A is for Accountability
I’m driving to fetch Cam. Scott Backseat-Driver Reyburn
is strapped into his toddler seat behind me. There’s a traffic circle and
another car and I’m not great with following distance and I brake a little hard.
Silence. Then soft rebuke: ‘Careful Mom.’
B is for Balance
Cam wants me to play hiking-hiking. This involves
imaginary trails and untold dangers and snacks and river crossings on the lawn.
I tell him I’ve got varsity assignments to mark. I’ll be around but I won't be
able to play much today. He goes all fists and fury and says, ‘You never hardly
ever often play with us anymore!’ So we have a conversation about the wooden
spoon. He gets polite again. I play hiking-hiking. The marking grows insidiously on the dining room table. Somehow it gets done.
And I’m astonished again by the hefty weight carried by time
and focus and non-measurable results and intangible achievements and
immediately unconstructive though eternally fruitful activities involving small
growing people, on life’s heaped-heavy swaying-precariously scales of balance.
C is for Comfort
I’m in church at the back with Scott who doesn’t want to
go to Sunday School and is cavorting wildly. I start crying during the worship
because a close friend is really sick. I pull myself sort-of together because I
don’t want to be that woman who weeps during worship. My eyes are sort-of dry
and Scott climbs into my lap and cups my face in his chubby hands and says with
all his soft heart, ‘You feeling calmer now, Mom?’
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