a different trip to the grocery store

Contributed by Laura Parrish

Dear Mother in the Grocery store: Yes, I'm judging you.

I'm the woman with the short gray hair, dropping plums into a bag, looking at you grab your small son by the arm and lift him off his feet. He was taking delight in his smaller version of your grocery cart, running down the aisle of shoppers, not listening to you or even hearing you, as he ran and you called. You carried him, wailing, by his arm around the corner to the entrance and told him to put the cart back. He had "lost the privilege" of pushing the cart. He wailed louder. Just a minute before, he had been pure happiness, delight and energy unbound, and now he was pulled back abruptly into a world of adult expectations for small children; a world that he didn't realize included walking sedately behind the cool, shiny cart just his size, staying beside his mother as she bagged broccoli and moved slowly to potatoes. Really, Mother? What did you think a little boy would want to do with his own cart to push?

control

Contributed by Ronnie Maier

"Sooner or later we will come to the edge
of all that we can control
and find life, waiting there for us."
~ Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

This quote is featured in our Quote Zone, and I love it. It's from Dr. Remen's book My Grandfather's Blessings, which I discovered several years ago while on a personal odyssey (as it turned out) visiting a friend in New Mexico.

It had quite an impact on me. I come from a long line of detail-oriented women who (attempt to) leave very little to chance. When my kids were small, my need for control — and it approached obsessive-compulsive levels in those sleep-deprived days — caused a lot of pain in this house.