My Lover of Life

I love this post from Hands-Free Mama.  Love, love, love it.  There are many ways in which I could have written such a post.  I have that little Noticer in my family, my own little "Lover of Life."  I also, say "Hurry up" more times a day than I say "I love you," and I too have been hit before with the damage I am doing to my daughter by rushing her.  It's always amazing and, as I believe, a work of the Holy Spirit, that different realizations in one's life come to coalesce at the same moment in time into a message that one needs to hear.  That message is coming to me through Sunshine.

Dr. Maria Montessori speaks eloquently of the "Apostolate of the Child," in her book The Child in the Church.  This is the idea that the child is a great source of grace that enters the family to move and form the adult, to aid in bringing bring the adult to Christ, to in fact change the adult world.  The child fulfills this God-given apostolate without being consciously aware of it, and yet he can be frustrated in this role by a domineering, or even simply well-intentioned, yet unaware, adult. 

 I have realized that this child, my Sunshine, is calling me to slow down, to be patient, to look.  She is sending me the message that the do-ers of the world are not the ones to wish you were, but rather the be-ers, the ones, like my Grandpa, who sit and smile and be.

 Of course, all children, and the elderly too, call us to this slower (and I would say better!) life.   My other girls certainly have, especially at younger ages.  There is something about Sunshine though.  At three and three-quarters, she is still serenely slow-moving, taking long, long times to eat, dress, walk and transition from one activity to the next.

 Whatever she is doing, she is whole-heartedly involved in, not flitting swiftly from one thing to the next like my dear Rosebud, or resolutely efficient like Turtle, but steady and unflappably slow.   I sometimes think what a trial it must be to her to have a mother who asks, pleads, or yells to her several times a day "Hurry up!" or "Chop, chop!", a father who rolls his eyes and calls her "Pokey!" and two older sisters who are quickly picking up on their parents' impatience or stress whenever things need to get rolling and Sunshine. is. still. sitting. there.

 The article by Rachel Stafford made me almost cry for Sunshine, and maybe a little for the girl I once was.  (I remember resenting my father's stressed rushing around and yelling to hurry up.)  The look into Sunshine's world was further emphasized the other weekend, as we grocery shopped, and D. and the older two plowed efficiently through the store, knocking out the list in record time and Sunshine and I brought up the rear, feebly and ineffectually trailing along.  I realized that I was almost resentful of the fast-paced shopping-blitz wherein I had no time to think or browse, or process what we were doing.  And as it dawned on me that mixed into this feeling were elements of distaste for who I am -- slower, needing time to think -- I had this sadness for Sunshine and this resolve not to make her feel left behind and somehow inadequate because her pace is different than others'.

Reading the Holy Bible to Sparky

Sunshine is a noticer and a thinker and that will never be anything but beautiful to me.  May she never change! And as Rachel says at the end of her post "things taste sweeter and love comes easier when you stop rushing through life."