Happy birthday to our darling girl (and what I'm thinking about today)

She and her husband went to Napa for her birthday. I love that for them. Send me many pictures, I said, because thirty one years ago today I was working hard too. “Pretty sure you were doing most of the work,” she laughed. Sometimes I’m just gobsmacked by how lucky I am that I get to do this life as her mom. 

She told me the other day that she and her brother went to dinner and, both of them having been in therapy, they had a fascinating conversation. They realized that they both had savior complexes. His is to save people in a physical sense, hence his calling to be a firefighter and paramedic, and his choice to come over weekly to train his dad in the gym and set me a regimen of steps per day by walking from the front of the house to the back bedroom and back around to the kitchen at least once each hour when I'm writing, so that I achieve a minimum number of steps daily, even if my joints complain. Hers is to save people emotionally, hence her soothing empathetic nature, which invites people to pour all their troubles into her care, and we do indeed feel remarkably better after she listens and offers whatever thoughts she has, even when the circumstance has no cure. How did they come by these complexes I wonder. I don't think my husband and I gave it to them, at least not consciously, certainly not intentionally, which makes me wonder, do our souls come here with a such impulses already baked in, even knowing they will take their toll? Because in more ways than they will ever know, my children have definitely saved me, much as I might wish they would not ever have needed to.

So that's what I'm thinking about on the birthday of my youngest, and about how lucky I feel to have birthed these two, and how hard I pray for their hearts and souls and bodies and lives to be protected, restored as needed, and loved in full, always.