What Mama Did

Five Minute Friday is changing it up a bit this week.  We’re to write on “What Mama Did” for five minutes.  No editing or backtracking.

I ate lunch with Lexi yesterday and we sat with one of the little boys and his mom.  The two littles started talking about the other kids in her class that were sitting back at the main table.  I’m embarrassed to say not all of it was positive.  Lexi wasn’t trying to be mean but kids call it as they see it.  Lexi calls me out all the time.  Why are you mad at me?  It kills me when she says that.  I stopped her yesterday at lunch.  Quit talking about your friends.  If you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. Lexi, naive, said I like to gossip.  I wanted to hide under the table.  I urged her to just quit.  She did and started talking about something else.  Probably her peanut butter and jelly sandwich she was picking apart. 

When she got home last night, I told her I wanted to talk to her about what happened at lunch.  Gossip isn’t nice and talking behind peoples’ backs will land you with exactly zero friends.  The Bible warns against and it’s really just not nice.  She assured me she wasn’t trying to be mean, she just liked talking about her friends.  She’s just too honest and naive now to know how that will turn out in a few years.  I could tell she got it though and we moved on to talking about the weekend.

I always thought mothering would happen with serious, hour-long conversations, but I’m realizing I get to dispense what little wisdom I have in spurts, like a Pez dispenser and its little candies.  And I’ve realized that’s what my mama did.  Years and years of teaching and guiding, sometimes seconds at a time showing me what wisdom looked like.  She still does it.  Sometimes just a sentence between what we had for dinner and what she found shopping that day.

Motherhood sometimes doesn’t look like I thought it might, but I sure hope it looks a lot like what mama did.