I don’t know if it will warm other people’s hearts, but it certainly touched mine in an unexpected way.

I don’t know if it will warm other people’s hearts, but it certainly touched mine in an unexpected way.

I was at the YMCA yesterday. I brought my three kids to the kids’ gym while I ran on the jogging track that circles above the children’s area. Every time I’d loop around, my kids would wave and call out to me with excitement.

Then this other little boy started waving with them, yelling “Hi, Mommy!” along with my children. I thought, “That’s a bit unusual,” but I kept waving back to him because his face lit up with the most genuine smile every time I did.

After a while, my own kids got tired of the waving game and wandered off to play with the other activities, but this little boy kept watching for me, shouting out “Hi, Mommy!” with each pass. And I continued to wave back every time. Part of me wanted to just focus on my running, but there was something so pure and joyful about his smile that I couldn’t ignore him. I did briefly wonder if his actual mother might come in and be confused about why he was calling me mommy.

Eventually, he left with his group, and a little bit later, I went down to collect my children. The staff member supervising the kids’ area mentioned something that made my heart both ache and swell simultaneously. She told me that the little boy who had been so enthusiastically waving was part of a group of children in foster care.

The realization hit me hard—this sweet child didn’t have a mother to wave at him from the running track. I was suddenly very grateful that I hadn’t ignored him or corrected him for calling me mommy. For those twenty minutes, he got to experience the simple joy of having someone wave back, of pretending he had a mother watching over him, even if all that “mother” was doing was running around in circles on a track above.

The encounter left me with mixed emotions—sadness for his situation, but also a reminder of how significant small gestures can be. We often don’t know the stories of the people we encounter, especially children, or how much a moment of connection might mean to them.

It’s easy to get caught up in our own routines and overlook these opportunities for kindness. But sometimes the smallest actions—like waving back to a child you don’t know—can provide a brief moment of normalcy and joy for someone who might really need it.

So if there’s a moral to this story, it’s simply this: be kind to children whenever you can. You never know what they might be going through or how much they might treasure that small moment of attention and care.

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