Done in By Dr. Seuss

I love, love, love Gray's Anatomy. I look forward to it every week, and I love having a DVR (like Tivo) so that on a night like last night, I can click a single button and record it so that in 15 or 20 minutes once both boys have settled, I can start watching it and skip commercials. Nice. Last night's episode caught me off guard. I cried unabashedly when the mother with cancer was trying to give her daughter years' worth of advice crammed into a few minutes (and on the night before the girl's birthday). I don't know why it hit me so hard, but it did. One boy was sleeping on the couch next to me. The other was nursing to sleep in my lap. And I sat and cried.

Then, this morning, they picked out books to read after getting out of bed. In their matching jammies (I love that!), they sat next to me and on my lap, and I read Dr. Seuss's Oh the Places You'll Go. I got totally choked up reading them that book. And, again, I cried, though trying hard to hide it and keep the overwhelming love and sadness and realization that I can't always protect them from scary, confusing, and frustrating paths out of my voice. (I can, I know, try hard to give them all the tools they need to deal with those paths, avoiding them where possible and finding a way out if they end up somewhere they shouldn't be. It's an amazing responsibility and challenge parents undertake, and somehow, this morning, my heart was bursting, which is both a good and a bad feeling, as I read to them.) It really is a beautiful and profound book, and parents understand it in such a totally different way than the kids.