You leave your two kids with a babysitter for the day while you drive into the big city for some rest and relaxation. All is well in the morning when you leave. Everyone's happy and in a good space, cheerful goodbyes are exchanged, the sitter assures you that you needn't worry, "Just go and have a great day", she says optimistically.
So you go. You do have a great day. A relaxing day. A restful day. You drive home thinking, "I really needed to do that."
Then you come home.
You walk in the door to silence. The sitter has left you a note describing how the day went. She says that one of the children was frantic, fretful, and very needy all day. You walk into one of the children's bedrooms only to find half of the knick-knacks on the dresser are either knocked over, on the floor, or askew. And before you can ask what happened, the other child runs in and begins yelling angrily at you because you didn't tell him where you put one the other child's toys. Then before you can try to make sense out of the outburst (and the askewed knick-knacks), the other child comes in and starts whining because she wants to go to the bathroom and nobody will help her, to which the non-whining child responds by yelling at her too.
Now imagine that those are your parents.
You just wrote the preface to your book. The nutshell cracked wide open by a short, powerful, sentence.
ReplyDeletelove, Sheila