I love shiny. Shiny is pretty. I love shiny….
She’s the finder of pennies. Everywhere she goes, she manages to find a penny. Today’s found treasure led to a song.
Your turn to sing a song, Mommy. You make up a song.
Not feeling particularly like a Maria this morning,
Oh, I don’t know what to sing about, honey.
Which warranted this reply,
I have an idea! Why don’t you sing this, ‘I love Lydia. I love Lydia. I love Lydia…’ [put to her own version of music]
At that point, I couldn’t help but be all in. I belted out my own rendition, adding a bridge about how cute she is.
I watched her making funny faces wearing her “I love Mom” shirt, and it struck me how secure she can be as my child while insecurities live right beneath the surface. She can tell me to sing a song about my love for her because she knows I do. She can ask me to push her on the swing and tease me about her getting growing bigger when I’ve told her I want her to stay small forever because she knows she’s mine and I’m hers.
And yet…
She walks a bit ahead of me in the store and loses sight of me for a second then runs to me, “I thought I was lost. I thought you left me.” It’s time to take the kids to school, and she sees us all putting on our shoes as we do every morning, and she panics to grab hers quickly, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave without me!” She yells for me from her room, and I don’t hear her right away or respond right away, “You didn’t hear me. You forgot me!”
It’s the juxtaposition she lives with all the time—knowing she belongs and she’s loved and yet experiencing something very hard called abandonment followed by a year of missing the earthly relationship she needed most of all.
I’ll keep singing, “I love Lydia, I love Lydia, I love Lydia…” It won’t make the hard stuff go away, but I pray that all our love songs will make her journey through it all a little easier.
