A child brought a crystal heart pendant to school, obviously very special, and I asked her to be careful, that I knew she didn’t want to lose it and she said : “That’s okay, my mom made me a string for it.”
Days later, that line came to me, with an image of a “string” from the mom to the child, a string that was always connecting them. And an idea, that that is what we are making, building, we hope, with our children, in the midst of the reminding and the explaining and the story reading and telling and the walks to the mailbox and the homework helping and the bathing and the doing of laundry and cooking of meals and saying : “no!” and “yes!” and making decisions and weighing alternatives and making mistakes and apologizing is : a string, a connection to hold us together, forever.
So, there is something (else) to think about: is this, what I am doing/saying now, building the string; making it flexible, able to withstand strain and stress and anger and fear, or is this on another path entirely, that has nothing to do with the string, and is about how everything looks, or how it feels, or how it ought to be, or how it used to be, or how I wish it were, or how I wish someone else were…?
Ultimately, in the long run, I think there is only the string. And, need it be said that it is hard to build, because of differences in temperament, and expectations, and desires, and time tables, and interests, and abilities, and god knows what else?
With my own string, I am very, very thankful when I feel that it is there, because, mostly, proximity and time, and, sometimes, common goals are not there, now, with my children. They are not at home every day, week or month. They are off, on their own path, and I am hearing about it, mostly after the fact. And this is as it should be; but now, there is only the string, and I hope I accidently managed to build it well from my end.
(If you know me, you know that I don’t believe that this means that you always say: “yes”, or try to be “nice Mommy”; “nice Daddy”. That doesn’t have much to do with the string, if you think about those agreeable friends you have had in your life, who were willing to go along with whatever you were doing but are not part of your life now. Maybe you will “Friend” them on Facebook, but you don’t call them when things are wonderful or horrible, nor they, you.)