It seems like charity season. In just the last month alone I have made four cash donations to help friends reach fundraising goals in walks and races, or as a place to put money that I owed someone and never sent (just because I kept forgetting). This last one was a lovely thought. A friend said, instead of bringing her a check the next time I saw her, that I should make a donation to Help a Mother Out in her name. What a lovely gesture.
And tomorrow I will be driving to East Los Angeles to bring over 2,000 diapers (donated at an event back in July and taking up semi-permanent residence in our garage since then) to a Salvation Army location. The drive out there is a donation, too. It’ll take me a long time and a frustrating drive across town, then a frantic scramble back home to pick Kyle up. If I charged an hourly rate, I’d expect the cash equivalent to be hefty.
Meanwhile, Christmas is already looming its red and green head over the calendar. The kids keep saying they want this toy or that toy. Can they have it for Christmas? (Can I have an iPad for Christmas? A ridiculous thing to want, since I have a small laptop, and I rarely leave my house. Okay, it feels like I rarely leave my house.) They, like so many children in our socio-economic sector, have far too many toys. They overflow from bins and baskets and shelves and cabinets. We step on them, we crunch them under our shoes, we vacuum them up, we bang our shins on them, we shred them with the lawnmower.
And yet they just keep on coming. I help them purge the collection once in a while – the gently-used castoffs are donated to “children who don’t have any toys” or, as Brady has summarized, “the poor children.” But even I am guilty of mild sentimental hoarding – I couldn’t let go of a preschool train set that was Brady’s “gift” to Kyle when he was born. The damn thing takes up a giant Rubbermaid bin and they never play with it anymore. Still, I didn’t let it get past the garage.
I try to explain what “the poor children” means every time I get a chance. There is a peanut butter drive at Brady’s preschool right now. (Aside: I don’t quite understand this one. It’s meant to collect so many pounds of peanut butter for hungry kids’ lunches. I’m guessing the organizers didn’t get the memo that hardly any schools in America still let you send peanut products in a kid’s lunch.) That was an opportunity to tell the kids that not everyone gets to come to school and eat lunch, that there are kids who might be too dizzy and out-of-it to concentrate and learn.
I find little ways to explain it to them. I have no idea if they really get it. I suppose I don’t even get it, myself, what it’s like to be unable to eat, or diaper my child, or feed him food without worry that he’ll have a deadly allergic reaction, or battle cancer or another difficult-to-defeat disease. These are all the causes I have supported in my tiny, tiny way in the last month. It is my hope that with my example and the foundation I am creating for my boys, brick by brick, that I can multiply my efforts through them, 2 times infinity.
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