Learning

I wrote this in 2008. I forgot I even wrote it until I stumbled upon it. To me, it looks like I was starting to see kairos time before I knew that there was a label for it. 

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I take things for granted.  I try not to and I’m getting better, but it still happens.  I used to take my children for granted.  My preschooler with the constant demands and needs for atttention, potty training and temper tantrums, and the baby with night wakings and need for attention... in my haze of post partum depression I didn’t understand what was happening and why it was happening I just knew it was almost too much for me to bear.  I felt like I was trapped. “Trapped in my own life”, I would say, not realising how very blessed I was to have these so called trappings around me.  

And then I got the call.  The call where my friend would tell me that her son had stage 4 liver cancer. Her 10 month old son whose body would ravaged by this special form of evilness that plagues at least one person we know... or more... or more than that.  I went to her and the second I entered her house I felt the thickness of air, heavy with disease and panic and grief and worry.  This thickness enveloped me into the fold and barely 36 hours had passed and then I was holding his thin frail body, listening to his heavy breath and the thought “this child is dying” passed through my head.  And then, not even 10 minutes later, being in the whirlwind of his death: the ambulance, people swirling, seeing his body, already cold to the touch, and watching his mother and father crumple, shrivel and weep, their entire universe crushing around them.  

When I finally got home and held my children and felt their soft bodies I thought to myself “Ahh... this is what healthy children feel like.”  That is when the light clicked on and the conscious decision was made to stop taking them for granted.  I try to take in the moments of their childhood, relish their amusement at the beauty in things.  Their genuine kindness. Their laughter.  I decided to have another baby so I could “get things right” and show another baby that I was deserving to be his mother and have more time to show that love to my older girls.  My number one goal is to make sure that each one knows that I feel that they are the most important person in the world.  They are my love, my light.