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Sunday, January 23, 2005
guilt
I think I need to regain a little perspective here. So if you ever had an experience where your parents hurt your feelings without realizing it and you cried quietly in your bed but your dad heard you and you told your parents you felt like you were being ganged up on (or "teamed up on", hey, whatever word choice you may happen to have made was fine), and they hugged you and told you they were sorry and told you to please tell them next time instead of crying quietly alone in your room and they prayed with you and you told them you loved them too and went to sleep afterward, and then you grew up into a normal adult who loved your parents and didn't cut yourself or start doing drugs at the age of twelve, please tell me.
Not that this has anything to do with ME, or with an enormous load of parental guilt I'm staggering around under, or anything. It's just a little, um, survey.
Other than that.
Today was a beautiful day. I am the first to say that I love winter storms -- at least California "winter" storms -- but a week of days like this in between them is like a gift. We spent the afternoon at my parents'. The grass is so green; the creeks are burbling; the afternoon sky is bright, dark blue; the moonrise was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It was perfect weather for a walk, which we took, and for roasting hot dogs, which we did.
We got to the halfway point in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, our current family read-aloud book, today. I think I read about eighty pages of it today -- in the car on the way to church, in the car on the way home, and on the way out to my parents', and on the way home (WITH A FLASHLIGHT), plus the regular nightly chapter before bed. T and I already loved this story, and the kids have fallen completely in love with it as well, and they just won't let me stop reading. Except for tonight, when LT wanted to play a game instead but the rest of us wanted to do the nightly reading first, and then we kind of jumped all over LT for not paying attention, thus making him feel like he was being "teamed up against". Because we are the world's best parents. (somehow the most heartbreaking thing to happen to a person -- not ME, a purely hypothetical person who accidentally hurts her child's feelings, I mean -- who has hurt his/her child is hearing that child say that s/he is the best Mommy/Daddy ever -- while the child is still crying. That seems like perhaps it would tear a person's heart to pieces, doesn't it. Not that I would know.)
