Always be available to your kids. Because if you say, 'Give me five minutes, give me ten minutes,' it'll be 15, it'll be 20. And then when you get there, the shine will have worn off whatever it is they wanted to share with you.
Interpretation
Prioritize your time with your children to fully engage in their moments.
This quote emphasizes the importance of being present and available for your children when they seek your attention. Delaying engagement, even for a short time, can lead to missed opportunities to bond and connect as their excitement and interest may diminish in your absence.
In practice
During a family gathering when discussing the importance of being present for children.
I find as long as I acknowledge the truth of something, then that's it. I know what it is and then I can operate. But if I overestimate the downside of something or the challenge of something and I get too obsessed about the difficulty of it, then I don't leave enough room to be open to the upside, the possibility.
My whole life, meeting people is like a blind date, because I feel like they've already seen the video on me.
There are no moments you have frozen in amber. It's moving, it's changing, so appreciate what's good about right now and be ready for what's next.
There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.
Certainly people have a lot tougher situations than I've had to deal with. But I will say we are all dying from the moment we are born. This is not just rehearsal.
I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.
I don't have to have a child come from my womb to have a connection. Children that are already born are beautiful to me. I can definitely be a mother to them.
Ammu loved her children (of course), but their wide-eyed vulnerability and their willingness to love people who didn't really love them exasperated her and sometimes made her want to hurt them-- just as an education, a precaution.
I tell myself that God gave my children many gifts - spirit, beauty, intelligence, the capacity to make friends and to inspire respect. There was only one gift he held back - length of life.
A mother is not a person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnessary.
My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there's this monster - this tiger or lion - that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn't stop. It doesn't matter if they become men or women.
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
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