Turning points in life are so quiet… unannounced, they tiptoe into our every day lives with little fanfare and sometimes accompanied by the most normal of things… a mom, nagging her son to clean his room… only to find at the end of the day he took all his cherished stuffed friends from childhood and crammed them into a bag and tossed into the attic.
What to do? Of course, admire the room that took 3 weeks to reach a state of clean, holding up this bit of trash and pointing out that bit of clutter. The mom never points at the collection of loved stuffies, but somehow, they also were chopped out of the room in his frustration to reach a level of clean that suited ‘mom’.
How the heart cracks when her children grow up. We pass along items chosen with care, and with love. You pass through a store and see a stuffed kitten with perfect eyes and think of your young son who feels safest when dressed up in his soft kitten pjs. You caress a newly budding bump on your belly while shopping for pants that might fit…and your eyes light upon a blue stuffed elephant that you just have to have for him.
And I reflect back. How often in my life did I carelessly, thoughtlessly discard items my parents cherished and gave to me? Timeless, beautiful things. From childhood to young adulthood.
What weighs on my mind often are a pair of oak side tables my mother gave to me when I finally stood on my own two feet as a young 20-something-year-old… to be discarded like yesterday’s laundry the moment my future husband (now ex) demanded I jettison anything that reminded me of my former life.
Recently, in my own unpacking of the final boxes of our home (only took me 3 years to get everything opened up), I found my own childhood lovey, a blanket that I couldn’t go to sleep without … I think my entire youth. And here it was, forgotten, discarded…and tucked into a box. The first thing I did was pick up that blanket and scrub my cheeks into it – the friend I didn’t even remember missing, yet there it was, waiting for me all of these years. It’s now back on my pillow, where it was all of my childhood.
We give our children everything. We fill their nest with loving soft things to hold in their hands and against their hearts, with the hope that we fill their minds and imaginations, but also so they know and remember we are near and loving them. I wonder, was I also filling him with the parts of me that are missing?
I am an indulgent parent, of that there could never be any doubt, as were my parents before me – though I never would have acknowledged that in my frustrated teen-aged years when the consequences of my own behaviour smacked me straight in the face and my own lovies ended up in boxes and bags. Here I wonder, what leads us to indulge in the first place?
I think, quietly to myself, that where we ourselves feel lacking, we fill with whatever we can to show our love, when all that is really needed is intention and time. Things our modern world denies us, in spades.
Tonight, as I ponder the freshly stuffed sack of lovely stuffies that have filled my son’s space for 13 years, I wish to take the time to step back and think of the sacrifices my own parents made and the hurts they must have felt and the patience they exhibited when I made similar decisions in an attempt to appease but overshot the mark and hurt only myself, instead.
My beautiful boy is growing up. Tonight is evidence enough that he will soon be beyond me. I can only hope that someday he will find a box, inside of which he will find an incredibly well loved cat who was there for him, gripped to death in his tiny fist, for years… and make sure that his kitty finds its own place of honour in his home and his life and he too, reflects on what journeys life has taken him on, but that he was, is, and always will be loved beyond measure.