On being nice

I took notes for this post on one of the airplanes, and as I sit here in Singapore outside, watching Maritza swim in a tropical rainstorm, I’m forgetting my grumpy thoughts. We arrived finally here at our first stop in SouthEast Asia, Singapore.  We’re staying with friends of my sister who have a pool and fed us curry.

I should restate.  I didn’t have grumpy thoughts, but I did observe people who were nice and several who were not nice. As we began our trip on standby, agents didn’t seem to find it necessary to be nice or kind. At one point there was even some eye-rolling while helping us “non-rev’s”.  It was comforting to walk into a restaurant in the Seattle airport where two very kind wait staff set us up with a table next to a fireplace and told us to take our time. The kindness was starkly different from our morning.

Standby ended up to not work out for us on this trip. I ended up buying tickets through New York and Abu Dhabi. I was excited to spend some time in Abu Dhabi, and posted on Facebook for advice. Word rather quickly spread through Facebook, and I was set up with options.  More kindness! Although this kindness is very common among wantoks, it never fails to surprise me. Unfortunately, I read the tickets wrong, and we only had two hours in Abu Dhabi instead of sixteen.  Ah well, next time. The airport was beautiful!

Two of my oldest and bestest friends went far out of their way to spend time with us…one in Seattle and one in New York. Kindness in a super fantastic way.

I’m not sure I did a great job practicing kindness.  I think I got better as I got more tired. I focused more on being nice to people around me. Is it really harder to do this as a mom? Maybe I assume that Maritza knows I am happy to be doing this trip with her, but I think I need to remember that she needs to be told. I can see her reacting to my unkind tendency to be bossy instead guiding. When she knows that her outgoing unashamed friendly personality makes my experiences so much richer and joyful, we get along just fine. However, when I unkindly ruin her joyful outbursts and hip hop dances in the security lines by instructing her in the proper way, we just don’t get along fine. She feels bad. I feel bad. And no one smiles.

These are good lessons to learn at the beginning of this trip!

Now, I shall take time to enjoy the tropical rainstorm and doing schoolwork outside in the rain with breaks for swimming.