Show up

Sometimes the hardest thing I do every day is to show up. I am a superhero to my littles who think I know every answer and can do anything. I took one of the kid's toys apart and cleaned a little corrosion off and tightened some loose wires and my daughter ran through the house yelling "Mama fixed it, Mama fixed it!" as if I had just lept over the moon.

I'm in the middle of hard things.  I want to lie in my bed and just thing and cry sometimes. The morning dawns and I'm not ready.  The baby stirs beside me and throws his little chubby arm over my face and sometimes it makes me annoyed rather than delighted.  My three year old comes skipping in telling me the sun has come up and it's "Suntime" and I want to yell at her for waking me up.  I did, in fact, this morning. I am so grateful for the forgetful love of children who forgive me for being crazy.


I get caught up in the mess, in the cleaning, in eggs and fruit, and bottles and laundry and I turn on the music to give a flow to the insanity.  Then my little girl puts on her princess dress and paper crown and begins to dance around the room.  She is graceful and not, all at once.  And then she comes to me and says "Can I have you?  Will you dance with me?"  And I think of all the things I have to do and say and write and be and songs that will never get written during naptime because naptime no longer exists for one of my children and the other is in a battle of wills with me to give his up too.  And then I see her.  And I stop.  And we dance in the living room and she thinks my bathrobe spins like a pretty dress.


You don’t have to save the world. All that hero talk is only superficial stuff. If you want to change the world, all you gotta do is show up, show up, just show up.
No great things have I done, no great things have I done, only small things with great love.
Show Up by Jill Philips and Andy Gullahorn