A Motherless Child…

It’s almost 1am. I have clients lined up and so much work to do and I can’t even think straight. Being a self-employed, part time stay at home mom has its joys and it’s pangs. My babysitter, God bless her, has been unavailable for the past three days due to her son’s strep infection. Ugh! Which means that all of this work I have to get done this week is piling up. So I steal a few minutes here and there while my 20 month old ball of fire of a daughter is eating lunch or watching more than normally allowed segments of Sesame Street and Telletubbies which THANK GOODNESS I taped! Where have all the Telletubbies gone?? I feel guilty for not whisking her away to the Please Touch Museum or to Makin Music where she could have some real fun…or is it just me being too hard on myself?  While she napped, I washed the “necessary” body parts (boy do I love those baby wipes) and went to my client’s office to try and get some work done  As I walked into my client’s office, exhausted from the lack of sleep and frustrated with the work that seems to be piling up by the second, one of the staff received a call that her mother had about 24 hours to live. I remember getting that same call and how it freezes your heart at that very second, and sends it crashing down into the pit of your stomach and you can’t breathe or think or move. It put it all in perspective. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. I miss my mom desperately. It’s times like these that she would drop everything to come and stay with her grandbaby so that I could run off to work. Many days when I’m missing her, I do feel like a motherless child, but today I was grateful that I was not again getting that phone call; grateful that although my mom may not be in this world, but I can go home and spend some quality time with my daughter so that she will have the endearing memories of me that I have of my mother. She never put work or anything before us, and if she did, we never knew it. As I drove home, noticing the warmth of the cold winter sun and inhaling the fresh, cool air into my lungs, I felt grateful that I was here and that I had another chance to start the day over. I rushed back into the house to find my baby girl with my husband…watching MORE television. He told me on the phone that she had napped for only 45 minutes and I could have screamed! I announced to my baby girl that we were going to go “bye-bye” and play. She was so excited to get her shoes on and get out of the house (who could blame her, I mean how much Elmo can you take??). We went to the Tot Lot in town and I had so much fun watching her socialize and play that I lost track of time! I was supposed to get back to rush my son off to his gymnastics class. Oh well, that’s what fathers are for, right? I called my husband to “remind” him of where my son needed to be, and then went back to creating fond memories with my daughter. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, but just for today, she doesn’t have to.

Peace and Blessings,

Toni