Stay seated.

For the past few months, my son has been having a tough time. He was struggling with both seen and unseen things and it was making him grumpy; what was worse, he stopped being playful.

I longed for the weekends of yore when he would spend hours upon hours making elaborate marble runs out of cereal boxes and slides off of the couch ("I love the physics Mama").  His spark was flickering and I was worried.  I was not sure how to reach him. I also started to think, if he feels unreachable now, how much further will he be from my grasp when he is a teenager?

In the past couple of weeks, a combination of things got solved medically and socially. Some of it was parental/teacher initiative, but a large part of it was his own (with the additional help of several days home due to storms) .   The results over all are a happier, lighter spirited, more playful boy that we have come to know and love. One morning, after I thought things were more or less settled, my son burst into tears.  In my head, I was thinking, "oh man, what now?" However, I ended up realizing something.  Instead of rolling my eyes, I said "are you going to miss me today when you are at school?"  He sobbed back his rhetorical response, "what do you think?"

So much of parenting is doing.  But there is also a big part of parenting that involves just being there.