Yesterday we celebrated Mother's day for a lot of practical reasons. We don't all go to the same church, Jenny also has a husband whose mother also needs to be visited, restraunts were way less crowded, Nicci didn't have other plans, and the list could go on. I have said repeatedly I have plenty of stuff and all I wanted was their time. So, we all went to lunch. We tried somewhere new. Although it wasn't great food or service, sitting there with 6 of the 7 kids was amazing!
This morning, I woke up to this. I don't even know which of the kids set it here, but I know it brought tears to my eyes. Not because they spent a ton of money or even because I collect teddy bears and now I have another one. It's because I felt so seen. This wasn't wrapped and presented by the purchaser. It simply sat on top of my laptop on my desk. That may seem like an odd choice, but for me it was the most logical for someone who sees me.
See, the way I have gotten through school to date and still managed everything else in my life is through a structured routine. My coffee pot gets preset every night to auto brew at 4am. Every day my feet are on the floor by 330am and by 415am, I am sitting at my desk, coffee in hand. This has been my routine since April 2022 when I began going to school. It gives me the quiet I need to focus. It allows me to still be present for the day to day functions of a large family. Because this has been the routine for 4 years now, someone knew that sitting it there would make it the first thing I really saw today.
And, it's more than that still. It reminds me of the type of people I am raising. People who think about others and know the value of the small things in life. People who see others not just in what they do for them, but as individuals with their own thoughts, needs, and personalities.
It makes me think of an exchange that I had with another parent in our school district a few years back. We live on gravel roads and I was about a mile from the house when I realized my tire was flat. There was no way I was making it home. This was the first flat I had had in the sedan I was driving, and my jack was not going to get the job done on that section of gravel road, there just wasn't enough clearance to get that style of jack under the car. Someone came out to help (I do love that about country neighbors) and we struck up a conversation about our kids. He said his daughter also went to the school and was in the same grade as one of mine. He asked if my daughter knew his. I said I recalled the name but wasn't certain how close they were or if it was even the same girl. He told me I would know if it was his daughter because she wore a prosthetic and that's the first thing anyone ever mentioned. Based on that, I said I didn't think my daughter knew his. When I got home, I asked my daughter if the girl she had mentioned several times by name had a prosthetic limb to which the answer was yes. I told her about the encounter with the girl's dad and my surprise at the information. It was in that moment that I saw a real glimpse of the people I am raising. My daughter responded with "well, I never mentioned it because it never mattered to what we were talking about." She had not used the girl's disability as a mark of identification. She just knew the girl. The prosthetic wasn't how she saw her, but a part of a whole person. Because none of our discussions surrounding the girl had been related in any way to her disability, it never got mentioned.
I say all the time I have amazing kids. They are bright, caring, people who haved really been predominantly as easy as any parent could ask for. But moments like this long ago exchange or finding a teddy bear seated on my laptop serve to highlight that all the more for me. I have been raising kids that see people as they are, past the narrow lense that the world may hold, to what makes them who they are. There have been many days I have questioned my ability as a mother, whether I was making too many mistakes, if I was doing this right at all. Parenting is hard and I certainly didn't have a good example, but in these moments, I feel like I haven't done too bad even for all my mistakes.
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