Too Early for a Lot of Things

February 6, 2008

She knows just the right buttons to push. She wakes up as soon as I leave the bed and starts looking at me with sad, sad eyes. "I will miss you," she’d say, all 25 pounds of thin, little brown despondency.

"I’ll miss you," she’d say as she follows me to the bathroom. "I won’t have a mom later this morning."

Guilt gnaws at me. She’s not yet four, and already, she’s resenting the mornings I have to get up early and go to work. "Do you have work tomorrow?" is the one question she constantly asks me every night.

How do you explain economics to a three-year-old without impressing upon her the fragility of the present? I don’t want her to know need, but I want her to understand it. How do you explain careers and decisions and life goals and the complexity of needs to a little girl whose world revolves around Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and crayons? I’d be lying if I simply tell her, "I work so we’d have a house to live in and you’d have nice clothes to wear." Wett asked me to stop working a few months back. I refused because I couldn’t imagine spending seven days a week at home. The help may not be a genius, but she certainly doesn’t need me to tell her what to do every step of the way.

So, how do you make a little girl understand why every day can’t be a lazy weekend spent drawing flowers, watching Fairly Odd Parents, and waging tickling wars? The guilt-ridden absentee Mom that I am, I reach for the easiest compromise I could pluck off the shelf. I bring her to work. Now my daughter is in love with the guard, and I’m starting to dread the day she’d trade "Do you have to work tomorrow?" for the question, "Can I marry Rudy?"

Acceptance

February 3, 2008

There are three things I hope to learn this year:

1. acceptance
2. the ability to take what has been given
3. and the insight to know how much I can give before I have to stop.

There are things beyond my control, and things I have given up control over, and things I can change if I want to but have been told not to. I have to learn to be more accepting that there are many things I shouldn’t pit myself against because I would only break trying. However, I am learning that lack of control is not always a bad thing. It can be good, too. Not everything has to be planned, and not all failed plans are mine to fix.