Questions I Find Myself Asking Since Having a Baby

Regarding tenderness and stuffies:

I was recently on a trip to Ann Arbor with my kids and we went to the children’s museum. On the way out, we obviously stopped at the gift shop. We agreed on a small animal stuffy for each kid, but they were incredibly indecisive. I started pulling them off the shelf to help them survey options and pulled out the softest hand-sized hummingbird. I tried to ask my 7-year-old if she wanted it and she declined, and I immediately felt let down that it wasn’t coming home with us. After a minute, I decided that actually *I* would be buying myself a stuffy, too. Not that I think of myself as a particularly hardened adult, but I realized that I was imposing limitations on myself because play and cute and softness were the stuff of childhood, supposedly. I’ve kept it in my bed for the past couple of months since we got home, unless we’re all three playing with our stuffies together. I even packed Ming (the hummingbird’s name, I decided) in my purse for a solo trip I took last weekend.

In my almost eight years of parenting, I’ve recurringly learned the greatest lessons from my teachers, my children. A path back to tenderness might be the path of childlike honesty about what we truly want.