It happened a few weeks ago. You know know how a mom’s life is: generally lovely, predictably busy, and often impermanent. By impermanent, I do not mean that we have so many years with our children and then magically they go off to college one day and suddenly, the house is silent once more. My children are still young, so my life is still in the predictably busy and mostly noisy phase. By impermanent, I literally mean that it can change every five minutes.

As my children and I drove around town running a couple of errands together, I felt an immense sense of gratitude. To the world, I decided. I am thankful for so many things, I thought. For my children, primarily. For a wonderful partner-in-life, for being healthy, for having a roof over my head, for not having to experience cold in the winter… All of those blessings kept coming to my mind. And I started counting each of my blessings. The boys are doing well and life is delightful, I could have whispered. But I didn’t.

Instead, as I started counting my blessings, my children started arguing in the back seat of our car. I had just collected them from school.

Prior to that, I had made a balanced, delicious snack of apples and pears and peanut butter for them, which was precisely the primary reason for the argument.

The little things in life seem to be the ones that hold the power to make me happy many times a day. Such a moment of contentment happened when I was packing their snacks, because I knew they would both enjoy the nutritious food I had made for them. My older son loves pears – and these ones were simply perfectly ripe – whereas my younger son is fond of green apples. I could almost predict their excitement upon seeing their snacks. They very much look forward to this time of the day after a long day of learning at school.

That is not what happened. Instead, they looked at each other’s snacks and noticed that they were different. They started arguing instantly, and crying was also very much involved. I tried to let them figure out how to deal with the situation by themselves at first, but noticing that it wasn’t going well, I resorted to intervening. I tried my best to talk to both of them and give some sense to the conversation, but it seemed that the more I tried, the more crying I could hear. I decided then to just let it go and be patient.

It is quite difficult for me to accept when people are not being grateful. It was hard for me to see my children crying when I had prepared a delicious meal for them. There are so many children in the world who do not have any food to eat day after day, how come they were crying simply because they did not have the same fruit? And so this situation saddened me.

At this point, the crying was lessening, but everyone was sad in the car. I could not be cheerful quite yet, since I was trying to come to terms with what I was feeling, and one cannot ‘give’ until their emotions are sorted out.

I had to stop at a gas station in order to get gas. The gas station attendant came to pump the gas. As he was performing his job, he looked at me and asked whether there were kids in the back seat, and he whispered that he had lollipops. I smiled and nodded as he reached for sweets to give to my boys. Perhaps he noticed my not-so-happy look, perhaps not, perhaps he he does that to all cars that stop at that gas station, or perhaps he felt he needed to do this. Whatever the reason for his offer was, it made me glad, because it was a gesture of kindness.

I no longer was sad. I was starting to be at peace with the fact that arguments like this might happen a thousand more times in the future; but now, I had kindness to move me forward, and I was prepared to deal with it one thousand more times because kindness IS what moves us forward.