‘You are not like other parents’, – a mother of my daughter’s friend tells me.
‘But really, – I continue. ‘After not seeing her the whole day while I work, I can’t wait to pick her up from the kindergarten’.
That is so true. It gets crazy sometimes, but every day I can’t wait to see her smiley face and get a hug from her.
She is my world.
Her world, at the age of 4, if far less complicated than mine. As it should be.
‘Mama, can a wolf and a fox be friends?’ – she wonders before closing her eyes.
‘Yes, my love’.
‘But a wolf and a bunny can’t be friends?’
‘Probably not, my love’.
However, even at that innocent age there is drama.
When I ask her if she’s good friends with some of the children, she tells me:
‘But mama, one day they want to play with me, the other day they don’t. One day we hug, the other day we don’t talk. So who knows’.
Bless her, she feels rightly confused.
As do I.
In the past six months I had men come into my life who had wanted to stay. What a long awaited, surprising, beautiful thing! And what did I do? I let them go.
Why? Is that not what I wanted?
And so here we are. Back to where we started.
But now I think. Is it really the same beginning? Is being on your own the sign of strength or the sign of weakness? To let go of someone who leads you nowhere, is that not the sign of courage? To recognize what’s good, what works and what doesn’t, even if at the end of the day it leaves just you, is that not what makes you strong?
When my daughter’s teacher told me that my girl could stand up for herself and would not let anybody push her around, I said, without thinking: ‘She must have gotten it from her dad’.
I was wrong. She got that from me. I am strong. I stand up for myself. And when push comes to shove, I know my worth.
I admit that it was not always so. There have times when I stayed quiet, when I should have shouted out loud. There have been times when I let others hurt me and did not fight back.
I grew up and I learned my lessons.
