Children

My daughter Kate came down from Eckville today, a two hour drive, to bottle the wine for her wedding. We had a good visit too. The only downside was my realisation of how little of this I can really do now, how much of what used to be a great hobby of mine is now handed off to others. It frustrates me that I could do virtually nothing to help her, not even provide the odd instruction or two. She knows pretty much how to do it all.

The other distresssor was that she couldn't stay for dinner. Turns out she is the coach for her step-sons soccer team, the Unicorn-Dragons, a mixed gender team for 8 - 10 year olds. Given that she knows almost nothing about soccer, it's a good thing her husband is her assistant coach. I think it's terrific that she has jumped into the role of being a mother for her husband's three sons.

I love children. I love my own children, and their children. I love the children of my friends. In fact, that is one of the things I miss most of all, having my children and grandchildren visit me. I anticipate with anxiousness their pending arrival. I hate it when they have to go. I would like to spend more time with them whenever possible. I don't mean the intense "activity time" that inevitably happens when they come to visit from so far away. I mean that calmer time which can only happen when there is a degree of settlement upon them. It's not always calm, but it is wonderful.

If you have children, I encourage you to think about this. All day long in your hustle and bustle, your children are around you, if you are lucky, an appendage often digging into your ribs or pulling at your pocket. Yet when you finally get them to bed at night, you watch them in their sleeping innocence. This is the repayment for all your work, those few moments between their sleeping time and yours, when you can look at them unhurriedly, wonderingly.

Of course that wonder ends when they wake up in the middle of the night, coughing and hacking, and just have to crawl into bed with you. But then again, that's just part of the deal. There will come a day, one day, when it will be the last time you pick up your child, the last time your child crawls into bed with you, the last time you hold their hand. That is the saddest thing.