I carve a perfect pear and set it down in front of my daughter who, for the first time, is diligently doing her homework without provocation. She is discovering the joy of industry: something hard to teach except by example. I feel the same. My mind is sharp and much was accomplished today. I feel myself returning to normal. I am also resting physically as chided: I did laundry in nice little light loads. I talked for hours on the phone, conversations long over due, with an ice pack on my stitches.
I’m pondering a bone to pick. I’d rather just swallow the bone than pick it. I’d rather say, “oh we have a boneless fish for a relationship! How delightful!” But the bone is there and it has been for a month now, despite my efforts to dismiss it as silly. It wasn’t silly. It was important. And I wasn’t given time or consideration. I sigh wide, forcing my rib cage to expand. Maybe a deep breath will make me a bigger person? But what does the bigger person do? Do they not get annoyed at all? Is that the big? Or are they big enough to have the conversation and say “I believe you have shown me disrespect in the work place”? I don’t know in this case. And upon writing this…
interesting…
I easily swallow. The bone is gone. I guess it was enough for me to acknowledge out loud: I’ve been disrespected. Maybe I just needed to remind myself that I’m worth time and consideration, whether someone in a position of power gives it to me or not.
My daughter smacks her math textbook closed with great satisfaction. “Well, my teacher has GOT to be pleased with that!” she says. And I think to myself, “Not necessarily.” But I am pleased and Nora is pleased. Then I pull out my high school textbook of poetry and read her Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. “What’s that about, Nora?”
“Well, it’s about a guy going for a walk in the woods and he could go this way or that way and he decides to go that way and he’s cool with that.”
“And what do you think this could be a metaphor for? Can you think of anything? What does going down a path mean sometimes?”
“It could mean what you decide to be when you grow up and he decided to be a poet and Mom, this is totally a road people don’t go down a lot.”
“At the end he says – and it has made all the difference. What do you think of that?”
image by aosleading
“I think he chose the right path. And I think he knows it. He’s in the book, isn’t he?”
