Remembering Dan

• Individuality

  27Feb
  Categories: Single Parenting Comments: 1

  I had an “Ah hah!” moment in child rearing today.  I often think, “My parents did it this way and it worked just fine for me.” Meaning, that I don’t need to change anything in my child rearing tactics of my children.  However, my parents had/have 4 children to raise.  And as we all know, each child is different.  My parents might have done it that way for me and it worked just fine, but did it work just fine for the other three?  Or did they change tactics with each child?  I can’t just say, “well it worked fine for me” because as much as my children are like me in many areas they still aren’t me.  I need to be willing to change tactics, be willing to keep searching for ways that work.  I can’t succumb to the “child rearing is cut and dried” mentality.  It might work for the first one, but I doubt it will work for the second, and even less for the third, and so on.  I am always fighting this “viewing my children as a whole” thing.  There are just so many that I often lose sight of their individuality.  It would be nice to figure it out and then just sit back and watch, relaxing in knowing that I got it right, but life isn’t quite like that, is it.  This daily growing stuff is hard work.  Don’t we ever get a vacation?  Are you on vacation from that kind of stuff, Dan?

• Boxes

  27Feb
  Categories: Grieving Comments: 2

  The conflicting emotions are starting to feel normal – not pleasant, just normal.  I’ve been working on a digital scrapbook of some recent photos of Dan and today I got my first edition in printed form.  It looks pretty good, but there are a few things that I want to fix before I order multiple copies.  I am excited about being this close to completion, but the conflict arises when I realize that I want to make some changes, order one more, make some more changes, order one more, make some more changes, . . and you get the picture.  It’s not so much that I want to get it perfect . . .   I think I’m seeing it as one more piece of Dan being put away.  I want each of the kids to have one of these books for themselves so that is just what I am doing.  I am making the books and then I am going to put them away in a hope chest sort of thing.  I am putting Dan away in a box.  Or at least that’s what it feels like in a strange sort of way. 

  Dan hated being stuffed in a box, labled, confined to a “feet on the ground” kind of thinking.  He wanted to be soaring above the minds of his fellow humans with ideas and inventions, soaring above the clouds in his green box, soaring above the atmosphere into the unknown realms of space, and now . . he’s above even all that.  And I’m down here, stuffing him in a box . . his creamation box, a picture box, a hope chest kind of box . . .

  SMASH that box!!!!  Let him free!!

  Maybe the real problem is my box.  There’s the box of grief, the box of human perception of heaven, the box of death,  the box of life,we even try to stick God in a box.  It’s easier than trying to understand how He could exist outside of a box.  We have such small minds and yet we think we’re such hot stuff.  Makes me think of Payden just learning how to walk.  Everything has to have a beginning and an end for us poor simpletons.  Oh to be free of the finite mind so that I could soar with Dan in a heavenly realtionship with Jesus.