Work, life and things in between – Day 59 – Feeling blue!
Three children are like a bird’s formation in midair. They take turn at leading the pack and
straggling behind….and they don’t always need you to lead. Much like your team at the office.
I guess I should take my lesson from the birds. They never fly in a straight even line…things are never equal for everybody…there will always be one who will need a pull, and when push comes to shove, they rest on a branch and take a break!
My three children are all adults now. They are shaping their own lives. It is hard not to think of your children as kids though. You see them work hard at finding their ways, their happiness. In that quest as in anything else, there are often 2 steps forward, one step backward.
The backward step is the one that is hard to take as a parent. You so much want to help. From the instant they are born you don’t want them to hurt. That never goes away. You learn to tame this and hold yourself back, but you are never, ever indifferent to their struggles and pains.
That day I saw some shadows in the eyes of some of them, and it clouded my day a bit. Someone was feeling blue.
I was still in Montreal then and meeting my youngest son for lunch. The plan was to spend the afternoon at the book fair.
He suggested that we go for coffee first. Now I know my children love me. They would not miss an opportunity to see me when their schedule allows. However, when they ask to go for coffee or lunch, you know something is rattling up their brain….today was no exception, and I understood some of the shadow I saw earlier on.
So we spent more time lunching and talking than we did book browsing. That was OK. Book browsing was just the excuse anyway. Besides, I always feel in my element when someone comes up to me for advice. The old HR hat goes back on. Or is this the mother hat?
Sometimes, it is hard to differentiate life and work and sometimes you just don’t need to. They go hand in hand.
He walked back to the condo with me. On the way we stopped for food. He gave me suggestions for dinner and thanks to his proposal, Tem came home to a cooked meal that night. Surprised again?
By the time he actually got home though, my son and I were well into the aperitifs. Had Tem come home a little bit later, we would have ordered in as this Chef would have been out of commission! To day 60.