Sleepless Nights

This is when tolerating our high heat and humidity during the summer months pays off with highs in the low 80s and lows in the mid 60s (freezing, according to the little people around here--weak, I tell ya).  The sweet potato vines wake from their slow slumber of growth and begin to trickle down out of the soil onto paths, as if they were more like a waterfall and less like vegetation.  Stretching their limbs, they seem to claim it as their right for surviving the summer months as well.

It's a lot easier to tolerate those summer months when you've already experienced the moderate-ness of the remaining seasons. It's that 20/20 hindsight, or something like that.  I read this quote this morning from Steve Jobs “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”  If hindsight vision and perspective were for sale, they would make someone awfully wealthy.  When Divine was a baby, I might have become distraught over the fact she spit up just after I finished changing her from head to toe, diaper to blanket.  With this boy I just laugh and enjoy his steady gaze while I give him a healthy dose of baby talk and get him cleaned up. 

oldest and youngest

That first one is more of an experiment than anything when it comes to parenting.  She undeservingly gets the brunt of our fumbles and attempts at striking a balance of control and freedom.  Too bad we can't have a practice teenager, or a practice child, so these years would be put properly in their place with perspective and hindsight.

That's where faith comes in and why we have to trust that if we put the most important things first, everything else will fall into place and the dots will eventually connect, creating an image, a life that makes sense with beauty in it's entirety.  You are able to see why certain people were put in your path when they were and why attempts at making changes didn't succeed when you tried and fought and cried.  I know that soon enough these sleepless nights due to a crying infant will be replaced with sleepless nights, waiting for teenagers to come home from dates.  It makes them easier.  At least just a little bit.