We haven’t had rain in what seems like an eternity, but of course this past weekend, when my husband was smoking ribs and grilling chicken for dinner with the kids, we suddenly had torrential downpours that snuffed out the grill and forced him to move the cooking to the kitchen, amid much vigorous cursing. As soon as the oven was fired up to finish dinner, the rain stopped, and the sun peeked back out, like it was laughing.
Despite the weather’s contrariness, dinner turned out great, and we had a lot of fun. There was so much going on, I couldn’t even keep up: multiple stories being told at the same time, impromptu wrestling in the kitchen (always with my husband in the middle of it), and a lot of laughing, all while keeping an eye on our 3-year-old grandson and trying to convince my cat to at least let the boy look at him (he wasn’t going for it yet).
After dinner, one of the kids was holding our grandson to look at photographs on our mantel. One of the pictures is a framed photo of my mother, in her 70s, with short, white hair and glasses. Our grandson scanned the pictures, stopped at the one of my mother, and said, “Gigi”, the name he calls Psycho.
At first, everyone chuckled, because of course there is no photograph of Psycho on our mantel. One of the kids said, “No, not Gigi,” then corrected him and tried to pretend he was looking at a photo of one of my stepdaughters instead. He glanced at that picture, way at the other end of the mantel, turned back to the photo of my mother, and repeated insistently, “Gigi.”
I bit my tongue. Truth be told, it was kind of sad. To him, he was just innocently looking at some pictures, saw a photo of an older woman wearing glasses, and thought it was his other grandmother. He wasn’t being insulting, simply honest.
Because the truth is, Psycho does look considerably older than she actually is. Everyone ages, sure, but some things speed the process up considerably. Bitterness. Frowning. Jealousy. Always, perpetually, eternally pissy. How can being miserable 24/7 not take its toll?
Time will eventually leave its stamp on all of us. There’s no escaping that, and it’s just a part of life. But when happiness and love shine in your eyes and heart, it will show on your face. It makes a difference. And when bitterness and hate seep through instead, it’s far more than aging. It’s decay, withering, spoiling like garbage.
We can’t stop the hands of time. But we can control what we feed on the inside, what is held in our hearts, what ends up revealing itself on the outside, even to an innocent and very honest 3-year-old.
Sweat & Sparkle 