Catching Tears with My Heart
She was born three years ago and my life hasn’t been the same since. How could I ever have imagined that his little girl would be so amazing. Here I’ve been wandering through the first four decades of my life thinking I didn’t need kids. How ignorant, I have been.
Today we took my beautiful innocent three year-old into see the doctor for a check-up. Everyone was excited to meet the new doctor. We had been speaking of this visit with anxious anticipation.
During the visit it was decided that our little sweetheart should get a flu shot. She’s had shots before, and she has been hurt before, but today was different. Today our little girl had her heart broken; deliberately.
She cried and cried. I held her in my arms. The look on her face was one of disbelief, betrayal, and confusion. “Why would my momma and daddy let them do that to me?” I could see it.
Afterward we went out for pancakes.
All day long she talked about her “poke.” She favored that leg and protected the band-aid. As we lay in bed ready to say our nightly prayers, I asked her what we should pray about. Over and over again, before the prayer and after, she reminded me to pray for her poke.
As I write this, tears well up in my eyes. It is a terrible thing to watch my little girl lose her innocence. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
This Wasn’t the Plan
It isn’t everyday that one has the opportunity to speak at a funeral, but today was one of those opportunities for me. She was a lady I’d only met once and that was as she lay dying in a nursing home. Her husband is a crotchety old guy with years of military experience. The night his wife died, we sat in his front room and he told me stories of his past. They were married just 25 years ago this month.
Just before I got up on the platform to speak, some friends of mine walked in the back with their two-day old newborn daughter. I asked them if I could take their daughter on the stage with me and they agreed. So there I stood in front of about 100 people with a little pink-bundled and perfect baby girl.
I talked about the cycle of life and how we are born perfect, innocent, and full of potential. I spoke of the joy parents exude when their children are born and how death is so far from everyone’s mind. Death is not the way it is supposed to be – we were not created to experience death, we were created to experience life.
It was a unique opportunity, to stand on stage at a funeral with a newborn baby in my arms. I shall not easily forget this moment – and I think that will be true for others too.
Interestingly, it has been just two years since my bother and I spoke for my Mom’s funeral. It wasn’t meant to be this way.
Extroverted Sanguines
Being a certified introvert, I often admire the quickness of the extroverted sanguines I encounter. Where I will often take several minutes to several days to formulate a response to a situation, my sanguine friends will whip out a reply faster than the Lone Ranger could draw his gun.
A couple of days ago I was in a coffee cafe doing the mobile computing thing. There is a girl who I’ve seen there several times. She is one of the more socially unique people one encounters in life. She tries so hard to be cool and to be noticed, but due to her uniqueness, I’ve seen her get blown off several times. So the other day, just as she is packing up her laptop to leave, a man comes into the cafe talking on his phone. Right here is when the drama happens.
I hear the man, who I later found out was a financial planner named Travis, talking to his grandfather. Just as he finishes his phone call and heads toward the counter, the unique girl trips over a chair and the girls behind the counter laugh out loud. It was a catty laughter, the type the cool girls use when the uncool girls do something stupid. The problem is that the girls behind the counter wouldn’t fit in with the cool, preppy girls.
The unique girl looks up at the cafe girls who are laughing at her and asks them if they are laughing at her. “Did you trip?” One of them asks, still with laughter on her tongue. The unique girl says yes and hurriedly leaves the cafe. Before she gets out the door, and before I have time to even register my disdain for the way she was treated, Travis, the financial planner, responds with a very pleasant rebuke of the counter girls.
What impressed me about his rebuke is that it was said pleasantly, gently, and it didn’t draw any unnecessary attention to the poor, embarrassed unique girl. He merely suggested that “that wasn’t very nice.”
What I appreciated about his comment is that it was done with tact, niceness, and yet it got the point across. The cafe girls stopped laughing immediately and the unique girl was defended. Somehow those with a more extroverted and sanguine temperament can do that with greater grace and aplomb than those of us with more introverted and melancholic personality traits.
If I had tried to respond, which I wanted to do, it would have come out harsh and condescending. As it was, I really didn’t know what had happened until about four hours later and I didn’t come up with a good response until the next day. In fact, I don’t think I could have done better than Travis did.
viva la difference
Confessing my Dad Attitude 