Keeping Tabs

When I was five years old and in first grade, I used the pay phone at school to call home. The phone booth was a small closet across the hall from the principal's office. It was also the lost and found. When I made the call I took off my coat and I must've placed it behind me on the shelf. After the call I ran outside to wait for my mother, catching a lift home, forgetting my coat. And when I returned the next day my hounds-tooth coat had vanished. My mother never forgave me. 

She never forgave me for getting an ink stain on the wooden living room table (at the same age), and she never forgave me for growing breasts and having long ringlets. 

But back to the coat. 

When I was 21 I was poor and freezing and living alone in Providence RI. I wore converse high tops and I had lost my winter coat in a fire that my North Carolina landlord had set. It had been my brother's winter coat that I inherited. It was down filled and Kelly-green and you could climb the coldest mountain in it. 

All my clothes burned in the fire. People in the community heard about the fire and they gave me bags of clothes. But my mother refused to get me a winter coat. So, back in RI, I found a big vintage wool coat at the local thrift store. It was from the 1940's and built with a zippered wool lining and the exterior made of tweed. I rode around on my 3 speed Armstrong bicycle wearing it. 40 years later, I still have it. My husband looks amazing in it. It fits him perfectly. 

But what I wanted to say is my mother kept a running tab, a checklist of demerits and I realize now that this was anything but love.

Love your children (and your friends and neighbors) and don't keep a running tab. They are not on earth to make you happy. As Gibran said...Your children come through you but do not belong to you.

Peace, 

Emily

“Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”

― Kahlil Gibran