As a grandparent I have plenty of regrets about pictures that I wasn’t able to take… pictures that get more beautiful every time I remember them…unlike other regrets that also live on in my memory.
There’s something about being on the beach that I find to be pure pleasure: the sunshine, the beauty of the water and the waves, the cold splashing, the swimming, the joining a laughing bunch of people in the water.
My grand-daughter Aria, the 3rd of four children, is teaching me, who am also the 3rd of four children, a wonderful lesson.
Everyone has their favorite games to play with babies and toddlers. I love to do interactive games and teach babies the hand motions that go with. Like Mother Goose’s “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man,” and the nursery rhyme “The itsy-bitsy spider”. However, my favorite game to play with babies and toddlers is peekaboo.
I’m 17 months old and I don’t need to learn to talk. I have a language of my own that works perfectly well.
One of the benefits of being a chauffeur for your children is that somehow the minute the car starts, you become invisible. Conversations go on in the back seat that you would never have been privy to under other circumstances. I
I forget what I am called to do: to live a fearless life. To choose in my relationships, not the way of fear, but the way of love.
Once I asked my mother what it was like to live through really hard times, like Pearl Harbor and WWII. Mom was a young woman in nursing school when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mom told me that they gathered around, listening to radios… She said it was hard to believe it had happened, that it didn’t seem real.
How did my mother, who grew up so poor, develop such a strong sense of her own self-worth, such a sturdy self-reliance, and such a strong hope and belief that life had wondrous experiences for her?
Waiting has its gifts. Waiting has taught me patience. Humility. Waiting has knocked the top layer off my ever-present and arrogant assumption that I know what’s best for myself and for everyone else in the world. Best of all, waiting has brought me closer to an always loving, always compassionate God.
