What goes around...

Last year Rachel, then 18, asked me sweetly, "Did you play with me when I was little?" I felt gut punched. All those hours of snuggling, playing, teaching... she didn't remember it. Watching bees collect pollen from the Crepe Myrtle blossoms? She can't recall. Her tiny self, draped in her daddy's t-shirt that reached to her ankles, standing on a kitchen chair to stir the pancake batter? That is my memory alone. The one million times I dropped what I was doing to tend to her... she has no memory at all.

I have put parenting first since the joyous moment I found out that I carried this creature inside my body. I gave up Diet Coke for the nine LONG months of gestation! I ate SPINACH almost every day! And yes, once she hatched I played with her. Endlessly. And I sang to her and carried her everywhere, worked my entire life around what was best for her. I read her favorite books out loud so many times that I still remember the words of them 19 years later. I was, even in retrospect, a very good mom.

Now Rachel is a college student with a part time job on the Alzeimers wing of a retirement home. Last week she called me and told me the following story: "At work we have some residents we need to wake up really early so they can have medications. I sit on their beds and sing to them and pat them till they wake up...."

She does remember, after all! Maybe not consciously, but all the tenderness I poured into her little life is there, rattling around in the back of her heart and brain. The times I woke her up by patting her and kissing her and singing. All the love I lavished on her. It is there, and it shines through in her sweet spirit.

I treasure the thought of her, perched on the edge of the bed of a person institutionalised in the twilight of their life.
Singing and patting. Waking them sweetly so that perhaps their day will be touched with some love. I revel in the thought of these men and women, whose memories are lost to them, waking to the smile of my kind and gentle daughter.

The remembrance of the hours she and I shared in her infancy and childhood... she cannot recall them. But the love I lavished on her? It's still there. And it multiplies as she shares it. What goes around comes around. My love was not wasted, it was magnified.