One of my restless moods took a hold of me last night out of nowhere and lingered in my unconscious even while I slept so that I found myself still uneasy upon waking the next day. I am by nature a rather restless individual, sometimes more so than usual and this was one of those times. These moods leave almost as imperceptibly as they arrive though so I tried not to let it bother me too much, waiting for the inevitable moment when it would dissipate. I was feeling suffocated though by the invisible miasma of heat which seem in part to be a residue of the breath filling the room from the night before and which clog the air worse than ever during the early hours of daybreak. I finally made my way down to the sunlit dining room in the hopes of escaping the oppressive humidity. It was here where I found the relief I was seeking, in more ways than one.

I would like to tell you a story about a little girl who is growing up to be the most loving person in the world even if she has a mother who lack in countless things. You see, there was a time in this little girl's life when she was practically a newborn and was then most in need of a mother's love which coincided with a time in her mother's life which was, to say the least, difficult, confusing and heartrendingly lonely. This was a time when the little girl's mother had lost touch with who she was, and was so overwhelmed with the circumstances facing her that she closed herself off at the expense of the one who was least to blame.

The mother hated, simply, hated, the world for the way it judged and condemned her especially since it seemed to take a perverse satisfaction of punishing her for doing what was right. She was angry with her parents and resented how she felt they were trying to control her, the way they seemed to use the little girl as an excuse to keep her where she was, which was then, the last place she wanted to be. The young mother, sad to say, did not have nurturing instincts to call her own, neither did she have a particular liking for children. None of this was helped by the fact that she was already emotionally distraught and was too lost in her anguish about her life then to have any love left for herself or for her child. Her only desire was to tear away the unwanted restraints which caged her in.

So for four months she left her child and she didn't look back. That little girl spent the first four months of her life cuddled in the arms of, cared for, watched over, and sung to sleep by others who were not her mother. It seemed that for a time the whole world felt the need and the right to pass judgement over that young, confused, and unhappy woman. The whole world except for the one person who had all the right to do so...

I hugged Angel good morning and couldn't resist kissing her smiling, rosebud lips so unlike my own as I have never grown accustomed to smiling after which she asked me to carry her, all forty plus pounds of her. I apologized profusely about why we couldn't take her with us yesterday when we took Powee to his much loved pediatrician for his immunization. I was rewarded by another smile and a sweet sounding 'Okay Mama'. Still feeling blue for the yet unidentified reason, I laid my head down on her soft, chubby lap, then raised it again for a moment to ask her for permission to sleep on her. She patted her lap, stroked my hair in the most gentle way, ironically the way a mother would touch a child and told me to make 'meme', which is her way of telling me to close my eyes and sleep. The next thing I knew she was singing me a lullabye which my mother and I have sung to her since she was born, and when, after I left her for those four agonizing months, she had only her grandmother to sing to her.

In her little voice, I heard all the love which I had witheld from her out of pride, out of confusion, out of pain, and out of fear, love which she gave me without question and without demands as her small hands patted my bowed head. She sung me the lullabyes which I could never sing, and it was as if for those moments the guilt which have haunted me for abandoning her and not being there for her dissapeared into mist.

It was then that I realized that I would still be restless even if I danced myself to exhaustion, that the only thing which had power enough to banish my unsettledness would be infinite love and tenderness, the kind which my two year old gave this morning, and that which qs showed me as he dealt with me with the utmost patience the night before. When Angel took me into her lap as if I were the child and she the mother, I felt as if I could do no wrong, the world and all its accusations past and present faded into nothingess, none of it mattered because all I could hear was her voice singing me a lullabye, putting my soul at ease, and for those brief moments, the need to search and to seek, that indescribable need which drives me to struggle as I do ceased. Heaven itself dwelt in my heart.