When Love Conquered Traffic
Yesterday afternoon I hopped into my neighbor’s car and we headed from Jerusalem to Beersheva to support our 18-year-old daughters at their end-of-year theater-club performance. At first Waze predicted a quick hour-and-twenty-minute trip, but traffic had something else up its sleeve. My neighbor and I ended up stuck in traffic jam after traffic jam, turning what should’ve been a quick 3-hour round trip into a nauseating 6-hour ordeal.
Sitting in that car, bored and uncomfortable, fielding calls from the children I’d left at home, I was frustrated. My day was slipping through my fingers, wasted in those never-moving traffic lanes.
B”H, we finally made it to the performance in time for our daughters’ skit. And B”H they both did a great job. And when the performance ended, and my daughter spotted me in the crowd, she came bounding over with the biggest smile on her face, arms wide open: “Thank you, Eema, for coming all this way!”
All those hours of schlepping (to see only the final 40 minutes of the play!) evaporated. In fact, I realized that it would have been worth it to shlep for an entire week just to see that smile on Moriya’s face.
How many times have I not been there for my children when they needed me? It would be easy to blame this on being one mother of eight children. And I guess being so seriously outnumbered doesn’t make it any easier.
But I think my inability to be all things at all times for all my children is the reality of being a mother who is also a human being.
I love my children, and have devoted the majority of my life to them, and in a heartbeat I would take a bullet each and every one of them. But at the same time, I am human being, which means I am distracted and busy and impatient and have other priorities and pursuits.
And that is also the reason why it meant just as much to me to as it meant to Moriya, at least this once, to be the kind of Eema who shows up, no matter what. To be the kind of mother, at least this once, that she wants to have and that I aspire to be.
