Me: "Who has the best seat in the house, me or daddy?"

Adam: "Well, Daddy's is nice, but yours is best. Your's is squishier."

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Lessons From Tin Man, by Ethan

Ok, I admit it, I have been whining a bit. The other day amid a menagerie of new found discomforts, I made my heartburn face, (something akin to "tasting cough medicine" mixed with "getting a whiff of wet dog") and Adam asked what was wrong. I generously ran down the list for him: "heartburn, headache, nausea, sciatica, dizziness..."

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"Sometimes I wish I could just go to sleep for the next five months and wake up when it's time to give birth." I lamented with a syrupy dose of self pity.

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Ethan chimed with his I'm-almost-a-teenager-I-know-more-than-Einstein voice on his way to the kitchen. "That would be too easy."

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"What do you know about it?" I asked.

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He sang, then, nice and loud, a line from a song in the musical Wicked, "If she'd let him fight his own battles when he was young, he wouldn't be a coward today!" The last notes echoed from the kitchen as he headed out the back door to go play.

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In his funny way, he is right. I might not appreciate this experience for all that it can be if it were easy. Certainly up till now it hasn't been a cake walk, but as I find the fear of miscarriage going from a thought I have 2,000 times a day down to 20 or so times a day (no joke), the residual empty space has been filled in some measure with both gratitude and a little belly aching.

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I once read a book that talked about people who had endured natural disasters. It said that interestingly, after the initial horrors were over, in therapy these folks tended to worry as much about their current and far less tragic woes as those losses they had endured from the disaster.

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In the song Ethan sang, the familiar Tin Man explains why the Lion is a coward... he had not needed bravery, because opportunity to learn it was taken from him when it would have done him the most good.

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I appreciate the subtle 12 year old wisdom. I guess I'll stay awake.

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