"We speak with more than our mouths. We listen with more than our ears." - Mr. Fred Rogers
If each of us is a soul who gets on a line in heaven waiting to be born, I must have gotten distracted when they were handing out the book of life instructions. My husband, on the other hand, was on the line with the upgraded technology where the book was injected directly into his system so he would know at the cellular level what to do in most situations.
When the boys were almost 6 and 3, we agreed with his parents and brother to go on a big family trip to the Bahamas. I planned the trip. They would fly from the UK and we would go from the US. We would arrive within two hours of each other. We had adjoining suites, excursions and dolphin petting planned. It was expensive for all of us to do but it was going to be amazing.
We are on line at the airport on Saturday morning waiting to check in for the flight. The boys are singing and doing a little dance 'we are going on vacation! we are going on vacation!' We get to the counter and I hand the nice woman our passports. She looks at me and says "This passport is expired - you can't get on the plane". I had no idea that a child's passport expires in five years not ten. It had not even occurred to me to check. We took Eddie to England when he was 9 months old, his passport had just expired. The woman at the counter braced herself for my reaction. I looked at Grant.
He calmly said with his British accent "there are two little boys standing behind you that are going to learn how to handle what life throws at them based on what you do right now." He paused. Then said "No one died here. This is a luxury problem." It was one of those weeks where there had been a shooting on a college campus and a bunch of parents lost their children. I turned to the woman quietly with tears in my eyes and asked her what to do. Perhaps because I wasn't yelling at her for something that wasn't her fault - or maybe because she was just a nice woman, she told me what to do and rebooked our flights for the following Tuesday at no cost.
This memory is a reminder to me to be compassionate - most of the time I do not know the problem that someone else is carrying. More importantly, there are two 'not so little boys' and many other children who are learning how to behave based on what they see. It is a reminder that my real purpose is to bring the most loving and kind person that I can be to the world each day. To keep perspective on what is a real problem and what is not.