I was busy painting my toe nails while sitting on the edge of our living room’s raised platform floor while my flatmate Ann was chatting to her son on Skype. My heart tore a bit when I overheard their conversation.
Ann: I’ll watch you while your dad goes out for a while.
Son: I don’t want a laptop mother! I want a real mother! (Crying)
Ann: But I’m real, Ian, I’m really here, I can hear you!
If I had kids of my own someday, I don’t think I can handle being a long distance mom. It would totally break my heart and worse than that, theirs. My own parents lived with us the entire time we were kids, and though we were not materially rich, I only now realize just how blessed we had been with something so much more important. Presence is more important than presents.
Right after that, I finished my pedicure and walked to my laptop and caught up on the blogs I follow. Jason Hahn’s articles are usually funny, but his latest one about his dad had its funny lines still, but on the whole, it was more touching than funny.
You spend your whole life thinking your parents are always going to be always healthy, always opinionated, always strong. Always there. And then, one morning, just as you sit down to breakfast, you get a phone call and your whole world changes.
It’s true, isn’t it?
It wasn’t a phone call that changed my world but an email from my dad telling me that he had malaria last year. I went through what they say people who are dying go through – my life flashed before my eyes, but mostly my childhood life, all the memories I had with my dad… it’s my seventh birthday, and he presents my gift by making a brand new teddy bear “dance” from side to side in front of me; he wakes me up on my fourteenth birthday with a “good morning pretty rosebud!” and a freshly cut pink rose from his own garden; we are at a church event, and everyone is looking and clapping at us as he twirls me around and around in an impromptu ballroom dance number…
I was touched by what Amanda did for Jason in the end too. Read the whole article here.
Leave a Reply