Moments That Define Us

Today, as I watched our little Tiggy jump onto the back of the upholstered chair, I soon realized something very profound. Life happens in small incremental steps, chosen by us. Many unrelated snippets of unremarkable moments -quick seconds of time, unfolding in rapid succession and lasting less than 5 minutes and occurring without warning - begin to punctuate and define our lives, who we are and where we are going. Upon closer examination, we soon realize that these seeming unrelated moments in our daily existence are in fact our life, in heightened colour and dimension.


I met my husband, at the stand up restaurant/bar where I worked, on a Thursday evening, a day most people do not consider an important day of the week for 'going out'.. (Waiting for the weekend for that most coveted of social time slots simply relegates the rest of the week and our lives, to nothing status.) .. Our preoccupation with the weekend gives little meaning to our everyday life. (Since there are only 4 Saturdays and 4 Sundays per month, the rest of the month seems like a total waste of time. Are we short sighted in our thinking? Should not everyday have significance, the potential to punctuate our lives with incredible moments, these precious flashes of time?. ...


A friend of 'John's' had been visiting, that Thursday. ... A night out was suggested by his room mate. Though John was tired after a week of travelling to Detroit on insurance business, he agreed to go out for a short while. He would go to his chalet with friends on the weekend, a ritual of his back then. ... In an instant, a moment in time had begun to define our future life together. ... In spite of a misunderstanding over the price of carafe of wine. (I was a part time cocktail waitress/ full time student; he, the very attentive, somewhat elusive customer.), we clicked ... He knew cars and had an uncanny spatial ability to be able to drive anywhere with or without a map. He could find alternative routes during traffic gridlock while anticipating problems around him. Actually, he could be left in a desert, anywhere, in the United States and find his way home- without a map! If left blindfolded in a closet for ten minutes in my house, I would awaken and wonder, “Where am I”? When our children were small, one of them would always accompany me to the provincial park 's camp store, just in case. ...(Thank goodness he found me!)


When I look at our cat sitting on top of the chair, I think of the stereotypes that have been totally shattered because I found her, 11 years ago. Another moment in time, lasting 10 seconds, punctuated my life and hers, while giving me nearly 12 years of feline bonding experiences. ... (I should not have been on that road, where she had been dumped, that freezing Monday morning and have not driven on it since.)... That moment became my life. ... Back then, we had been a family of dog lovers. (And rabbits and lizards, too) ... Now our family included this fragile diminutive kitty, with incredible powers of love. Our intention was to place her in a good home. There were none available. We became her 'good home', in an instant.... The lives of our sons were re-awakened when she entered our lives in this most dramatic unplanned way. Nothing means more to us than the welfare of our pets, some of whom had been abandoned and abused.



When I met 'Mary', the teacher about whom I have written many times, it wasn't until she asked me into her primary intensive language classroom for help that a special moment in time had begun. Within her primary special ed classroom, the creation of a program of learning to think, using dough, was born. The concrete nature of working with something real to teach special needs young children something intangible and abstract, such as thinking, was a monumental moment in time, born within 5 minutes of watching her students that first morning. That moment changed the trajectory of my life, forever. It's now my life's focus. ...


The grand daddy of all moments, that has superseded all other moments, was the birth of our first child, arriving thirteen weeks too soon, whose death would have literally cancelled the rest of my life that followed. His survival-35 years ago- gave me incredible strength, courage, an invincibility of unparalleled  proportions. I formally grew up that day and my eternal gratitude and life became the focus on children. I became driven. As two more children were added to our family, a wealth of moments accompanied each of these births, woven together to create a tapestry of purpose and meaning to my life.


We are all made special and given purpose by all the seeming insignificant moments of our lives. I would not be TheMomsey without those moments. ... And no moment is insignificant. Strewn together, they become our life, in bold technicolour!