After finishing this little sketch, I looked back at it and I decided to call it “Hope”, then I made up a little story. A single woman is sitting at a bus stop with her daughter, but her attention is elsewhere. She is thinking of someone else, perhaps a potential lover. She is hoping to one day maybe meet someone who will complete her. Her one arm is around her little angel. She forgets - it’s easy to forget, that the real “Hope” is sitting right by her side. She is not only the future, but she is her past, and the palpable, unmistakeable, and ever fragile present.
But why that story? Maybe because that’s how I myself function. I have a little daughter too. I know what it is to be a parent. It can be hard (I haven’t slept in four years), but I also know that I didn’t live to be 48 to allow other people to raise my child. I get to teach her things, help her develop a taste with forms and colors, sounds and speech. No one else is allowed to do that!
If you don’t spend time raising your own child, other people will. There is a reason a child is born into a certain family, to certain parents. If we don’t respect that specific configuration that God set into motion for us, then we are merely selfish beings expecting our kids to love us.
It’s you and your family dynamics. YOU get to decide what’s right for your immediate family. Everyone else is there to contribute to the dynamics YOU have set forth. No one messes with those dynamics - no aunts, no uncles, no grandparents, no friends, nor educational systems.
Our children, these absolutely unique and beautiful individuals readily and alertly experience life every instant without a doubt, whereas the social structure lurking in the corner, is waiting for the right time to put them in a single mold to which all conform. I can feel it pulling like a magnet, I can see its insidious charm. I won’t allow it. There is a reason she has chosen us to be her mama and papa, and I will not break her trust. The dead structure of the known paradigm is foreign to me. There is a new world waiting for our children. It is in the doubtlessness of their little minds.
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