Stretchy love

(L mastering skipping at dance class - what a pro)

A newer friend made this cool thing for our family.

It is a piece of board (you need your imagining head on now) covered in material (board not too big - a small platter size) with felt houses on it, 6 in total.

One of the houses is the biggest and each house has a nail in it.

Attached to this board is elastic with tags on it. You write the names of your family, one on each tag. These tags have a hole in the middle, big enough to fit on the nail of any of the houses.

The biggest house represents our family home where K, L and I live.

The pink house, made of felt, in the left hand bottom corner, is d's house, we decided.

The other houses are listed as our special friends homes so we can talk about visiting them if we want.

The thing that makes this stretchy love is the following - the elastic joins all of the tags together, the girls are joined to me, the girls are joined to d (who is missing in action) but the mum and dad tags are not joined. Stretchy love.

When i first looked at it as my friend was explaining, i almost wanted to cry. I had acquired a picture that expressed the emotional picture of our life. Separation yet together.

When d (the tag) is at his home alone, we are at ours together. They are joined to him though. Nice visuals. When they put their tags on his house (their weekends with him), they are still joined to me via elastic. Hard to see our little felt house, with one person at it. But it's true and cleverly portrayed.

I felt i hadn't seen into the 7 year olds heart for awhile so was quite pleased as she shared something from her stretchy-heart experience.

"I wish i wasn't born in this family".

"yeah" i replied.

"i wish i was born in a family like Kathy and Mark" (two parents, lovely peeps).

I was thankful for the shared heart. I was happy for a glimpse into her private world. A door was opened and i thanked her. I agreed that I wished it wasn't this way too.

We talked the next day through shower steam, about how glad i was to hear her heart and that God was full of surprises for our family.

I'm glad of stretchy love. It's just another tool to help these and hopefully many more, wee dear-hearts, process and heal and understand the messiest of things. Life.

When i get to go out, this is often the picture i'm left with - little noses pressed against the window, trying to be glad for me that i get a night out, trying to be glad that it's Grandma babysitting, mostly wanting me just to stay home!
I'm glad of the love that stretches, even when i'm away from them.