Unapologetically Ambitious by Shellye Archambeau

Author:Shellye Archambeau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

21

Live Your Values

It was Saturday morning, early. I woke slowly, lazily, warm in bed. I could smell something cooking. Mmm, breakfast. I smiled and snuggled back into the covers. Next to me, Scotty stirred in his sleep.

Wait. If Scotty is in bed, who is in the kitchen?

I jumped out of bed in a flash. “Scotty! The kids are in the kitchen!”

As I snatched on my robe and barreled down the hallway toward the stairs, I could hear him behind me. “Kethlyn! Kheaton! What are you doing?” I called. Just as I reached the top of the stairs, a very firm, very small voice came from the kitchen below.

“Don’t come down here!”

I skidded to a halt, putting an arm out to stop my husband, who was a step behind.

“What’s that, Doll?”

“Don’t come down here,” Kethlyn said again. I couldn’t see her from the landing. I heard dishes clanking in the kitchen.

I turned to Scotty. He shrugged.

“Okay…” I said slowly. “Are you sure you don’t need help or anything?”

“No,” she said. “Just stay up there.”

Kethlyn was almost six years old, and her little brother was three. We had a gas cooktop, which they were clearly using, unsupervised. But I couldn’t smell anything burning.

“What do we do?” I asked Scotty.

He looked as confused as I felt. “Well,” he said, scratching his cheek, “I guess we stay here. We’re close enough to help if there’s a fire.” A slow smile spread across his face. “Sounds to me like we don’t have another choice.”

I let my breath out in a long sigh, shaking my head. “I guess not,” I said, wrapping my robe around me. “So, we wait then.”

We sat down on the landing.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Scotty and I had discussed our parenting goals before we were even married. We settled on a unified philosophy: We wanted our kids to be self-sufficient, confident, and caring. Every parenting choice we ever made, we held it up to that rubric. And now we were having our first real test.

It was exciting and a little silly, sitting at the top of the steps in my robe with my husband, waiting to find out what our children were doing downstairs. We could hear them chattering, plates scraping. We chuckled nervously and squeezed each other’s hands, and I tried to stay calm and push images of cuts and injuries out of my head.

After what felt like hours, two little figures stepped into view at the bottom of the stairs. My heart fluttered. They were dressed in their best, Kethlyn in her Sunday dress, Kheaton wearing nice pants and a little vest. She had to have dressed him herself. They were both smiling.

“Breakfast is served,” Kethlyn said.

Scotty and I stood and followed our children into the dining room, to find the table set more or less properly, with fruit salad, scrambled eggs, grits, and toast on the plates. I was amazed. The fruit was cut—in big chunks, but they had cut it up—and the salad contained everything in the produce drawer: apple, pear, grapes, carrots, and celery.

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