With Thanksgiving almost here, I’ve been enjoying a lot of posts about gratitude, like this one, this one, these and these.
I feel like this blog is already full to brimming with reasons that I am thankful to be a mom. But another one occurred to me this afternoon as I looked at Declan napping in his car seat. There were dark little circles under his eyes and the flaky evidence of an oncoming cold under his nose. He has been extra fussy the past 24 hours or so, feeling slightly feverish, waking in the wee hours of the morning to wail, for unknown reasons, “I need a bath!” over and over, inconsolable for twenty exhausting minutes.
He yelled at me in Neander-toddler more than once today: “Unh! Unh!” his arms outstretched, his feet stomping, his needs or desires completely unclear. And more than once my voice strained in frustration as I told him “I can’t understand you! Please take a breath and try and tell me what you want!”
But then there was a time today when I just held him, felt him collapse into me and recognized the obvious — that “unh!” was simply grunt-speak for “comfort me.” There was also a moment when I almost snapped and yelled, but didn’t because I looked in his watery eyes and remembered that my yelling today would likely mean his yelling tomorrow.
I am grateful for all of the moments when he has reminded me to be a kinder person. I am grateful for the moments when I remember that telling him about the kind of person I’d like him to be doesn’t compare at all to showing him.
Life soundtrack: Velvet Underground with Nico, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” Launch
Copyright Tracy Zollinger Turner, Tinymantras.com, 2007.
How true that is! Because they’re so forgiving, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that even though they won’t have hard feelings, they will file everything we do as future reference for their own behavior. A timely post.