The Lottery

So Noah and I are in the car. He hears the lady on the radio telling us the news. One story was about a man who had just won the lottery as part of a group of people and decided to change his life. He was going to "stop smoking so he could live to enjoy his fortune". Noah wanted to know what a 'fortune' was.

I explain to him that the man she was just talking about sadly didn't know that his life was worth living even before he won the lottery and his 'fortune'. Noah just looked at me with these 'go on' eyes like tell me what you mean... I told him that there are lots of people in this world that think money makes you happy. They think that money will take all of your problems away and that isn't true. I told him that you have to know what really makes you happy in your life and cherish all your breaths, every single one of them. He seemed to understand it when I put it like that. He wanted to know what a lottery was and I told him what it was and how you could win blah blah blah but at the end, he said this..... "Mom, I think we're all happy with our life aren't we? We don't need a fortune to help us be happier do we?" Well, how do you answer that? Of course, money would help. Take it all away though and you have to know who you are, what makes you tick, what makes your soul fly, and the things that put smiles in your heart. How do you explain that to a little boy? I just said, "the lottery is nice if you win it Noah but there are other things that make you happy (he chimes in, 'like watching Star Wars?') that mean more than all of those dollars any day of the week". He seemed perfectly satisfied and looked out the window.

This is the stuff of life you know? These are the things, these are the values and morals we teach our kids. Will they grow up and cherish the wrong things? We hope not, right? It depends what we teach them. I will not lie to you, the lottery, it would be nice. Do I even play the lottery? No. Rarely in my life, if I'm at 7-11 and I'm paying and I look down, I might buy a scratch ticket. Maybe twice a year. Never the kind of ticket you could win big on though. Just never crosses my mind. The man in the story? His life is now changed, he is even going to quit smoking. Should have done it years ago but it took winning money to make him think his life was now worth living. Strange isn't it? Strange what money can make a person do. All the time, the whole entire time, his life was worth living and he didn't know it, didn't think it. How wrong he was. Even with the losses we have suffereed, even I know that.

Maybe once, in the beginning, maybe just once, I wanted to sit in my bathroom and make it all go away. It was when we got home from Philadelphia and Lucas was gone. At that moment, I decided, no, Noah and Ivan need me. Noah needs me now more than ever. And true it was. He did, he does. I am his mamma, and because he needs me and for many more reasons which I can now see, my life is worth living. Has nothing to do with smoking or money. You either know it or you don't. How strange is it that I thought what the woman on the radio said was sad rather than happy. Clearly he is now happy, and it was a happy story....but behind the scenes, that's all I heard, that one comment 'he stopped smoking so he could live to enjoy his fortune'. And I thought.... how sad. Money has nothing to do with real happiness. Absolutely nothing.

Jenn