The Most Important Words...

We teach our children a lot of words.

Some of those words, like Please, and Thank You, and You're the best mom in the world, seem to take a lot of teaching.

While the words we hope they didn't hear are, of course, the ones they learn right away.

And the ones they repeat.

Often.

In Church.

Most of us probably agree which words are the most important.

Like I love you, and I'm sorry, and I'm here for you.

I've been thinking about those kinds of words a lot this week. Trying to find the right ones.

Knowing none of them is adequate, but trying anyway.

Knowing that sometimes, there just are no words.

In the midst of trying to find the right words, I am often interrupted by someone who's dealing with their own struggle to find the right words.

A two-year-old running through the house with a diaper in his hand. A two-year-old, in fact, who is naked. And crying. Holding a diaper that has, in fact, been used. A two-year-old who is yelling, through his tears, "My mickey! My mickey! My mickey fell off!"

This briefly causes me to think that the most important word we teach our children may actually be "diaper". It was the diaper, after all, that fell off. Not the mickey.

And if you don't know what a mickey is, I'm not telling you.

But they don't usually fall off.

And if they did, well, let's just say there would be a lot of anxious men running around.

And maybe a few women, too.

It's not just me and the two-year-old who are trying to find the right words. There's a four-year-old, too, who sometimes has trouble in this area.

(For the record, the seven-year-old does not have a problem finding the right words. She knows just when to say I love you in a way that is guaranteed to brighten my day and/or get Jimmy to give her exactly what she wants. She also knows just the right words to say to her brothers, like when I recently overheard her telling B, "I'm trying to give you a compliment! I'm trying to be nice. But you probably don't even know what a compliment is anyway, do you?" Aside from that, she has no trouble finding the right words because, well, she's smarter than the rest of us. Jimmy doesn't usually have trouble finding the right words either. This is mainly because he doesn't try to find them. He just grunts a lot).

Anyway, tonight I told the four-year-old who sometimes has trouble finding the right words that we needed to go the cable company soon to get a new cable box...again...because someone knocked our current box off the table and broke it...again.

He nodded as if he was remembering something and said, "The people at the cable company get high, mom".

Um, what?

"They get high. They take those things, and they get high. Sometimes they get really high".

Things? What things? Pills? Joints? Does he mean take those things, or smoke those things? No, this is my four-year-old. I am quite sure he doesn't know about pills or joints.

How, then, does he know that the people at the cable company get high?

"You know the things, mom. The...what are they called? The elebator..no, the elevator, " he laughs as he finally finds the word he was looking for.

Oh yeah, the elevator. Of course he was talking about the elevator.

What else would he be talking about?

Sometimes, instead of finding the words you were desperately searching for, you just find tears.

Other times, when you least expect it, you find laughter.

And sometimes, you find them both at the same time.