Posts Tagged ‘children’

Life and Death

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Life is a precious commodity and it never hits home quite as hard as when someone younger than us dies. This week my daughter’s boyfriends older brother was killed in an car accident. He was twenty years old.
I was awakened by a whisper, “Mom, **** died last night.”
I immediately sat up and asked what happened and she told me it was a car accident and her boyfriend was crying and she didn’t know what to do. I told her to take him to his mother’s house. It was 5:30 in the morning. My daughter is 18, her boyfriend is 19 (AND yes, they both live with me).
Since then my daughter has been shuttling back and forth, but has been dazed and keeps saying, “I can’t believe I will never hear his voice again, or I will never see his face again.” This is the first person she has really known, of her age that has died.
The most heart breaking has to be for his mother. Children are not supposed to go before their parents and she is having a very difficult time. This has not been lost on my daughter either. She feels for her as well as people come over and the grieving process proceeds. The date for the funeral has not been set yet and all I can do is stand in the background and listen as my youngest child grows up and handles an adult situation.
And in the back of my mind I pray please protect my three children every time they get into a car.

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Parenting

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Isn’t it strange that when you give birth to a child you’ve just signed up for a lifetime job? Even if they don’t like you (or worse….you don’t like them). It’s okay I won’t tell anyone. Your secret’s safe with me. Everyone knows that there are parents out there that have kids just to fill the status quo – you know the average household consists of 2.3 children. Have you ever seen that .3 kid? Totally underrated!

So tonight is the last night I actually have a child ‘officially’ living under my roof — who’d have thought they’d all leave the nest so soon? Now the tricky part is standing back and watching them fly (or fall). I’ve always been one of those parents that tried to let my kids make a mistake – I’d rather have them do it when they were with me than to try it out in the vast ocean of sharks. I was good with the philosophical – “It’s not the mistakes you make that make you who you are, but rather what you do about the mistakes that mark the person.” (I wonder if Ted Bundy’s mother felt that way?) Or even if mine does. Anyone who’s familiar with my novels knows that most of them are drawn on real life and real life situations, so I guess we’re about to veer into unchartered waters. Hope you all like to swim!

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