February 25, 2005
Personal: , Recommended Reading:
Sometimes simple turns of phrases say more than paragraphs
By Jack GrantBoudicca has had a rough week:
We were on our way home tonight from a soccer meeting. From the back of the car I hear Son#3 (Bones) say… “Mom… sometimes in my head, I cry for you.”Me: What? Why do you cry for me?
Bones: Because I love you so much, I don’t want you to ever die.
Me: Oh. So when do you do this crying in your head thing?
Bones: At snack and play. (That would be in school.)
Well the whole conversation went downhill from there. I am just NOT the person they should be coming to when they are having some sort of spiritual crisis. I don’t know the answers. At all. I wing it and I do OK, but its going to come back to haunt me.
There were questions about how my grandmother died 2 years ago. Then questions on how THEIR grandmother died 5 years ago. Then what is a stroke? What is old age? Why doesn’t God protect us from disease? And on and on it went… and I just answered all the questions very matter of factly, but then… but then… I had two little sobbing boys in the back of my car. Son#1 was just listening, but Sons2 and 3 were now melting into two small salty puddles.
I was aghast.
I pulled in the garage and when I got out of the car, Bones hung around my neck, as if I were going to spontaneously combust right then and there and leave this earthly existence. Son#2 wasn’t doing much better. Imagine my husband’s surprise when in we walk and two of them are crying messes.
Blech. Sometimes the questions they ask are too deep for me. What fits right in my head would not fit in theirs. I need to just defer all these questions to their Dad.
There's more, but you should go read it at Boudicca's Voice. Even this short excerpt should fully explain why I read her regularly.
Two sentences struck me deeply. The first:
What fits right in my head would not fit in theirs.Something we could all do to remember anytime we are speaking to anyone. Just because it fits our head, our preconceptions, our ideas, our beliefs, our biases, does not mean it's the right answer for everyone.
The second:
...sometimes in my head, I cry for you.Out of the mouths of babes come words expressive and poetic. That simple phrase conveys something that I feel that has always been too complex for me to describe adequately until now.
Sometimes in my head, I cry for us all.
Posted by Jack Grant at 18:21 on 25 February 2005





