Lessons from a Water Balloon

I came home from work tonight to find my husband on our deck filling a water balloon for our 7yo son Elijah. I watched as my husband accidentally filled the balloon past capacity and popped it. Elijah stared discouraged as his father attempted to fill the next one. The look of delight and the giggle that slipped between his lips was infectious.

I guess that before I go on I should describe Elijah, my little Buddha. I call him that because if there is anything he has shown me, it is that children are here to teach. I’ve often watched his approach to life and tried to emulate it. He greets each day with wonder, has no worry about the past or the future and has difficulty holding grudges. Elijah expertly explained to me once why I should forgive our dog Shai for peeing on my bed. He reminded me that our dog is just that, a dog and dogs pee on things. He explained me that we all make mistakes and need to be loved and understood.

As he gets older and “life” happens, he is beginning to carry over his worries from the previous day into the next and holding onto his hurts a little longer than he used to. As a mother I worry. I want him to hang on to this part of him, that part that lives in the questions, that’ always wonders if there’s more, the part of him that lives heart wide open and has the ability to forgive. I understand though that he too has his journey; the lessons he chose to come here and learn.

My little Buddha has taught me a lot, which brings me back to the water balloon lesson. Elijah decided to name and keep his balloon as a pet after successfully being tied closed by his father and decreed that we should all have our own “water balloon pets”. Daddy went back to the task of filling them with water while Elijah and I named them. He named his Peter, I named mine Patty and Daddy’s was named Patrick.
When my husband suggested we use Elijah’s pet “Peter” in a catch, Elijah stared at him in horror! What if we dropped it and it broke? Funny enough, I understood his fear. I suggested he could use my “pet” Patty in a catch, explaining that it is every water balloon’s dream to be used in a catch, to be tossed high up into the air and caught in a child’s hand. Elijah looked up at the trees that keep guard in our yard and expressed his fear that he would be unable to catch Patty should he toss her up as high as they stood. Again, what if she broke; landed in a puddle on the ground? I heard myself explaining to him that if she broke, she would break doing something that she loved, fulfilling her dream, her reason for being created.

I am like the water balloon in many ways. I am in a period of transition, in the process of fulfilling my dreams; figuring out my reason for being created. It is scary being tossed into the air, unsure of whether there will loving hands to catch me as gravity propels me down. It’s a chance that I am now willing to take. When I was a child I believed I could be anything I wanted, create my destiny, as long as I believed. I was always told to dream. I would be dishonest if I said I wasn’t scared. And as I was driving home from work this evening I was contemplating feelings of fear.
It’s amazing how the Universe works, how the Goddess speaks to me in different ways. A co-worker once told that “we often teach what we need to learn”. The water balloon was just as much a lesson for me as it was for Elijah and he happily tossed Patty into the air with his father. Patty broke shortly thereafter and Elijah insisted we each keep a piece to remember Patty; a piece to remind us to always follow our dreams, no matter our fear of landing in a puddle on the ground.