“Anytime,” I replied. “This is your family.”
I stood in the kitchen after she left and told my daughter what I had been feeling for weeks.
After Lizie went, the home became quiet, but it wasn’t empty; rather, it was back to its typical three-person frequency.
Sam had a familiar look on his face as he observed me. The quiet kind of pride she had been cultivating—the kind that doesn’t require an audience.
I said, “Hey.” “I want you to know how proud I am of you. You saw more than simply someone in pain. You took action.
Sam shrugged in the same manner that she did when she felt uncomfortable receiving compliments. “Mom, you would have done the same thing.”
I gave that some thinking. I almost stated that you can’t just bring folks home without asking when I was standing at that stove on Tuesday night, counting chicken pieces and disagreeing with the math. About how, in some way, the arithmetic that had seemed insurmountable turned out to be doable.
Perhaps she was correct. Perhaps I would have followed suit. She hadn’t waited to find out, though. She had just completed the task.
I hadn’t taught her that. After witnessing a girl in a gym class sit on the floor due to running out of fuel, she came to the conclusion that it wasn’t someone else’s problem.
I nearly missed the lesson my own daughter was living out in front of me because I was so preoccupied with worrying about having enough—enough food, enough money, enough of everything.
It turned out that Enough was more flexible than I had anticipated. It extended in directions I hadn’t considered. No one would go hungry if it covered one more dish. One additional person could be covered without diminishing the size of the rest of us.
The following day, Sam and Lizie entered through the back door in the late afternoon, making the unique sound that two teens make when something amusing has happened between them and they haven’t stopped laughing about it.
“What’s for supper, mom?”
I said, “Rice and whatever I can stretch.”
I also arranged four dishes.
I didn’t consider it. I did that just now.
