About the Blue Bowl

So I’m back from the training in which I learned to put more God in my days, and here I am in my house with the children and the laundry and the normal days.

‘it’s ok to enjoy a calm life’, I read.

I will.

The boys are home today, because teachers have to go to school sometimes, too. Gabriel does not get this. His teacher is destined to spend her days and nights in school. She has no right or reason whatsoever to leave school. And so when he wants to go to school at night or on sunday or on this day, he does not understand that there will be nobody there. He giggles and tells me in a voice that tells me what he thinks of my intellectual capabilities ‘Juf Cynthia is there mama’.No, darling. No. Believe it or not, even teachers have lives outside of the classroom.

Should you ever become a teacher, I very much hope that you will come and see me sometimes, and that I will not have to go to your classroom to go see you. Although I do think you might think you lived there, the first year or two. It won’t be so.

Anyway. The boys are home.

They hug each other joyfully and I fool myself into thinking that this is a good sign. There will be no fights today.?But brothers must fight. Apparently.

They fight over the baby chair, over the bears, and of course, over the blue bowl. Always every day whole days the Blue Bowl.

And after each fight has been resolved, they sit beside each other bortherly again, as if they had never had a disagreement in their lives.

I do wish grownups could do that. There is no grudge. There is no ‘yesterday you really hurt my feelings’.

There is ‘isn’t life awesome’ and ‘let’s read this book together’ and ‘come Gabri?l, you can come live in my castle’.They remind of of the dog in ‘UP’.

The next fight is waiting to come, but looking at them I am not too worried. It will be annoying for me to have to solve it. We will go to the pantry and we will pray and I might ask Abel if he wouldn’t like it if he didn’t have to get so angry, if he could solve it without screaming. He might say yes, or he might cross his arms and inform me that he loves being angry and he will always and forevermore be angry all day and every day.

But we will pray and hug and he will either tell me he loves me or at least acknowledge that with a grunt. And then we will go to the living room and he will anxiously look to see if his borther took his grapes. His brother didn’t, this time.

The love and joy is boundless. Life will always be great, and nothing can ever go wrong again, because Gabriel did not eat his grapes.

It’s why I am their mom, isn’t it? I feed them and I make them eat garlic when they are sick and I rub garlic lotion on them, to the horror of their uncle.I put them in bed and sometimes, occasionally, I give them a bath.

I make them love kombucha and I wash their dirty clothes. And I resolve fights. I read them books, the boring ones and the awesome Richard Scarry and Dr Seuss.

These things are not disturbances. They are occurances in our day.