“Hey mom… look! Petsmart is right next to Home Depot… can we go?” asked Josh. I managed some half-hearted enthusiasm through coughing spells. I put TJ down on the sidewalk and he ran squealing into Petsmart. “I’m so tired,” I thought. Maybe they have an empty kennel I can crawl into and go to sleep. Maybe if I tell them I have kennel cough they’ll give me something and make me feel better.
We rounded the corner to the left where all the rescue cats are kept. We have a cat. I don’t understand why they react like they’ve never seen a cat before. And no, we can’t get a second cat.
There was a little girl there just as excited about the cats. A man was with her and from a quick assessment, he appeared to be the dad. I struck up friendly conversation.
“Better than the zoo, isn’t it?” I commented. He grinned broadly. “And free!” he said. He was tall and slim with a sparse beard and quite a few tattoos. Immediately I could tell what a kind dad he was by the way he was treating his daughter. She adored him.
I looked around and saw at least a few other parent/child combos who had the same idea we had.
“Two boys, huh?”
“Actually, three. –That one is five, the three-year old is in preschool and that one is one. And we’re all kind of sick today.”
“I have three girls,” he grinned. The oldest two are twins and they are seven and this little one is three.”
The convo just took an interesting turn.
The color drained out of my already sick-pasty face. I made a gasping sound. He knew what I was thinking. Stuff was about to get real.
“It was so SO hard. So insanely hard. Like, sometimes I don’t even want to go back there in my mind it was so hard. It grew me up fast. We (my wife and I) decided that I would stay home with the kids because there was just no way to be able to get through life with two babies in daycare.”
“You have blessed your family beyond measure in this season. We have two sets of twins on my husband’s side and I was a mere bystander to the front lines because I was juggling my own babies. I’m sure that both families would say that first year or two was the hardest of their lives. My hat is off to you sir.”
Suddenly, I didn’t feel so sick anymore.
There are always varying degrees of “life is hard”…. requiring so much sacrifice from us we feel like we’re being strangled to death, gasping for air. And then… the next hard thing comes by and it may not be quite as awful because of the hard thing that just came before it.
That stuff is not by accident. God orders our steps and builds us up to the hard things. The Israelites finally made it to their destination, but only after years and years of hard things.
I took a second to mentally appreciate another fine dad who stood up to the challenge. Lost in thought, I didn’t realize Josh and TJ had split.
I ran over to the fish section and TJ was trying to fish for fish with his bare hands. He thought it was great fun. I put a stop to that because we need Petsmart.
We need Petsmart to fill the in-between minutes. To get fish for our fish tank when TJ decides to periodically fish for them. To get hairball meds when Mia the cat needs them. I did not want to get kicked out of Petsmart.
After the running tour of Petapalooza, it was time to go. “Where are we going now, mommy?,” asked Josh.
“We’re going to the promised land.”
Everything else could wait, while we pressed pause on the hard stuff and pressed firmly into our beds.
An American humorist, writer and author. When boiling down the chicken soup of life, she finds those golden, fried nuggets of truth & writes them long after the kids go to bed.
