It hasn’t been a great first couple hours this morning. Unmotivated to start looking for new business from scratch, unconvinced on whether to pursue light bulbs in my mind, disappointed with the list of new efforts stagnating on my laptop.
I headed upstairs to click the coffee maker back on, heating up the final two cups of coffee. After a quick pit stop, I wandered over to the now weathered kitchen table that the five of us eat almost all of our meals. I plopped down to take in the wonderment of mother and son, at work with Play-Doh.
It’s a decision we’ve made or avoided making over the last decade or so, the mother of our boys setting aside her credentials as a Chemist and Chemical Engineer to take on her primary vocation of mother. It is a rare blessing that we have as a family, these imperceptible nudges and nuanced directions to turn babies into boys, and hopefully boys into men.
Maybe it would be better if this asset called stay-at-home-mother was deployed rigorously toward advanced tutoring, contemporary fitness drills, some new-age art and creativity mind-melding. Yet it was the two of them sitting on the bench, a plastic bin of realized profits amid stray plastic knives, clay becoming eyes and pizza and the imaginings of a fifty-month old.
I sat across from them, just taking it in after wasting two hours of my life this morning, trying to think up a way to think up a way to find what comes next. If you stumbled here, hello. If you have some youngster that shares your DNA, take a big step back this afternoon or evening and just be in his or her midst, either alone or with your spouse/lover/significant other.
Stay-at-home or not, travel heavily or not, juggle or not. In my Suburbia with my Ti-Vo at the ready, the blessing of witnessing a mother nurturing a child is as magical today as ever.
August 13th, 2008 at 8:06 am
I need this reminder far more than I’d like to admit.
Thank you.
November 12th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
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