Such is Life...

So I'm checking out at Rural King...you know, the K-Mart for farmers, and I've got one hundred and sixty pounds of ground corn cob for my guinea pigs to play in, a small bag - forty pounds - of potting soil, some last minute veggie plants all heading to school. So there I am, at the check out lane...so glad it went without a hitch, because my precious and wonderful son called from Detroit on his way back to Germany so he can be home for his son's birthday.

Now my precious and wonderful son builds Proton Therapy Units all over the world for cancer treatment. He's the top guy and flies everywhere --- in the next month he will probably be in St. Petersburg, Riyadh, Taiwan, San Diego, and probably many places in Europe. It's his job. When he tried to take his female lawyer to Saudi Arabia, they asked if he "owned" her...you get the picture.

So here is a young man with an important job talking to his mom who is now sitting in a very used parking lot in the light industrial section of Evansville, Indiana, in her seventeen year old jeep loaded down with ground corn cobs and potting soil. He's in a business suit with five hundred messages waiting to be answered on his phone, and I'm wearing short blue jean shorts and a $3.00 shirt from Walmart and using my "smart phone" which is usually smarter than I am.

How does this happen that a dichotomy of life styles has grown up between  mother and child to this extreme?

Hope.

I have come to believe that hope is the magic word...the magic wand in rearing children. I love what I do, where I am and my life. I wouldn't change anything about my life...it's sweet...but at the same time, my life is not my children's. It's mine. So while I've been living my own life, I have had great hopes that my children could do the exact same thing...live their own lives, doing what they want to do, and doing it well.

When my son was born, I hoped that he would do good things with this life, and I encouraged him to do great things at every point in life. I told him that he could reach for the sky and get there with enough effort and enough solid living.

When my daughters were born, I hoped that each of them would do good things with their lives, and I encouraged them in the same way I encouraged my son. "Anything is possible if you work hard enough."

I've gone round and round with several people over the years who believe that hope is a worthless passive waste of time. For me, hope is all the possibilities tied together...it belongs to a life lived cautiously, carefully, and prayerfully. It is open, healthy, broad, and encompasses all the human passions while it remains gentle and lovingly looks forward instead of back.  Hope is life's polish.

So as the sweat is dripping from my smart phone into my ear in the worn jeans, car, and parking lot, I talk freely about family, the cancer of a friend, his travel schedule, what Patrick wants for his birthday until they call him to board the plane. I'll talk to him again when there's time. Meanwhile he's living a good life and doing good things for others, and I'm living my life enjoying it to the hilt!