Surround yourself with people who pray for you behind your back .. those are your people, those are your tribe
I feel your prayers, my friends. Thank you. Working through the trauma that comes with my youngest son’s epilepsy is a process, but the process feels lighter with the loving and kind energy of prayer and well wishes, moving through it. Again, thank you. I treasure you, my tribe.
“I always like for other kids to know that my kids’ mom is a little bit psycho.” – @emily_tweets, Twitter
I love this tweet. All of my children and their friends know that I have my quirks, and that I usually proudly own my quirks. I think that it is my middle son (the matter-of-factual medical school student) who would most deeply relate to this tweet shown above.
My middle son is reserved. His teachers used to love to accuse him of being shy, but that’s not honestly the case. There is a big difference. My middle son is confident, he just doesn’t care for spectacles. My middle son has a stealth self-containment. In the midst of chaos, he isn’t chaotic, but it turns out that he is often that sneaky instigator of the tumultuous happenings all around him. You know the type.
When my middle son was in elementary school, parents took turns organizing surprise “Fun Friday” activities for his kindergarten class. Now my regular readers know that I love Fridays. Fridays put me in almost a holiday kind of spirit. I get giddy, sometimes even ecstatic, on Fridays. And my closest friends and my family know that, unlike my middle son, I’m not particularly reserved. So on my turn of heading up a Fun Friday for my son’s class, I decided to go all out.
My middle son is an automobile enthusiast. He’s going to be that guy whose garage will always be more pristine, and probably larger than his house. He has loved cars since he could steadily hold one or two brightly colored Matchbox race cars, in his precious little chubby baby fist. He can name the make and model (and probably even the year) of any car he sees, like he is a walking Blue Book. So it was inevitable. I decided that I would go all out with “the car theme” for Fun Friday.
We were living in Charlotte, NC, at the time, and we had friends who worked at NASCAR, so I asked to borrow a racer’s suit. I also borrowed another friend’s motorcycle helmet. That Fun Friday, I proudly promenaded down the hall of the elementary school, donning my race gear, like I was a model on a catwalk. I had bags full of activities and stuff, all related to cars, that we were going to enjoy in his kindergarten class’ Fun Friday. And I, on that particular Friday, wasn’t just wearing a race car suit . . . . I was a race car driver, and a good one. On that day, me and Jesus, had the wheel.
I confidently opened the door of his classroom, where the children were sitting on the floor with each other working on a math activity. I stood in the doorway, hands on my hips, and then I whipped off my heavy helmet with panache. I smiled broadly (and probably in my son’s mind, a tad fanatically), as I eyed him, wondering, with glee, what he thought of my surprise entrance.
My middle son looked at me, eyes widened, and he gasped in horror. He turned to his friend sitting next to him, and in a loud whisper aimed towards his friend’s ear (and anyone else in close proximity), my son firmly pronounced, “Yeah, don’t mind her. She’s a little kooky!”
Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.
