Trying to be present

Mazzy and I were lying on her bedroom floor playing this morning and I had that squeeze-y want-to-cry feeling that happens sometimes when you are just so happy it is hard to breathe. Yeah, that feeling. We were playing with some plastic balls and I rolled it to her. She, of course, didn’t catch it, but she crawled after it and started to give it back to me. As she was crawling closer with the ball in her hand, she was squealing in delight. Once she was able to bump heads with mine, she sat up and thrust the hand with the ball in it at me. Mazzy was grinning from ear to ear, her whole face animated with enthusiasm and pride. She was confident and so pleased with her awesome that I wanted to take a picture. I wanted that look forever on the wall so that, as she gets older and loses that joy, I can show her that life wasn’t always hard for her.

Sometimes I think that I worry too much about the days that come after this. I don’t stay enough in the present. I am worried, always worried, about cruelty and pain and the way that life knocks people down and my part in all of that. I can’t stop thinking about my place in her life once things start to hurt. Will I be strong enough? Will I listen in the right places? Am I capable of letting the little things hurt so that she doesn’t want to have big pain? Worry, worry, worry.