If You Have It

(Photo Credit: Google Image)

This summer my friend Sierra took a road trip from Texas to Utah with her three children: Maya, nine; Josh, six; and Carly, three. And I had the honor of hosting them one night. 

Before bedtime, Josh played Wii with my teenaged sons while Maya and Carly watched Harry Potter in a different room. The next morning, much to my horror, I––the guilty hostess––got up at 8:00AM and found Maya and Josh wandering in the living room, obviously hungry and bored. 

I quickly fed them cold cereal then set up a game of chess for Maya and me, while Josh played with Jurassic World Legos. About twenty minutes later, they were done with chess and Legos. Maya scanned the collection of board games stacked on the living room shelves and exclaimed, “We'll play Ticket to Ride!”

“I don’t know how to play that game.” I admitted. 

“What?” Maya looked at me with deep confusion. “How can you not know how to play?”

“Because I’ve never played.”

“But you have it. Over there.” She pointed at the game, somewhat annoyed, or maybe disappointed, most likely both. Her face was puffed up with disapproval of my lack of game skills. 

“I know.” I said, wondering if I should explain to her that no one in my family is particularly interested in playing board games anymore. 

“But if you have it, why don’t you ever play it?” Maya said before taking Josh out to the backyard to jump on the trampoline, leaving me to wallow alone in the question that sounded simple, yet hard to answer. 

I realized there are many other things I have that I’ve somewhat neglected, and the most significantly important of all is time with my children while they still live under my roof. 

I’m living in a season when I still have the blessing of seeing all my children every day: seeing them walking in and out of their bedrooms, the kitchen, the garage. Hearing their croaking teenaged boys’ voices telling, laughing, complaining. Smelling their nausea-inducing lacrosse socks, helmets, jerseys. Time and things so plain, routine, and ordinary that I’ve forgotten every second having them physically present in my life makes my house a home––heaven on earth. 

I often think of, and plan for, my empty nester life. I keep thinking I want to move far away. I want to travel and see places. I want to be the best grandmother in the world, better than the mother I’ve ever been to my boys. But I’ve obviously forgotten that I don't have it yet––despite all my retirement fantasies, I don't have the privilege of spoiling my grandkids just yet. I've forgotten that in the glorious moment I’m currently living, I should strive to be the best mother in the world to my children before I can work to be the best grandmother to their children. 

I can just imagine an older, more mature version of Maya coming to me with this question: “You have your kids still living with you, why don’t you go create bonding memories with them right now?” 

But it was the nine-year-old wise Maya who ran back to me from the backyard, her sunbaked hand grabbing mine; her sparkling brown eyes filled with excitement. “Come jump with me!” she said.

“Uh––” I hesitated, trying to find the best way to tell her I’d actually never jumped on the trampoline in my backyard, either. I wanted to tell her I didn’t much care about the trampoline; it just came with the house. I wanted to tell her I suffered from this paralyzing back pain; jumping on the trampoline would be the end of me. But then I remembered how I should answer her question. 

I jumped on the backyard trampoline with Maya and Josh that summer morning, our animated shadows bouncing on the black surface, laughing, playing, and telling stories. And it was in that precise moment––when I took advantage of what I had––that I was convinced I had the potential of becoming a wonderful grandmother after all. 

Allison

Blog: Allison Hong-Merrill
Facebook: Allison Hong-Merrill
Twitter: @xieshou
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Only a Child: Bursting the Bubble

By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I was seven the day I tasted my first bubble.

I was the sole occupant of the street in front of my house, a 50-yard stretch of asphalt dead-ending at a little copse of trees. I stood, purple bubble bottle and yellow wand in hand, absorbing the glaring summer sunlight that had sent everyone else indoors but that I seemed to photosynthesize into smiles and pumping arms.

I repeatedly pulled the wand from the bottle, dripping refracted light, a sheet like a prism's blink stretched across it eye.

Sometimes I would purse my lips and blow the bubbles myself, but more often I would let the air do it for me, arm outstretched, whirling and watching bubbles stream from the wand, bursting into existence in sparks and glints of color as the wind gave them life.

I stood and watched, the blood rushing in my ears and the world swirling around me. Magical! Floating spheres of light and reflections. The elixir of life, holding precious a tiny breath of air.

I had the sudden urge to taste the bubble. I ran down the street craning my neck, stretching my tongue to reach it, but the wind tasted it before I did, blowing it out of my reach and eating it up.

So I tried again. And again. I ran up the street, down the sidewalk, across neighbors’ yards, into bushes, everywhere the bubbles went, trying to catch one with my lips.

And all the time I had the little jar of bubble solution clenched in one cautious hand. It never crossed my mind to taste from the source, from the bottle or the wand; those weren’t magical. There’s nothing ethereally enticing about a sticky, purple plastic bottle or a yellow, dripping wand. The magic was in the air around me, in the bubbles caught in the current of the wind.

The magic was there right up until a bubble danced to my lips and burst on my tongue. In the split-second between contact and taste I was shocked at having achieved my quest.

The shock was short-lived, however, as the filmy, acrid feel of the bubble filled my mouth. It didn’t taste like I thought magic ought to. I wiped my tongue on my shirt, spat into the grass, glared at the purple bottle in my fist, ran inside to repeatedly flush my mouth out with water.

I felt foolish for the first time, like a child. Only a child would run around for long hours in the burning sun, chasing impossible, disgusting bubbles. Only a child wouldn’t realize that the bubbles in the air were no different than the bubbles-to-be in the bottle. Only a child.