Garland & Chain

Nighttime Exchange

Beloved son,

Every once in a while, you wake up in the middle of the night hungry. Maybe you’re going through a growth spurt, or you’re having a bad dream, or you ate bad the evening before. Who knows the real reason—Mom and I try not to overanalyze these things.

Whatever the cause, we’ve developed a routine in response:

Your crying wakes me up. Mom, strong sleeper she is, barely stirs.
I come to your room, where you’ve removed everything from your crib: pillow, blanket, binky, and stuffed pig companion lie strewn on the floor, and you’re standing in your crib, facing the door expectantly.
I give you a hug and ask what’s wrong. You sign for food, which, I only now realize as I write this, is a rare holdout in your language. Most of the words you once signed now emerge as spoken words, but in the middle of the night, anyway, it’s always your fingertips tapping your mouth, accompanied by an urgent hum of “hm, hm, hm.”
I pick you up and you drop all the weight of your head into my shoulder. I like step 4 very much.
To maximize your sleep time later on, I change your diaper. Sometimes you protest, but only for about half a second. You just don’t have the energy to mount a full-on resistance. Plus, I reassure you that we will get some food afterward, and by this point in your life, you are actually pretty good at understanding small delays in gratification.
Your diaper fresh and your body nestled back into my arms, we retrace our nighttime steps in the absolute dark of the kitchen. Parenthood has basically turned me into Batman when it comes to navigating unlit areas of the house. I glide through the dark, fetching a fruit pouch and some Goldfish from the pantry and a bowl and cup from the cupboards. Sometimes you remind me of our mission if I dawdle too long, for instance saying “bowl” or “eau” (water). After all, you know the routine: If you could write, you could document these steps just as well as I could. I fill the cup with water and the bowl with Goldfish, and we return to your room.
The whole process is strongly reminiscent of those late-night bottle feedings we would do when you were just months old, but this next part feels especially nostalgic. I put you on my lap and rock back and forth in the chair as you eat. What more basic bond is there between us than father feeding son. It’s always pouch, water, Goldfish, water. You suck down the pouch, then suck down some more with my help. You eat every single Goldfish, no matter how many I put in the bowl. (I’ve learned not to put very many.)
Once sated, you take your binky, give me one last cuddle, and lie back down in your bed. Sometimes when I’ve returned to Mom’s and my bedroom, I watch you in the monitor, lying on your back twirling your hair, your eyes like glassy black orbs in the camera’s night vision. You never fuss, though; you wind back down and drift off to finish out your night of sleep.

This routine is occasional enough and so precious a bonding time that I never feel frustrated or impatient about having to get up to care for you. I know that your days of such neediness will not last forever, so in the sleepy quiet of the night, I savor every second of it.

It’s not all sentiment, though—from time to time, there is humor, too. Last night when we did this routine, you were getting to your last Goldfish, and the beauty of the moment nearly overwhelmed me. I leaned down and kissed your soft little head, and in the quiet sanctuary of your room, silent save for the gentle lullabies of your music monkey, I whispered, “Je t’aime.” Without missing a beat between crackers, you retorted, “no.”

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Maybe you were scolding me for adding unsanctioned material to the routine. Maybe you were imagining some subtext behind “I love you,” as if I were really saying, “okay, time to go back to bed.” Maybe you were just rehearsing one of your favorite words.

I’d rather think, though, that it was a Han Solo moment, your way of hearing me perfectly well and responding, “I know, Dad. I know.”

Soap in the Laundry Basket

Through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
Romans 5.19

Beloved son,

There is a hilarious scene in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 where two of our imprisoned heroes ask Baby Groot, the sapling tree-thing, to fetch an item that is crucial to their escape. They need to retrieve a device from their captors’ sleeping chambers, and they tell Baby Groot exactly what it is (Yondu’s fin) and just where to find it. Baby Groot listens intently, trots away, sneaks into the room full of sleeping brutes, locates the drawer Yondu and Rocket had described, and returns with a big smile on his face carrying…a pair of underwear.

Dismayed, Yondu and Rocket try to explain what they need in even simpler terms and send Baby Groot on his way again. This time he seems sure he has gotten it right, only to come back lugging a squirming alien lizard.

The shtick carries on, with Yondu and Rocket’s exasperation swelling and Baby Groot’s failings becoming more and more outrageous: he brings back a prosthetic eye, a desk, eventually a severed toe. When Yondu hands Baby Groot a small medallion and tells Groot that the desk he is seeking has the same symbol on it, Baby Groot eyes the medallion carefully…and then puts it on his head as if it’s a hat.

When at last Baby Groot gets to the sleeping chambers and finds the desk drawer that matches the medallion, spots Yondu’s fin, smiles triumphantly, reaches in…and pulls out a tin of candy.

You are such a Baby Groot right now. Other than the fact that you can’t grow your limbs at will, so much in that scene captures who you are this stage of life. If you got caught up with a band of star-trekking misfits, you would do pretty much exactly what Baby Groot would do (sans the toe fiasco—yikes!). Treating objects as hats and getting sidetracked by sweet and/or shiny stuff—these are classic toddler antics.

But what that scene embodies especially well is that charming quality that comes about when you mix your eagerness to help with your partial understanding of what we mean. Like Groot, you are often eager to listen, eager to carry out instruction, and eager to show off all you know and can do. In your own way, you are actually quite helpful sometimes. If we are lazing on the couch and want our cell phone from across the room, we know just the little man to recruit. If you spill your drink, we don’t just wipe it up anymore; we give you a napkin and you do it yourself. Three of your favorite activities right now are washing dishes, sweeping the floor, and—as if you’re competing for Yelp reviews—pulling off our socks at the end of the day. We could have named you Cosette!

Also like Groot, though, you don’t necessarily receive the full message of what we’re saying. You almost always get part of the story, but rarely all the details.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a bottle of body wash sitting in the laundry basket in our bedroom. I held it up to Mom and she just laughed. That afternoon, she had enlisted your help with clean-up, giving you specific instructions like “put your books on the shelf” and “put this shirt in your room.” Because you had brought the bottle of soap into the kitchen earlier that day,[1] Mom had told you to put the soap back in the tub. We didn’t see the results of your work until bedtime when, voilà!, there it was in the laundry basket. You got the gist, to be sure, but was it all that helpful? Well, about as helpful as a pair of underwear in a jailbreak.

This eagerness to help and listen and show off what you can do, all while coming into greater but sometimes quite limited understanding of what we are asking of you—these two elements converge to form a picture of what I can only call obedience. When you were younger, Mom and I didn’t much think about this idea of obedience. You certainly didn’t, either. So much of your first year of life was about survival and adaptation—learning to eat, sleep, and move about the world. By and large, when you cried you were expressing need, not exerting will.

Not so in your second year of life and now—would you please take your finger off the fast-forward button?—starting your third. Just as your efforts to help are expressions of obedience, you are also exploring different ways of exerting your own will against ours. Alongside the washed dishes and returned soap bottles and fetched phones, you have started to develop a rich and colorful vocabulary of disobedience.

In words, this lexicon is tiny: “no” suffices in almost all cases and, to our chagrin, has become a recent favorite. In non-verbals, however, you have many ways to communicate your rebellion. You can shake your head vigorously, or resonate an extra-long “nnnnn” before the “no,” or throw something, or turn your head away as if you can’t hear us,[2] or cry, or run away, or, best yet, run away crying.

But the reasons for crying now must be so much more complex than they used to be. What was once “I need food!” might now be “I want food but not the food you are offering me and even if I did accept it, I would obviously want to open it myself.” What was once “I am hot” might now be “I told you I didn’t want to go to the grocery store and I might have been cool as a cucumber—ooh, cucumber!—but hey, stop trying to distract me, because you put on my socks when I clearly wanted to wear my sandals, and now my feet are going to catch fire and my shirt is itchy and yup, I think you did it, now I am going to explode.”

Your efforts either to follow or to flout instruction reflect something that is divinely endowed but commonly called “terrible” when people describe two-year-olds: you are discovering your will. What I don’t hear people talk about too often, however, is how their two-year-olds are discovering their will—that is, the wishes of their parents.

In my experience, you seem to care very much about what Mom and I want of you, even if you exercise spontaneous, headstrong, and sometimes totally irrational discretion in choosing whether to act on it. As a general rule, you want to understand us. You want to please us. You want to put the soap in the tub, just as much as Baby Groot wants to retrieve Yondu’s fin.

And I have to believe that this desire is innate. As pleased as we are that you aim to please, I think Mom and I really have had little to do with it. It seems more heart-borne than habit-learned.

So what stands in the way of your obedience, then? Well, your own will is part of it, to be sure. What we want doesn’t always line up with what you want. Or, if it does, theway we want it might differ. Although we may both want to read the book, you might insist on turning the pages.

But there are so many other factors than the “terrible” battle of the wills. Even if you want to do as we wish, you might not understand. Even if you understand, you might not be able. Even if you are able, you might not have the mental or physical energy at that moment to execute the task. And even if you have the strength, your feeble yet developing attention span might get drawn sideways, by a stuffed animal, or a screen, or a hunger pang, or who knows what.

Wait a second, though: such fickleness reminds me of someone, and it’s not a character from Guardians of the Galaxy.When I start listing all the possible obstacles to your obedience, I can’t but help but reflect on my own behavior. As you often do, you have gotten me thinking about the bigger picture—our toddler-like relationship to our heavenly Father. As I count off the parallels between you and Baby Groot, I realize that I am every bit as much a Baby Groot as you are.

Our heavenly Papa gives us what must be crystal clear instructions to His ears, spelled out as plainly as He can: “Love me, and love your neighbor.” We don’t quite get it, so He shows us an example: His son, in word and deed, embodying perfect love. Easy, right?

So what stands in the way of our obedience, then?

We misunderstand. When He says “love,” we hear “occasionally pay attention to.” When He says “neighbor,” we hear “the people you like the most.”

We are (or we feel) unable. We feel small, or powerless, or useless. We look at the chasm between selfish us and perfect Christ, and we think there’s just no way.

We lack the strength. We are tired, hungry, fussy, whiny. Our own need grabs us by the ears.

We get distracted. We would help our neighbor, but there’s a screen/ad/notification/newsbyte ringing the service bell and demanding our attention.

But you know what, dear son? Just as you draw my eye to my own pitiable obedience, you remind me of good news, too. First of all, you show me that obedience is both innate and learned. Your natural desire to please me and Mom is the start but not the end of this negotiation of wills. Just as you will go on learning what it means to be a good son, I can go on growing into the son of God that He has called me to be.

As your father, though, I know that there is better news yet: I know that the depth of my love for you has nothing to do with how well you obey me. And if my fatherly affection for you is any sort of indication of our heavenly Father’s affection for us, if it is just a sliver of the real thing, then His love is a bulwark never failing indeed, no matter how badly we botch our end of the deal.

As your father, I know that even when you mishear my instruction, even when you are too weak or too tired to listen, even when your mind snags on every loose thread in the room, your efforts to please me accomplish just that. They bring me great gladness.

When I see you listening to me, and running off eagerly to put my words to action, and returning with a proud glint in your eyes, it is not the underwear or the lizard or the desk in your hands that I care about. It is the orientation of your heart that makes me glad, a look that sings, “Did I please you, Papa?” and raises in my heart a resounding “yes, son, you did.”

I can picture Father’s face light up when His children, His distracted, wayward, feeble children, hear His voice and act on it. Surely, my son, He smiles on us—even when all our efforts amount to little more than soap in the laundry basket.

[1] Before you entered our home, we rarely lost anything. Now things just mysteriously disappear for months at a time, only to be found in the strangest of places—a plastic token inside a humidifier, a stack of Christmas ornaments on the whiteboard, a toothbrush inside the snack drawer. I can’t wait to see what turns up when we move houses one day.

[2] You must know that doesn’t actually work. Right?

Don’t Ever Change

Beloved son,

When I was finishing sixth grade and students were passing around their yearbooks to exchange notes before summer break, two particular comments appeared most frequently.

One was HAKAS, an acronym for “have a kick-ass summer.” HAKAS had the advantage of being short and therefore easily reproducible on a mass scale—perfect stock material for 50 pre-teens asking each other to spontaneously compose meaningful messages for one another. HAKAS also had the thrill of naughtiness. We got to use a curse word on school grounds—in an official school publication, no less!—right under the noses of those unsuspecting adults.* Marking each other’s yearbooks with HAKAS was like stamping the seal of a secret society: efficient, allusive, and laden with mischief.

The other common yearbook phrase was “don’t ever change.” Unlike HAKAS, I don’t think I ever wrote “don’t ever change” in my friends’ yearbooks, though it sure did appear frequently in mine. Even at the time, I remember thinking how superficial and just plain dumb the saying felt. Don’t ever change? How could I not change? We were a bunch of twelve-year-olds; of course we were going to change—that’s what twelve-year-olds do. We would move on to seventh grade, we would go to a different building for middle school, we would have a whole new set of teachers, we would grow, and sometimes resent our growing, and sometimes wish we would grow faster, and we would find out who we were, and sometimes realize we didn’t know who we were, and we might often wish we were someone else, and so on and so on. The whole job description was change, change, change.

Looking back on “don’t ever change” now, though, I kind of get it. Sure, it’s almost offensively idealistic if you take it literally, but I understand the sentiment underneath. It’s like saying, “Don’t ever change: you are just right just as you are; I see your present self as it is, and I see beauty in it. I know it’s impossible, but if it weren’t; I know it would stifle you, but if it didn’t—don’t ever change.”

The most profound glimpses I’ve had as your papa have buried down along one of two roots: the parallels between our relationship and the one we share with our heavenly papa, and the paradox of touching eternity while being bound by time. It’s along that second root that “don’t ever change” resonates with me. I see you as you are, I behold your truly wonderful smile, and I can’t help but think, naïve as it is, “Son, please, for the sake of the world, don’t ever change.”**

Luckily, parenthood has not made me an idealist all the way through. I’ve seen you change tremendously in these 19 months, and I know you will change tremendously still. But there are a few qualities I see in you now that I do wish to never change. If I were to write in your yearbook this summer, here is what “don’t ever change” would mean.

Don’t stop laughing with others

One of your most charming qualities is how when others laugh, you laugh, too. To the adults in the room, of course it always strikes us as hilarious, because often you have no conception whatsoever of the joke being shared. We could be enjoying a good pun using words you can’t pronounce yet or making a reference to a show you’ve never seen, but as soon as the group erupts in laughter, you burst out laughing, too.

The amazing thing is that I think your humor is more sound than most adults’. I love the principle of your humor: if there is something to laugh about, then we all ought to laugh. To you, it really is that simple.

The hang-up for most adults is that they feel the need to understand the joke, and when they don’t, they either lose interest or—more likely—assume the joke is about them. (I know—what ego!) You share none of that insecurity. Instead, your humor is perfectly unselfconscious. You don’t mind if people are laughing because Mommy made a joke or because you are toddling around in a diaper and sunglasses. To you, if laughter is in the air, we all take a breath.

Don’t let this be just a baby thing. Stay light. Laugh often. Pay more heed to people’s joy than your ego. Don’t ever change.

Don’t stop learning the world

Your curiosity about the world amazes me. Sometimes you are almost scientific in how you learn a place. In our living room, for instance, you systematically examine every object you can get your hands on. You will pull off every book from the shelves, grab every newspaper and pen and miscellaneous object from the couches, look at every shoe in the entryway, tug at every cord by the outlets.*** Your learning dial is turned up to max.

If you could write, I could imagine you keeping the most detailed of logs documenting every little discovery.

Day 39 of living room console investigation. Re-counted the books; there are still 61. Contents appear unchanged. Rudolph’s sparkly nose seems removable, but the male adult stopped me before I could confirm. Pushed button to make bear play the flute 11 times; the flute activated every time. Pushed button on black obelisk on top of console, and a circular disc emerged. Male adult re-inserted disc. I pushed the button, and the disc re-emerged. Male adult re-inserted disc. I pushed the button. Male adult re-inserted. I pushed the button. Male adult re-inserted. Repeated this experiment 14 times before being relocated to kitchen. Will continue cabinet investigation there; notes forthcoming.

Don’t stop exploring. Search the world your whole life long; there truly is no end to the discoveries. Assume that nothing is trivial just because it is small. Stay curious. Don’t ever change.

Don’t stop loving purely

What a more harmonious world we would have if everyone took on the same curious, undiluted, difference-agnostic, barrier-bashing attitude toward others that you have. Besides the occasional inexplicable nervousness around a certain person – the same way you irrationally refuse to eat something you’ve never seen in your life, just to gobble down platefuls of it the next day—you smile on everyone you meet with a beautiful simplicity that, to my eyes, says, “Isn’t it wonderful to be humans together?”

One afternoon when you were maybe eight months old, Mom and I took you walking through the mall. An old, worse-for-wear man wearing an Army hat teetered over to us and got real close to your face to greet you. He was missing most of his teeth, and his face crumpled in on itself like a house ravaged by wind, making it so that we couldn’t make out a word of what he was cooing to you. Your reaction? It was as if you had rediscovered your best friend. You smiled and giggled and stared blissfully at that hobbled stranger. You made each other’s days, I think. What lessons you teach me about love.

Of course, some might attribute your unquestioningly affectionate gaze to ignorance: by the same token that you would casually wander off the bed or the edge of a pool were it not for our protection, you haven’t yet learned what or whom to be scared of. But it is the best kind of ignorance I can imagine. Rather than not knowing what you should, you have little interest in knowing in the first place. You just really love people – it’s that simple.

Be wary of your wariness based on how people look. Smile at everyone. Assume the best of them. Love them before you know them. Don’t ever change.

Now, if I were to write all that in your yearbook, there wouldn’t be much room for your friends to say anything. Good thing all your friends are babies and can’t write.

But let’s play fair. If I were indeed constrained to a corner of a yearbook page, hemmed in by crass comments, trite farewells, and forgettable inside jokes, I’d have no choice but to settle for brevity. So, in a word, my son, please don’t ever change. (And, obviously, have a kick-ass summer.)

* Okay, the adults probably knew we were up to something, I see that now. Perhaps they just decided not to intervene. Or, just as likely, they saw the acronym appearing all over the yearbooks and chose not to ask because they’d prefer ignorance. Adults have to pick their battles, you know. And besides, I understand now that the teachers must have been just as ready as us to go start their own kick-ass summers.

**Did our heavenly papa ever have that thought about his own son during Jesus’ life on earth? We know Jesus experienced dread at the prospect of his suffering and death; did the same horrible sense of foreboding ever settle in his father’s heart, too?

***Your curiosity about electronics and plugs is not Mom and my favorite, seeing as we’d like to keep our baby un-electrocuted if at all possible. How tricky it is, though, to pasture a thing like curiosity: fence it in too much and it starves, leave it too open and it wanders off to get eaten. Mom and I seek the middle option.