It is just a simple small translucent blue recycled glass heart.   It fits nicely in the palm of your hand.  Inside this heart you can see tiny air bubbles, trapped like mini tear drops within the hardened glass.  The significance of the heart is what it represents to our family. This heart represents comfort, unconditional love, and the knowledge that we bear one another’s burdens.  This little heart plays an intrinsic role in a Bennett family tradition.  

Most days you will find the little blue glass heart reflecting light, propped on the window sill in our kitchen.  On days when someone in our family is sad, when their day has been fraught with loss, or disappointment, and tears have fallen, that little glass heart is gently lifted from the window sill by another family member and put to work.  One of us will take the heart and place it on the pillow belonging to the sad one.  In that simple act we know in the midst of our tears that we are not alone with our pain.   

Through the years each one of us has found that blue heart lying atop our pillow on a difficult day.  It was there for my husband the day his grandfather passed away.  It made an appearance when my son struggled with having to move and leave behind a very special girl. It was there when my youngest cried for her daddy when he was deployed.  It has been there when we have tried so hard to reach a goal and fell a little short.   It has seen each member of the family through loss and disappointment.  This week I found it on my pillow.

I did not suffer from the loss of a friend or family member.  I did not fail an exam.  I had not been nominated for an award and lost.  No.  I had thrown a huge mother-fit.  Don’t pretend that you are unfamiliar with mother-fits. If you are a mother, you have had one.  If you had a mother, you have witnessed one.  All my friends have had one.  I have one friend who says she averages one mother-fit per season.  

A mother-fit is usually brought on by an over-extended schedule.  Multiple children all in need of being somewhere else, all at the same time, and being completely oblivious to anyone’s needs other than their own.  Another factor often includes the children and/or husband forgetting that they have any responsibilities in the home.   It can have something to do with the lunar cycle, but that is not always a good predictor of an impending mother-fit.  In my case, it generally has something to do with too many pairs of shoes and book bags being left all over the floor.  Add a dog that has walked through the unscooped poop left in the yard and onto the white kitchen tile and you have got yourself the makings of a colossal mother-fit.  Somehow the combination of factors mixes itself up and explodes into a torrent of tears and feelings of martyrdom come spewing forth.   

My children all stood in various arrays of readiness for their day and watched me with mouths agape, as I wept and wailed like a lunatic, randomly yelling about what exceedingly large babies they had been, how I given birth to them completely naturally, and how, ”this, this is what I gave caffeine up for…to be treated like this?”  

 I cried and sputtered on about the hours a day I spend driving to support their individual talents and pursuits and they can’t even scoop the dog poop in return?  I finally wound down, not entirely convinced that they “got it” at all, but feeling better none the less that I had unburdened myself on their seemingly ungrateful little selves.   So what if they thought I was a little crazy?  I remembered thinking my own mom was a little crazy too, but now I understand her.  I decided that someday my children will have children too and that will be all the comeuppance they need.  I felt much better after that last thought and went on about my morning bleaching the kitchen floor.  

That night when I went to the kids rooms to kiss them goodnight, I noticed that their rooms were remarkably clean and well organized.  Then I went to my own room to get ready for bed and noticed the family heart placed lovingly atop my pillow.  I picked it up and looked at it, thinking about the significance this heart has played in our family.  I realized then that my children did “get it” after all.  Thank you, my dear ones, for loving your lunatic mother unconditionally.