Questions for my parents

• Did you look at me like I look at Oliver and Alexander?
• Were you as unable as I am now to express adequately the love you had for this small addition to your life?
• Could you ever kiss me enough?
• Did my smiles and laughs make your heart swell so that you could actually feel a lump in your chest?
• Did your heart break every time I cried?
• Did you secretly wish I would wake in the middle of the night crying just so you could hold me?
• Did I frustrate you when I did wake up too often?
• Did you have mixed emotions about seeing me grow—excited to see me experiencing the world, but sad to know the days of infancy were going to end?
• Did you ever tire of watching me?
• Did I change you—not just your life, but you, who you were?

Knowing how you would answer these questions makes me love you even more.  It's hard for me to understand that I was (am?) to you what Alexander and Oliver are to me.

[No special occasion.  These things were simply on my mind.]

Children & Happiness

In an interview in the Telegraph, Archbishop Rowan Williams had this to say about children:

"What is lacking in children's lives is space. They are pressed into a testing culture, or even into a gang culture, they are bullied and manipulated until they fit in, they never have any time to develop in their own space."

He understands the urge to join a gang. "A lot of it is yearning for love, they want to fit in, if their families are as chaotic as some of them are, gangs give them a sense of belonging."

But he says pushy parents who rush children between ballet and violin lessons are suffocating their offspring too. "Children live crowded lives, we're not making their lives easy by pressurising them, whether it's the claustrophobia of gang culture or the claustrophobia of intense achievement in middle-class areas."

And this to say about happiness:

"Happiness happens when you are not thinking about it, when you are inhabiting your body comfortably… when you feel at peace with yourself and the world. When we live overprotective, overstimulated lives we expect more all the time, we find it hard to be unself-conscious and just do what we do, we overanalyse."