Thursday, July 23, 2015

Sap

“Did you always cry this?” Alyssa asked me last night.

We were watching a new show on Fox called Home Free. It’s a group of couples competing to win a house. Each week, the group renovates a house for a deserving family. What the couples don’t know is that the houses they’re renovating are actually going to be theirs. Each week, the couple that is sent home is taken inside the newly renovated house and told that this house is theirs.

It’s sweet.

One of the couples is actually a pair of sisters who are competing for a house to give to their parents.

When this was announced, I teared up and said, “That’s so sweet.”

Then there was the commercial last week where a little boy who missed his dad who was deployed overseas kept writing him letters, folding them into paper airplanes and throwing them over the fence.

The older gentleman next door gathered all the paper airplane letters, boxed them up and sent them to the little boy’s dad. The boy’s dad in turn sent a bunch of letters back to the neighbor, who folded them into airplanes and threw them over the fence to the boy. Oh, the tears that flow during that one, even during subsequent viewings.

My answer to Alyssa was that no, I haven’t always been this big of a sap. Commercials haven’t always been able to reduce me to a sobbing mess. I haven’t always sat in movie theaters fighting tears while an imaginary friend calls out, “Take her to the moon for me.” Ohhh, Bing Bong.

“When did you get this way?” she wanted to know.

I thought about it. I realized that having kids has brought my sappiness to the surface. I feel more strongly now, the sadness kids might feel when they miss a parent. I feel the ache of growing old and perhaps becoming obsolete.

I tear up in joy when something is just sweeter than I can take, something so selfless as two twenty-something girls working so hard to give their parents a home.

My girls have shown me so much joy, provided me with so much to fear and have made me grateful for every single day that I get to wake up and be with them even one more time.

If that makes me big ol’ sap…so be it.

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