When I wandered into the kitchen for my ten thirty coffee break, I was stopped in my tracks by a carefully written message on the refrigerator door. There, fighting for space among the computer-generated grocery list, the parent-teacher interview sheet and assorted wisdom from fortune cookies, shone this little gem:
A sunny message for a rainy day
My fourteen year-old-daughter wrote this message – a twist on the lyrics to a song from the Lion King – for the rest of us to find.
As a parent, you have to think to yourself, “wow, I guess I’ve done something right”, but that would be taking credit where none is due. My daughter is her own person after all – independent-minded, creative and brilliant – not an instrument of my carefully planned parenting methods. Actually, I have no carefully planned parenting methods.
It is as Khalil Gibran wrote:
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls.”
And that being the case, it would hardly be fair for me to hold this message fast in my own household, so I am sending it to you, via my blog: May you, too, find love floating in a sea of refrigerator magnets.