I am passionate about cinnamon toast on a Sunday night in the calloused fingers of my guitar-playing husband or the small, dirty fingers of four sandbox-construction-working children.
I am not passionate about anything that takes me out of that moment around the kitchen table. I don't like thinking about the amount of calories in the cinnamon toast, the films I should be studying in preparation for another semester of teaching, the piano pieces I need to learn before Haddy's book 2 recital, the floors that will need mopped in the morning, the journal entries I need to catch up on, or the new budget we need to review. And yet, these details cannot be neglected.
Success follows passion, or so I've been told. So if I can become passionate about the day-to-day details of mothering, seeing them as necessary brush strokes in the portrait, perhaps there will be some measure of success.
But how can I measure success as a mother, when so much of the outcome is out of my hands? I feed my children a carrot, pinch pennies, take them to practices, clean up after them, read to them, pray with them, tuck them in, nag at them, hold them, teach them, and then, they go on and do things their own way. I can only hope that cinnamon toast on a Sunday night does something good for those passionate little people...
