house and in the air and cling wispy gluey yum to my heart.

Cam, you say you want to be a beekeeper and a poet. You could also be a Maker-Upper of New Words. Like ‘ka-momma-late’. Which you made up. You use it facetiously and it kind of means nominate commandingly. As in, ‘Mom, I kamommalate you to go and bath now.’ Don’t ever ever stop making up words and stories and sticky fluffy imaginings that melt on the tongue. Don’t ever stop talking out your thoughts – oh, your wife will be grateful, as I am. You express your joys and frustrations like succinct slices of sweet and sour life. The other day you dawdled beneath my feet busy in the kitchen. Quietly, chuffed you said: ‘One day I’m going to be a wonderful dad to my children.’ My feet stopped rushing and stood happy still. Like father like son.

Scott, you are the wunderkind of soft affection and dizzying energy. Don’t ever ever stop being amazed by clouds and breakfast muffins and your teacher and baby cows and chickens and ants and collecting stones from pathways. I love how you offer to help carry heavy things and how you relinquish a book when Cam asks you nicely. Our far-too-early morning puzzle-building and crepuscular don’t-wake-Dad coffee-making are pre-breakfast sugar to my soul.

I know candy floss is ethereal. You’ll grow out of it and into the meatier stuff of life. But you don’t have to lose your sense of wonder, not ever. Don’t settle. Not now and not when you’re older. Don’t settle for safe or beige or bland (even if safe, beige and bland are also lucrative). Reach for the kaleidoscope and the tang that explodes from your gifts.  

I’m trusting you’ll read this at a time in the future when you need it most. Because life will try to drench your candy floss – leave you soggy and dreamless and disappointed. Remember then that there’s more for you and that God ‘is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more that we might ask or think.’ (Eph. 3:20)

All my love

Mom

xx



 Scott and Kyle... up to no good at Irene Dairy...










No comments:

Post a Comment