A mother's dream

The first time I felt like I was a part of something greater than myself was when I had my first baby. That’s late I know, but most of my life before that was spent rejecting the people and places I was connected to.  My childhood was peppered with varying degrees of turbulence so that by the time I was old enough to be on my own, I shut most of the world out. My therapist and I think it was a defense mechanism. We discussed my years of phone screening, my preference for email or the written word over face-to-face, my reluctance to participate socially in family functions and concluded it was an appropriate reaction to sometimes very inappropriate circumstances.

I remember with too much clarity the stress of my childhood.

Lately my four-year-old has discovered that he is a part of something larger than himself. Just yesterday he ran into the house bursting with excitement and announced that he had a special surprise for his “whole family”. In his hands he held a Dixie cup with four pretzel sticks – the last of his snack from the after-school program. He’d saved these for us. He could barely contain himself so we followed suit. We feigned enormous delight at being thought of this way, bit into our pretzels as if they were generous hunks of decadent chocolate cake, shook our heads with disbelief at the kindness of the act.

I love that Deaglan will not remember with painstaking exactitude his childhood. I hope that he will think back on it fondly but that it will be a blur, one long continuous ride, filled with

Love not pain.

Joy and only minor loss.

Kindness and comfort.

Giving not taking.

And the feeling of home, always home.

Thank you my friends for your wonderful comments on my last post. I still feel a bit raw from   the boldness of my act - I mean who do I think I am posting so many pictures of myself for the world to see? And yet I received some wonderful messages from even my high school friends telling me it was okay, that they understood where I was coming from. And even the ladies at BlogHer ads gave me a nod. See up there to the right under the heading More from BlogHer - that's my post! Every few weeks they pick something and it increases my traffic, brings other bloggers to my site, shares my little stories with people from all over the world. 

Kind of a thrill for an oddball like me.