"Thanks, Grandma"
A mom reminds us that our kids are sponges, absorbing every word.

When the commercial started I snuggled deeper into my Grandmas embrace and told her that "I want to be a movie star just like Lucille Ball".

"You can do it, Abby!" She said. "You can be anything you want to be if you want it bad enough."

And I believed her, because, to my 7-year-old mind, she knew everything, Simply EVERYTHING. She had even been to France, a whole other country!

And I never forgot. Even after I grew up a little and didn’t want to be an actress, or a singer, or even a lawyer. But I KNEW, in the deepest part of me, that I could be whatever I wanted to be, if I just wanted it bad enough.

The point is - while I never forgot what she said on that sleepy afternoon, she was most likely thinking about dinner, or how spotty the carpet was, or the laundry, and answered me with only half of her attention.

But I remembered.

The same way our kids now remember the things we say to them. Even when our attention is on something else, something far more important to us than their fleeting ambitions, they remember.

So I try, really hard, to pay attention to how my casual words may impact on their relatively fragile egos. Even when I am running behind and dinner is late and the kitchen is a mess and the dog just got sick on the carpet and ... well, you know how it is. I try to do it right. And sometimes I can think back to a casual conversation with my kids and pat myself on the back for doing well, even when I wasn’t really paying attention.

And I say a silent ‘Thank You’ to my grandma.

Abigail Pierce/ Reprinted with permission.
Abigail is a sometimes writer, mom and the webmaster at "Abbys Good Stuff for Free, the webs most discriminating free stuff portal" http://www.anycities.com/abbys