‘Snapshots & Snippets’ a brief, or sometimes not so brief, look at a moment in time. A glance back and a peek forward with an abundance of gratitude for the present.
Today’s episode of ‘Snapshots & Snippets’ is brought to you by the emotions LOVE and GUILT.
You love your littles fiercely and you love your creative pursuits hard, and you know there is only so much time in the day for each of your passions. This is the tough thing about being a person who loves many things, every once in a while you are forced to make the difficult decision to squeeze in a little more time with one while seemingly neglecting the other. These situations may trigger emotions of guilt. But guilt, as you will see in a moment, is a useless emotion.
A hypothetical scenario…
You’ve reunited with your darling child after a long day of work, aching for those moments of snuggling on the couch together and reconnecting, but all of a sudden you are struck! Struck with sheer brilliance! So you choose to pour your inspiration onto the page, (or in a dazzling email to your boss) and you choose to hand your child your iphone.
Oh the guilt you will feel, the hand wringing, the second guessing! You may even say this in a chat on the Facebook,
“I haven’t seen my kid all day and I’m letting her play on my iphone while I work. I feel like an asshole.”
Your Facebook friend, wise and experienced as she is, may suggest that the guilt you feel over this decision might not be worth the brilliant idea, she may say
“Go play with your kid ASSHOLE.”
(I’m paraphrasing here)
You realize, (of course!) this brilliant idea will still be here after you put your kid to bed and you power everything down to be in the moment, to savor each second together.
You go over to your precious child, hug her, wrap her in a blanket, kiss her cheek and snuggle next to her.
She looks at you, with the kind of look that you didn’t dare give your parents until you were at least seventeen, and says, “I want to watch this by myself.’
You are momentarily wounded, but you recover and choose to respect her decisions, you’re even proud of her for voicing her desires so clearly. So you move down to the floor and look up at her, wait for eye contact, stare deep into her eyes and tell her, with full present engagement, I LOVE you.
She looks back at you with the same sincirety and says I love YOU.
Your soul soars and exactly .025 of a second later, she, maintaining that sincerity you found so admirable a moment ago, finishes (you off) ‘now go away’.
See mommies? Guilt is absolutely useless.
I love you, just leave me alone. Seriously though, this is very sweet. And a great reminder that the guilt we feel really is useless. Thank you friend.
It’s all in our heads. They never want us as much as we crave, pine for, and all-out desire them. And then we love them more, the end.
That was too funny, and also typical! We worry too much!
I nominate Lerner as the FB friend, because I totally read that in her voice.
And YES YES YES to everything you wrote.
I miss him SO MUCH when he’s gone, but then I still need space when he’s here. It’s a conundrum for sure.