The under slept, overloaded and stuffed with more stress than the Hefty garbage bag commercials - type of day, and have one of your kids walk up quietly behind you, at its most chaotic point?
" Hi dad" he says deflated...
You momentarily turn, almost grudgingly, and look into his eyes. Something's wrong, you can tell, so you rob a few seconds from the task at hand to say hi and give him a hug.
He holds on a little longer than usual and you pretend not to notice...
Turning back to your work, you tell him that your glad he's home and again, ignore the few extra seconds he stands behind you waiting and hoping.
As he carries his bulging book bag on his tiny shoulders into the house, you make a mental note to talk to him later. " After dinner", you tell yourself...
But "after dinner " comes and goes, as you continually try to get past the wall he's erected in your absence.
He doesn't need you now. Whether he cried it out or tougher it out, you have no way of knowing. Was it a day he was pushed around in the hallway or the day kids on the bus made fun of him? Did he disappoint a favorite teacher or maybe he just found out his best friend is moving half a country away?
He doesn't need you now...
But he did...
And you probably never will know why.
A wall begins, it's foundation begun by this first brick you created...
The hardest thing to do in every single relationship is to let someone know that we need them, to stand quietly waiting for them to acknowledge us and maybe not meet that need we are so terrified to let them know we have...
It happens in all relationships; parents, kids, spouses...
We don't get to define the need or it's time or place. We don't even get to choose whether it's valid. All we are able to choose is if we are willing to fill it...
Nothing is sadder in this life than watching kids who learned how not to need their parents or husbands and wives that long ago, stopped needing each other...
I grew up in a house with parents who had absolutely no need or real use for each other, by the time I was old enough to notice.
By then, they had passed the place where they noticed the cost...
But watching it day in and day out, the cost tallied in my head automatically. I learned observing fear and weakness, masked as strength, what not to do...
At least I thought I did...
What my kids need from me are not electronics or toys; it is time...
It is to be a priority for moments of their choosing, not a timeline based on my convenience.
A lot of days I've managed to get that right.
My Wonderful Wife doesn't need me for my paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, if I didn't bring one home a few weeks in a row I'm sure her stress level would skyrocket to levels not yet seen... She's a mom and the budget lady. No paycheck would surely be noticed..
But if I know her, it is not what she needs from me.
To love her, to see her, to be her partner and father to the McMonkeys we conceived and she birthed; to be a husband who has forsaken all others, in this Covenant with her and God...
I'm thinking that's what she would list.
I am blessed to come home to a clean house and dinner on the table, coffee made on the mornings I work... I love that she does those things for me, but they are not what I need...
She is my one and only.
She is the first one I think of in the morning and the last one that leaves my thoughts, as I fade off to sleep.
I need her...
Probably more than she knows.
I hope that in the end, I have met more needs and missed fewer opportunities to give what was needed.
More loving, less bricks...
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