I never used to cry. Or be one to get choked up at sentimental things. I’d say around 22 or so, I began to see the mushy side of life and I’d even go so far as to cry at Publix commercials or anything that involved family sappiness. After having a child, it’s even worse. I can no longer watch anything involving harm to children or even implied. If it has injury to an animal, the water works flare up. It’s pretty bad. (Though, not as bad as my grandma who cries at parades.)

Point being, I get very sad when I have to help blind students. It isn’t pity; no, it’s something more like the inability to help them any more than I can. A girl came in this morning and wanted to double check that she was on the roster for this poetry class. I pulled up her schedule and there was nothing. So I called undergrad studies and it turns out she had been dismissed from the university over the Christmas break but not reinstated. I felt awful that I was the one to break it to her and then she would have to walk all the way across campus to find her dean and talk it out. It just breaks my heart to see people like that who have to overcome such adversity and I can’t do a damned thing to help.

Perhaps it’s the new mother in me that wants to give all I can, even to complete strangers. (From Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? : “I am the Earth Mother and you are all flops.”) I wonder if, when I am the mother of two children some day, I’ll be able to juggle all their needs, Ash’s and my own, and still find time to help others. I feel like it’s possible but it feels awfully overwhelming.