admin

Babyproofing the World

Beloved son,

Shortly after we moved into our first home—a good four years before you were born—Mom and I installed a new ceiling fan in our kitchen.

We had ambition and vision aplenty, but little know-how between us. What would take someone handy like your grandpa maybe a couple hours became for us an entire weekend of trips to Home Depot, viewings and re-viewings of YouTube how-to videos, Mission Impossible-style crawls across the attic rafters, and, as the project neared completion, a number of silent prayers that the ceiling would not collapse into our cereal bowls the next morning.

Our prayers must have been heard, because the fan did not drop out of the ceiling the next morning, nor the morning after that, nor any morning since. It quickly became, well, a fixture, something stable, something sure. For years I regarded our ceiling fan the same way most people regard their ceiling fans: Unless a bulb went out, I paid no attention to it whatsoever.

That is, until you noticed it. There is no fixation quite so unadulterated as a baby’s desire for an object. When you were around five months old and learning to reach and grab and pull, you discovered the two chains dangling from our ceiling fan, one for the light, one for the fan. Like mystical talismans descending from the heavens, the chains drew you in, called to you—who knows, maybe you heard them speak your name. “Greetings, little one. We are called Hampton Bay. We have powers beyond your imagination. If you find a way to reach us, we will share our magic with you.”

Whatever undiscovered particle it is that determines babies’ predilection for certain objects and horror at others, you were taken in. You needed to grab those chains.

At first you did just that, stretching out your arms whenever I walked through the kitchen carrying you. You would wrap your fingers around the oval metal trinket and stare at it as only a baby can. It didn’t take long before you combined “grab” and “pull” to create “yank.”

Click. Suddenly you could create shadow or, just as easily—click—light. While your arms understood the motion, I’m not sure your brain understood the cause. Whereas now, as a toddler, you might do something over and over again out of pride, as a baby you always seemed to yank on the chain out of duty. When we held you up toward the fixture, your face was serious and focused, your arms straining desperately to grab hold. It clearly wasn’t a game; it wasn’t even a job. It seemed a sacred responsibility.

I’d wager that if I held you up there long enough, you would yank and yank and yank and yank—on, off, on, off, on—until either your little baby muscles gave out or the ceiling fan itself ripped through the drywall and crashed onto our heads.

And that was precisely the problem: Embarrassing as it is to admit, I was fairly certain that you, at five months, were strong enough to tear our pet project down to the ground. The gentle, measured tug with which Mom and I pulled the chains was too subtle a motion for your reflexive yank.

At first this got me thinking about the obvious: What does it say about the quality of my handiwork if I don’t trust our ceiling fan to withstand the force of a 15-pound person?

But then I started to see—as I imagine all parents do at some point—that the whole world is made of nothing but questionably installed ceiling fans.

Wherever I looked, it became clear to me that the everyday existence of human adults is perfectly breakable. We are so naïve as to place plants on windowsills, candles on coffee tables, laptops on the couch. We are so delusional as to believe in the fixedness of fixtures. Drop in a grabby baby like you at five months, and it is just one giant demolition site waiting to happen.

Not to mention, of course, that the demolition crew is perfectly breakable, too. Mom and I have always taken numerous precautions to make things safer for you and your sister, but the very notion of babyproofing suggests that the world is inherently dangerous; it’s just that adults know how not to kill themselves navigating it.

Since we’re past your babyproofing phase, you might be wondering why this ceiling fan episode has come back to me now, over two years later. Well, for one, we just moved houses, so I got to say goodbye to the ceiling fan, hoping that it will hold up okay for the next folks. (I am pretty sure it will. By now it’s undergone years of rigorous testing.)

Our new place is nicer, better built, sturdier. But even as we enter an updated, recently shampooed, freshly painted home, reminders of its brokenness—current or eventual—abound. An outlet covering is pulling away from the wall. The lightbulb above the kitchen sink is out. Dings and pockmarks show where previous tenants installed their curtains and shelves and baby gate. The doorbell casing is shattered. Heck, we have a whole rite dedicated to documenting such signs of decay: the rental inspection, where we list every busted thing we can find.

Beyond our recent move, I am also keenly aware of the world’s fragility in this moment because your sister, now seven months old, is revealing to us every day new ways that our house is a death trap. With her recently learning to roll, and then crawl, and then pull herself to standing, we have swiftly entered the no-and-move phase, as in, “No, don’t touch that” as we move her away from a hazard—and inevitably toward another.

There are the obvious hazards, the ones that make it on the wellness check sheets: outlets, medicine bottles, stairs, cleaning supplies. But there is a whole host of mundane scenarios that pose a threat, too—really any everyday arrangement of reality. A scrap of paper on the office floor? Choking hazard. A fallen strand of hair on the bathroom floor? Tourniquet hazard. (Yes, it’s a thing.) A crumb of food on the kitchen floor? Bacterial hazard. A thick carpet floor? Suffocation hazard. A smooth tiled floor? Slipping hazard. The existence of floors? Gravity hazard.

It’s hazards all the way down. And if it doesn’t pose a threat to you or your sister, then you surely pose a threat to it. The only books we can let sister freely examine are two that we have in the “Indestructibles” series, which I believe are printed on camping tarp and bound with fishing line. Anything else is destined for her mouth and a slow, saliva-soaked death by dissolution.

Through my eyes as someone raising little breakable people surrounded by little breakable things, I end up with the impression that the essential condition of the world is brokenness—whether it is currently broken, is eventually going to break, or is imminently going to break us.

And that is the third reason unstable ceiling fans are on my mind: You wouldn’t know it, dear son, but as I write this people are enduring a season of great instability. Just about every brand of calamity has made an appearance this year: global health crisis, shuttered businesses, sweeping joblessness, racial injustice, months-long protests, political pandemonium, record-breaking heat and forest fires and hurricanes. Whoever moves in in 2021 will have a doozy of a time completing the rental inspection.

There are many who would rush to remind me that it’s pretty much always been that way, that 2020 is not unique in its unraveling. One of the most famous novels of the 20^th century borrows a line from one of the most famous poems of the 20^th century: “things fall apart.” A century earlier, physicists conceptualized entropy, which describes the inevitable trend of all things[1] toward disorder.

Long before that, the ancient poets and teachers insisted that this world is no sturdier than we are. The Bible says that the world is passing away (1 John 2) and will be destroyed by moths and rust (Matthew 6), that we its inhabitants are as fixed as a flower blown away in the wind (Psalm 103), as enduring as a breath or a shadow (Psalm 39 and 144), as permanent as mist (James 4).

But then, the gospel doesn’t end there. It begins there. It starts with our brokenness, our frailty, our fragile-as-a-flower existence, and it promises healing, wholeness, life everlasting. The gospel is not about babyproofing. It is not about fixing, patching, making do. It doesn’t install fixtures and then pray that they will hold up.

The gospel will hold up. The assurance of God’s eternal, redemptive love is a reality that will last. It is the Reality upon which our reality is built. In an audacious counter to the decay and disorder we see around us, Jesus promises nothing less than the “renewal of all things” (Matthew 19): our bodies, our relationships, our earth—yes, even our ceiling fans.

One day all these things will be new, not just fixed up, patched up, cleaned up, but new, regenerated, re-created. One day there will be no lives ended by disease, no people caste by race, no homes destroyed by fires. One day the books will not dissolve in sister’s mouth and the fans will not wobble and the five-month-old in you can yank and yank and yank to your heart’s content. Until then, we look up and pray.

[1] If you go on to study physics, you’ll point out that, technically, entropy only applies to closed systems, not all things per se. The point stands: Even physical laws seem to suggest that our very existence, if not already broken, is in the process of breaking.

The 3 a.m. Epiphany

Beloved daughter,

As you know, most of the things I write to you don’t end up on this website. More often, Mom and I pen our reflections in a journal that we will give to you much later in life. Last week I went to log a note about your recent sleep habits, and as I scanned over the previous pages, I noticed that it would be the third entry in a row about your sleep.

Well that is odd, I thought. I mean, sure you sleep a lot, and it’s true that in these first few months, I have spent many hours singing and shushing and dancing you to sleep. But there are so many other worthwhile moments. How come in an entire month—one-sixth of your existence, mind you—I hadn’t tried to put to words your incredible laugh, or where we had gone on family outings, or what clothes you were wearing, or how you smile at your brother, or even just the go-to subject of your amazing cuteness?

As I thought about it, I realized that it’s not just my preoccupation with your sleep that is odd; it’s that I often write these letters at odd hours, when I am at my sleepiest. I began writing this very letter one night at 4 a.m., perched on the edge of the bed waiting for you to finish nursing with Mom before putting you back in your bassinet. (I might have been tied up feeding you myself, but as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, you have an inborn revulsion to the bottle.)

Two of the first five letters I posted to this site were about nighttime interactions I had with your brother, and since he was born, the bulk of my writing ideas have come to me in the quiet, dark, desperately tired moments of the night. What is with that?

Perhaps I am just participating in that long tradition of the writer’s love affair with the nocturnal. Flashes of inspiration are often said to strike in the middle of the night, temporarily immunizing the artist from sleepiness, jolting them awake with the brilliance of an idea. Kerouac couldn’t have punched out On the Road in three weeks without a few short nights.

When I graduated high school, my English teacher gave me a book of creative writing exercises called The 3 A.M. Epiphany, thus titled on the premise that creativity comes knocking in strange ways and at strange times. In music, there is a type of composition all its own called the “nocturne,” a piece that evokes the night. Chopin famously wrote 21 of them; I wonder if he was raising small children at the time.

But here’s the thing: before you and your brother, I never used to be a nighttime writer. Pre-parenthood, I enjoyed my sleep immensely—took it for granted, I now realize. Other than my years in the pressure cooker of college, rarely have I interfered with my sleep in order to write. There must be more to my fascination with sleep and sleeplessness than a creative impulse.

After all, it isn’t creativity that wakes me up at random hours of the night. It’s you, my needful, fussing, routine-defying, best-laid-plans-be-damned baby. And to be honest, when your cries puncture the still of night like a fire alarm in a symphony, I don’t leap out of bed brimming with inspiration. I flop out, bleary-eyed. I exhale sharply as would a hiker who’s just labored uphill only to arrive at a false summit. Sometimes I mutter something terribly mature and sincere like “Oh great!” or “You gotta be kidding me,” as if my protestations could somehow show you how silly and unreasonable it is for you to be awake. Contrary to the serene Hallmark image of a purring, rosy-cheeked baby nestled into the warm chest of a sweetly smiling daddy, sometimes you end up being rocked back to sleep by a whiny, delirious man more preoccupied with his own rest than yours.

In a twisted way, perhaps that is the reason that I fixate on sleep and sleeplessness, the reason that sometimes I am crazy enough to stay awake to write even after I have won the battle of the wills to get you back to bed: in these moments, rather than feel inspired, I am just the opposite. I am exhausted, depleted, raw. And though such a state isn’t perhaps ideal for artistry, there is nonetheless something profound and compelling about the experience, physically, emotionally, even spiritually.

In one of my favorite recent songs, “The Mother,” Brandi Carlile says of her baby daughter, “The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep.” What a perfect line. Right alongside the beautiful love and care and selflessness that parenthood demands is deprivation, sacrifice—indeed an element of suffering.

I’d go one step further: love and this element of suffering are not just side by side but inseparable, necessary even. If you were giggles and cuddles all day every day, any old oaf would be happy to care for you. When your brother was a baby, Mom would somewhat scoff when people commented on “what a good baby” he was, because all they really meant is that he didn’t cause a scene. He was quiet, out of the way; he required little. If he was drooling and screaming and leaking out of his diaper onto their sweater and they still said, “What a good baby,” then I’d start to suspect that they might really, truly love him.

And in that way, whereas I normally am reminded of the Father as I reflect on our life together, when it comes to sleep, I am reminded of the Son. For the picture we have of the Son is of a man totally spent, a man at his most exhausted, his most depleted, at his rawest. We see glorious omnipotent God Himself brought down to clothe himself as an infant among barn animals. We see a man denying himself, leading a life of poverty and homelessness. We see a man with hands weathered by work and face drawn thin with hunger. We see a man washing dirty feet, touching leprous skin, mending crippled limbs. We see a man pacing in the middle of the night, sleep-deprived, lonely, and tortured. In the clearest, most lasting image, we see a man suffering, literally dying for the sake of his beloved.

To meditate on this kind of love is to meditate on suffering. There is no parsing the two. There is no pretending you can accomplish one without the other.

Returning to my pedestrian, itty-bitty lowercase “s” suffering at 3 in the morning, do I think that my sleeplessness is extraordinary? Do I think it is anything nearing the scale of what Christ endured out of love for us? Of course not. Compared to Christ, my suffering is tiny, my love puny. Still, there is something of the same nature in them. A drop of salt water and the ocean are not the same thing, but they are the same stuff.

I suppose that is what keeps me up at night—on one level you, my daughter in need, but on another level nothing less than the stuff of Christ, the lover, the sufferer.

Lest I leave off on a note of utter gloom and lead you to believe that my main experience of parenting is suffering, I should be quick to add that love is not all suffering. If it were, love would hardly be lovely, would it. No one would choose to love; we wouldn’t be drawn to it. Brandi Carlile would stop her song at the loss of self and sleep and never get to lines like “You’re nothing short of magical and beautiful to me.” Parenting would stop at labor and never get to birth.

No, my deprivation, my frustration, my fatigue, my futility—they are mere bits of food stuck in my teeth during a fine meal: annoying in the moment, but forgotten quickly when I think back on the feast.

For with you and your brother, the moments of suffering are far outweighed by moments of laughter and delight, and always followed by tremendous sweetness. No matter the lateness of the hour, I am rewarded, eventually, one way or the other, with that Hallmark scene: a tiny child pressed against my chest or curled up in my arms. In contrast to the tumult of your (and my) fussiness, once you have surrendered to sleep, I get to relish a closeness and quietness, a gentle peace, that only a cared for baby can provide. I’d say that is worth a journal entry or two.

The Gift of Presence

Beloved children,

Today is my last day of paternity leave.

For the past four months, I have preoccupied myself almost exclusively with being a husband, father, and homemaker.

I have done most of the laundry, most of the cleaning, most of the cooking, and all of the grocery shopping. I have learned how to make shallot sauce and breakfast quiche and rhubarb crisp.

I have assembled a hundred Lego towers and read your books shelf to shelf and back again. I have played firefighter and trains and apple orchard.

I have discovered through your eyes the minutest details in our yard, bugs that were invisible from my height, twigs whose significance I never could have guessed. I have picked strawberries I didn’t know we had. I have baked “cakes” made of pinecones and water in a bucket under the Jeep.

I have planned treasure hunts, and feasted at imaginary picnics, and shared in fits of contagious giggles.

I have petted your hair. I have admired your ears, your eyes, your toes. I have worn you on my chest, held you in my arms, carried you on my shoulders, carted you on my back.

I have changed ten thousand diapers and taken ten million photographs. I have exceeded my Google storage.

I have watched you discover one another, first a little boy ecstatic at the long-expected arrival of baby sister, then a little girl wide-eyed with wonder at another small creature like her making funny sounds and constantly buzzing about.

I have bathed you, washed your hands, trimmed your nails, wiped your tears. I have brushed your teeth. I have offered my knuckle to suck on.

I have risen at your waking and sang you to sleep.

I have missed hardly a moment.

Day after day, I have marveled at how small you are yet how heavy you can be, how you fill me with light but exhaust me by bedtime.

Day after day, I have witnessed you do the most magical and the most mundane things, and I have seen how they are often the same.

Day after day, I have led a most ordinary life in a world often no bigger than our living room.

Day after day, I have been blessed with the inestimable gift of presence.

Of course, it’s not like I’m going on an Apollo mission. Just because paternity leave is ending doesn’t mean I will suddenly be absent from your lives. In fact, since I am returning to a job that has gone remote, technically I won’t be going anywhere at all.

Yet our time together will not be quite so singular, not quite so complete in its simplicity. There may be a few more interruptions, a few more sorry, not right now’s, a few more breaks to watch Peppa Pig.

Speaking of Peppa, I feel a bit like you do, son, when one of your cartoon episodes comes to an end. Even when we tell you in advance that it’s almost over, sometimes you can’t help but bawl. You just don’t want it to end. It’s like you feel the full devastation of a good thing coming to a close. I can relate.

We have been working with you on the importance of gratitude in these moments. Rather than whine at what’s lost, we want you to be thankful for what was—and I, too, have so very much to be thankful for in the last four months. This is certainly no moment to whine.

I do sometimes wonder, though, what you would do if we never turned off Peppa, if we let you soak up episode after episode until you had your fill. How long would the streak last? Five episodes? Fifteen? Two hundred? Even when you tired of it, even when you realized it was time to move onto the next thing, I have to imagine there’d still be a piece of you wishing the moment could last forever.