Opining Online

Sometime around the 7th of April, I will be the fortunate grandmother of a newborn granddaughter.

Her 19 week sonogram showed her to be perfect and healthy. I’m anxiously awaiting my grandma cuddle time with her as well as wondering what joy I will experience in watching her 3 year old sister interact with her newborn baby sister.

Until today, we all wished for a baby boy… but we all wished for that perfect and healthy even more. And now, after a few hours I find it difficult to think of this child as anything other than a perfect and healthy girl, though as recently as last week I thought of a perfect and healthy boy.

It does not matter. The most awesome and inspiring thing about having a child is the inability to imagine life without them. Once born, once cuddled, once held it is as that child has been a part of your life forever.

So, even though in reality it’s been only 30+ years that my daughter has been in my life… it feels wonderfully as if it is forever. And with each child my daughter bears, forever is extended exponentially, geometrically, and beyond.

Love cannot be explained by science.

Everyone seems to be able to understand tears of joy and tears of sadness, but — men especially — seem unable to understand tears of anger.

If I am truly angry, I cry. And it’s a lot harder to stop these tears of anger because I then become angry with myself that I am crying because I’m angry. It’s a vicious cycle.

I know I’m not alone in reacting to anger with tears because I inherited this unfortunate tendency from my mother. Surely there are others beside the two of us?

This is a post by Woodlief of Sands in the Gears that is really a must read. I’m classifying it under “things my mother taught me” because she did. Not by tears, but by face to face “these are the things your family stands for”.

We were living in Colorado and about to move back to NE Texas. She wasn’t really happy about this, but told me that maybe it was destined for people like us, who held no prejudice, to go there and set an example.

I’ve been trying to live up to her ideals since then.