He Just Wants Me

There are many nights when I come home from a long day of work, completely exhausted and spent, yet I still have a list a mile long of things to do: make dinner, give Little J a bath, clean, finish the laundry, etc. etc. I have learned that if I sit down when I get home, none of those things will get done. Once I'm down, I'm down. Typically on nights like these, we end up ordering take-out and sitting in front of the TV all night, putting the list off until tomorrow. But if I don't sit down, I find that I can get everything done. Dinner will be on the table, laundry will be done, and the house will look neat and tidy. On nights like these I am in what I like to call the zone, so much so that I often neglect the one who needs me the most. I might hear, "Mommy come look at this!" or "Mommy come play cars with me!" And can you guess my response? "In a minute baby" or "When I'm done with dinner". How is it that I can put off my list of things to do to watch a stupid reality TV show, but I can't take two minutes away from the laundry to watch my son do a somersault on the living room floor or look at the tower of blocks that he just spent fifteen minutes building? All too often I try to occupy my son with toys and movies so that I can get my chores done, but he could have all the toys in the world and still not be completely happy. He actually wants to be noticed. He wants to played with and acknowledged. Most of all he wants me. He wants to spend time with me. The thing he needs most in the world is to be loved by me. So will it really ruin the dinner if I spend two minutes watching my son light up as he shows me something he has been working on all day? I'm pretty sure dinner will survive, but if I continue to put my son off, he may resent me in the future, and I am certain that I couldn't survive that. There will always be a list of things to do, but there is only so little time that my little boy will be a little boy and I don't want to miss one minute of that.