On the contrary, I was constantly grateful for one overriding change: WE SLOWED DOWN. Carpooling, planning, scrambling, being here physically while being somewhere else mentally, traveling for days at a time for work — all of it stopped.
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Reflections as a Parent
I don’t care if you have a stack of MAGA hats in your closet or a 14” Obama portrait tattooed to your back. I don’t judge. But I do know that our children are watching. And the discord and vitriol of our leaders, and the tribalism we are prone to exhibit from whatever camp were in, lends to a greater dysfunction that we may realize…
Long gone are the days when mass media imitates society. Instead society imitates mass media. Maybe it’s a group of catty, bickering housewives or sisters; maybe it’s a rabid sports fan in a $200 jersey sitting on the front row of a football game; maybe it’s the scores of obsessed shoppers lined up for days for Black Friday…
My children love school. When they’re sick, they protest having to stay home. However, the march understandably meant more. So we narrowed down the message for their signs, painted them, packed up some water and sunblock, and we headed to Fort Worth’s City Hall…
So what happened in the span of a generation? 30 or even 20 years ago the sight of children acting out in public earned the parents a collective stink eye by most adults at the grocery store or on the bus. It was the exception, not the rule. But something shifted in the course of a generation that a well-behaved child with the ability to sit still has become a diamond in the rough. He or she is showered with praise for apparently not being a distraction…
Like many parents across this country last night I lay awake in bed, tired but unable to sleep, the thoughts of the horrors of the day keeping me awake. ”What are those parents doing right now? Are they out of tears, collapsed in exhaustion?” I wondered. ”And the parents of the survivors, how are they keeping it together in front of their shaken children?”
For one day the kids will all be grown
With their own firm hopes and thoughts
And I’ll try so hard to remember
All that I forgot:
The little moments wrestling
Or scraping dried food from cheeks
Little toots that make us laugh
Giving them away at hide-n-seek