It starts the day they are born. You've been up all night and that new little one already demands to be fed. You didn't even get a solid hour's sleep in first. But you get up. And you do it. Because you love that little girl. She is part of your family.
It continues on through their entire lives, that inconvenience: Getting up way earlier than you'd prefer so that they can make it to their school on time. Sitting in pickup lines in an old, hot car that doesn't have a/c, stopping for the third time to go to the bathroom on a, generally, one-hour drive home. Children are inconvenient.
But we don't know we're inconvenient when we are children. We are happy. We live our lives, and we're excited to be doing the fun things during our days that our family members consider inconvenient.
And then we grow up, and we begin to be inconvenienced by our other adult family members ourselves. How many newlyweds have driven hours and hours on their precious time off work to make those obligatory visits to family at the holidays? How many couples have dreaded the drive, but did it anyway because despite the hassle, they love their family and genuinely want to see them even if it means going out of their ways and sacrificing their time off work to do it?
I am so glad that I was raised by parents who did not view their children as inconveniences. My mom and dad went out of their way to spend time with us. I cannot count the hundreds of hours my dad spent with me coaching me in basketball, power-lifting, and discus. And still today, I can't count the hours of drive-time my mother has made back and forth between her house and mine. Sometimes she comes because I want to redecorate my house, and it's just more fun with your mother. Sometimes she comes so that we can go snoop around pretty churches in the area. And sometimes she comes because I'm making fajitas, and, apparently, my fajitas are worth that 2 1/2 hour round-trip drive.
And I am grateful that with my four little ones ages four and under, that that fine woman is still not inconvenienced by a one of them. Thank you, Mommy, for teaching my children some of the things that I would rather not be "inconvenienced by" doing myself. Like letting them paint rocks (what a useless thing... but it brings them SO much joy... and so it's really not useless at all.) And for teaching them to mop, and taking them to bounces houses and allowing them to hold terrible, nasty, horrible snakes. (None of them would have been allowed to do that without YOU!) Thank you for the picnics, and the creek, millions of stories, and trips to the zoo, magic house, cave, and chickens. The sacrifice of your time does not go unnoticed by me or my children.
How sad we have become when the only people worth being inconvenienced for become the people we work for who are giving us a paycheck. People who would replace us tomorrow if we were in a car crash and couldn't return. In my opinion, family are the only people worth being routinely inconvenienced for. Because they are the only family we will ever have. They are not replaceable.
And they do matter. They matter when they are hours old, and they matter when they are struggling to breathe their last breaths on this earth.
And now, I must go... and be inconvenienced by that one-hour round trip to pick up my son from school.
Wow.
ReplyDeleteWow.
Wow.
What an amazing (and certainly undeservedly generous and kind) post.
I can well recall those "inconvenient" times as a young parent -- and you have twice as many kids!... especially when you are so hobbled by lack of sleep and overwhelmed by the sheer number of items on your to-do list.
Looking back, the only truly valuable and worthwhile thing we ever did was raising you girls and sharing as much as we could in your day-in and day-out lives. In my minds-eye, there is no age that I can't summon from my memory and see you standing before me so clearly and with so much detail that it's quite possible that I could reach out and touch you.
Now, Ashley, I see her rather adeptly and thoughtfully painting her share of rocks (yes, an extremely valuable pass-time). With the same sort of preoccupation, I see her sitting at the little makeup counter in your room, carefully applying layer after layer of eye liner and sometimes curling and other times straightening long silky locks of hair. (And if I tell the whole tale, Greg is probably there somewhere in the house during many of those memories -- eating vegetable soup or drinking grape juice, while he waits-waits-waits!) I see Ashley curled into a ball in the living room reading the most terrible books, laughing at absurdities which seemed funny to no one but her. She is every age -- minutes old and ten years old and twenty-five.
Then there's you. I see you (as you know and hate this memory) most vividly, standing in a pout at the living room window tattling on sister and cousins who have unfairly excluded you from their important activities because you are destined to play with Sierra-Sierra-Sierra (who is younger and so not as desirable of a playmate). I see you walking slightly ahead of me as we trespass through miles and miles of autumn woods surrounding our home, your attitude adventurous and your humor excellent and agreeable, searching not only for a perfect spot to picnic, but also a turtle, a snake, a rabbit, and who knows -- a polar bear! I see you hefting the biggest and most ludicrous rocks from Springcreek to clunk into the back of one of our old clunkers to take home and arrange around a walk or flowerbed or pet's grave. You are days old. A toddler. A preschooler. Thirteen. Twenty and getting married. And a mother of twenty-eight.
There's a timelessness to those days with your children, I think. They are always young and impressionable and full of wonder. I suppose, as a parent, when we remember those times, we also see ourselves, once again, as young, impressionable and full of wonder. What a rare and inspiring God-given surprise!
Most wonderful of all, I think, though, is that second chance we have with that next generation of children. A (possibly) last chance to see, up close and personal, someone experience life for the first time. Yes, Micah mopping with a spin-mop (and warning us of his awesome clean and wet floors!) and Lydia hanging clothes in the sweet sunshine on the line (then later discovering with shock the cockle-burrs on her dress and socks!) and Jonah manning the broom and duster (conking the pictures on the walls more constantly than managing to sweep any dust at all into his dustbin)... it's a sweet, sweet way to pass an afternoon and the days and the years. Reading "Betty Botter" for the fifteenth time in one afternoon or "Puss in Boots" five weeks in a row... I can't think of anything I'd rather do. I can't think of any better investment at all.
We love you. We love the family you've made. We love the privilege of being a part of your lives and sharing in all these excellent adventures. Actually, the real inconvenience in life is not caused by family and friends... the inconvenience is the part God added to a fallen world -- toiling for our keep. And yet, because God loves us so, what strange and wonderful days are these that He has set before us. If only we are wise, we can seize the times before our numbered days are completed.