Mocha Needs Waddit

I just spent the weekend with my sweet grandbabies. Keller is just past two years old and Pace is six months old. We had a delightful time and as always, I was amazed to see the changes in them in just a few weeks.

Keller, the two-year old, is talking, sometimes in his own language. I love the expression on his face when I figure out what he is saying and repeat it back to him. It’s pure delight.

He has changed my carefully picked grandma name (for the time being maybe) from Mimosa into Mocha. I love Mocha just as much. He calls a sandwich a witch, a dump truck a bump truck. His word for tractor has about four b’s in it and for some reason he calls coffee waddit.

Over my single-grandparenting weekend with the boys, I found myself waking up early and speaking his language inside my head, “Mocha needs waddit.” She really did.

How can it be that someone who wasn’t even on this planet a few years ago could enter my heart, head and our family with words, thoughts, humor, joy, affection and a will of his own? How could he have morphed from a cell into all that he is? How could someone so small have the power to change what I call myself in my mind?

One day on a walk in the sunshine, he sneezed and then said “Bless you Keller.” How can a guy go from not even being here to someone who blesses himself when he sneezes?

We are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made…. Psalm 139:14.

Families are rather elastic in nature, opening up to welcome new family members. We circle in and tighten up our family when we let go of a loved one, but then miraculously we are able to expand again. Six years ago we welcomed a son-in-law and he is now our son. Our other sons are both in love. It is fun to watch our circle widen to welcome in their one-of-a kind women.

I’ve been studying about the soul in preparation for a Women’s Retreat I’m speaking at in 2019 for the women of First UMC Lewisville and Grapevine. Join us! The theme is Soul Spa. Thomas Moore in his classic work, Care of the Soul, writes that souls prosper in families. Our souls thrive in the concrete, particular setting of a family. We even have our own vernacular in families…our own language. Moore says the soul feeds on the details of life, its varieties, its quirks, its idiosyncrasies. Nothing is more suitable for care of the soul than a family. We need others in our life in order to become who we’re meant to be… even those in our families who challenge us and irritate us.

The family is a soul circle of deep knowing and being known.

I thank God for family and most recently for our unique additions. How else would I ever know that Mocha needs waddit?

Dr. Cindy Ryan is a pastor, wife, mother of three, Mimosa/Mocha to Keller and Pace, breast cancer survivor and waddit drinker.