Happy Birthday to my Mom!

We celebrated the anniversary of my mom's birth by going out to dinner on Sunday, and with a yummy chocolate rum cake last night, but today is the actual day. My folks were driving as far as Columbus today and staying over with our cousins there, so hopefully they are doing something fun to celebrate.

I stayed with my regular Tuesday kids this afternoon, and they were great as always. They are both really smart and funny, with very good manners tempered with appropriate childhood irreverence. They are a joy to be around. I usually get there at 1 pm on Tuesdays and stay with Emme (4) until we go to pick up her brother, Rees (6), at the bus stop at 3:45.

Emme is a bright, exceptionally happy girl--the kind of person who lights up whatever room she enters. But even so, some days she feels very sad when her mom leaves for work. She is used to this long-standing routine, is old enough to understand the very temporary nature of this separation, always has fun with her sitters--but she loves her mom, and wants to be with her. In spite of everything she knows to be true, it hurts to be apart.

That is how I am feeling tonight without my parents. It has been a decade since I lived with them, our lives are different and in very different places--but still, whenever it is time to part after being together, I just wish it didn't have to be.

I'm trying not to judge myself too harshly for the tears our culture tolerates in a four-year old but questions in an adult. The further along I get in life, the more I understand that pain is like a side effect of love. Not a "possible" side effect, like dry mouth or oily discharge (gross), but part of the package: if you love, you will experience pain. And the measures are directly correlated, like a 45 degree slope on a X-Y plot. The greater the love, the greater the hurt.

I suppose it's not really a "side" effect at all--it's all part of the same whole. Rather than pain being something to resign one's self to as a kind of "necessary evil" that accompanies love, rather it's kind of like an unpleasant way to know it's working. I hesitate to make the comparison, but it's a bit akin to the four-hour involuntary erector set mentioned in one of those unpleasant pharmaceutical ads I was bemoaning the other day. Sure, it's not the intended desired effect, but hey, it's doing what it's meant to do! (Sorry, gross again.)

Clearly, I'm still working out this whole metaphor thing.

Anyway, I'm pretty worn out and should get some rest. Part III of the Great February Guestravaganza is only two days away, with the arrival of my friend Jen from Chicago on Thursday afternoon. She's coming into town for a quick visit to hang with the Blood:Water Mission peeps on Friday night.

'Til the morrow, I bid you adieu, dear friends. And caution you to read that paper that the pharmacist gives you along with your prescription, so at least you can have an idea of what to expect.