MONO MONDAY - WHERE DID THOSE YEARS GO?

When I saw the theme of the challenge today, I was tempted to brush it aside and just do something else, but then I remembered something I had seen yesterday when I was looking for something and found some old drawings that our younger son, Julian, had done when he first started school, way back in 1979.  

This was a portrait that Julian had painted of Mr. HCB’s mother, Joan and in the original she is wearing a bright red dress.

However, the thing that came back to my mind was the comment that Joan made when she came to the school with me to see all the work that the children in Julian’s class had done.  You can probably see that Joan has light coloured hair - and in fact, it was sort of white-ish grey, but something that I had never noticed was that her eyebrows hadn’t lightened like her hair, but were still very dark and Julian had obviously noticed this fact.

When Joan saw the portrait, although it says “Nanny by Julian” on the top, she said she would have recognised herself from seeing the very dark eyebrows.  So, over 40 years on, we still have this portrait and you can even see the marks where it was sellotaped to the wall - but where did those intervening years go?

They were such happy days when our children were small - but so often we are anxious for them to move on to the next stage of their lives, without enjoying the moment they are in - and often we carry on doing that for all of our lives.  We want to be done with the moment we are in and move onto the next, thinking it might be better,  However, we often learn more by the difficulties we go through - things that have caused us hurt, pain and suffering.  

Mr. HCB and I have been very fortunate in that we have stayed well throughout the last few months, but we know of many who have had challenging health issues and for whom life has been, and still is, very difficult but we continue to pray that we will soon see an end to this pandemic and hope we will all have learned how precious life is and not take the love of our family and friends for granted.

“Challenges are part of life;
     we weaken our spirit, 
          when we act in fear and lose hope.
but we strengthen our spirit, 
     when we fearlessly with faith and hope, 
          rise up to meet and conquer the challenges.” 
Lailah Gifty Akita