Caring

A few posts ago I referenced our Wonderful Caregiver. This is a story about how wonderful she is.

Three times a week I knock off work and hustle on my bike up the hill as fast as I can to be home by 5pm (or very close to it). I greet the kids, and then proceed to find out how the day went, who ate what, find out who napped, and anything else of interest that might have transpired during the day. There is something of language barrier between us, but we can usually communicate the essentials. Another thing that comes through clearly is how dearly our Wonderful Caregiver holds our children...or so I thought.

From time to time, we call her husband to talk about significant changes: payment, vacations, changes in the weekly schedule, etc., the kinds of things about which we want to be absolutely clear. Recently we were talking to him and figured out a minor change -- I'm at home Tuesdays now instead of Mondays, to accommodate the needs of another family that our Wonderful Caregiver works for -- and we came to the end of the discussion. But then her husband told us this:

"Every day I pick her up at the train station, and every day she says a silent prayer before we go. I ask her what she is praying for. She says 'I do not pray for the few hundred dollars I got paid today. I do not pray for a million dollars tomorrow. I just pray for those children to be happy.'"