Garland & Chain

Beloved son,

I have been wondering recently what your first memory will be.

It took me a while before I had mine. I was born in Lafayette, Indiana and lived there for over four years before we moved to Colorado. The only solid memories I have from that time – in no certain order in my mind – were getting my head stuck in a hollow toy penguin, getting my head stuck in the neighbor’s fence (yes, these were my rebellious head-sticking years), and prodding at our cat Calico until she hissed at me. And that’s about it. Four years in a place, and I can only recall three semi-traumatic events. It’s not a great ratio of experience to memory.

In your first 13 months of life, I can’t even count how many amazing, hilarious, and heart-warming memories I’ve made with you. Mom and I have taken literally thousands of photos in that time. We’ve recorded dozens of videos, filled a calendar and the better part of a journal, written you notes and created albums, and not a single one of the moments we’ve documented will exist independently in your memory. That’s wild. How fascinating is it that we humans are not designed to remember things until later in life, after we have experienced and learned so, so much.

What spooks me even more is thinking that your very first memory may likely be a traumatic one, like getting your head stuck in a fence. (I’ll do my best to steer you clear of that; I know firsthand what warning signs to watch for.) Mixed in with all the cuddles and belly laughs from your first year are a good many sad and scary moments, too. Which one might lodge in your brain? Will it be the first time I trimmed your nails and cut your tiny finger? Will it be Grandpa’s booming voice that used to send you into tears? Or how about that sinister towering machine that wanders around the living room and sucks up everything in its path? Your first molar coming through that kept you up at night? That visit to the lake when you slipped off the floatie and went underwater for a frightful second?*

Chances are, you won’t remember any of these blips at all. In fact, it’s likely that nothing that happens in the next two years will live on in your own memory, and even for years after that your recollection of your own life will probably remain a hazy patchwork of moods, visual impressions, and stories that we tell you later in life. For as rich a time as this is for me and Mom, it is literally forgettable for you.

There were times early on in your life, particularly those late nights when I was cradling you and trying fruitlessly to sing you to sleep, when I would ponder the strangeness of a memory-less life, and the whole situation would feel kind of like a raw deal. My mind would occasionally wander to this place: “I put in all this effort, I lose sleep and take off work and sacrifice my time and my hobbies, I cater to this helpless boy’s every single need and show him what it means to love, and he won’t even remember a second of it? What is the point of that?”

Those selfish thoughts were fleeting and infrequent, but they cropped up nonetheless. Even when I haven’t been feeling entitled, I have often marveled at the odd asymmetry between us. Looking at it from a different angle, I might say that it is you who are getting the raw deal: Mom and I have all these amazing experiences with you, and you don’t even get to relive them in your memory.

But then, memory isn’t everything, is it? Or rather, there are different kinds of memory, each playing its part in who we are. When you are five years old, you will still remember how to walk, even if you cannot recall your first steps. And even though your 30-year-old self won’t remember using the shower curtain last night to play peek-a-boo with me and Mom, your 30-year-old self will certainly remember me and Mom, and you will certainly still remember that we’re loads of fun. (You better, anyway!) The things you are learning, the relationships you are forming, they bond to your sticky, sticky brain, even if the individual moments pass by like grains through a sieve.

Of course, even for grown-ups like me and Mom, grains through a sieve is all that any of us have, anyway. Even when we can “capture” moments in our memory, we have not caged the actual thing, just a video of it. That is the nature of being bound by time and mortality (and a big part of the reason that Mom and I have taken such a ridiculous number of pictures these past 13 months). Yet somehow, even as moments slip by relentlessly, there is a continuity in our souls and in our relationships that endures through time.

When I think about your memory in that light, what I see is an eternal perspective. Even more than exploring and acquiring and developing into a fully functioning human, what matters most to you is relationship. How could I think you have no memory when I come home from work and you greet me with a beaming smile, toddling over to say hi? You see me and you know me. That sticks, and it will stay stuck for a long, long time.

When our earthly days are up and we enter heaven, I am not sure that we will be able to recall every moment of our lives, and if we can, I doubt that we will have the same kind of attachment to those moments as we do now. I have no doubt, however, that even though we will have been given new bodies, we will recognize one another. What connects us then will not really be memory so much as knowledge of who the other is. We will enter the kingdom and, instinctively, greet each other with a beaming smile.

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*The one memory that I definitely don’t want to stick in your head, by the way, is the moments where you had a cold and couldn’t unplug your own nostril. They say they designed the Nose Frieda for the health and safety of babies, but I am pretty sure it is actually just a test of how unconditional parents’ love really is. I’d rather us both forget about those days – they really sucked.

And yes, I just dropped one heck of a cheesy pun. But really, shoving one end of a tube up your nose and putting the other end in my mouth and sucking vigorously is not my most cherished moment with you. I passed the test, though, and yes, I absolutely love you that much and more.

Beloved son,

Sometimes when I watch you I can’t help but think of Emily Dickinson. It’s time that I introduce you two.

People often get the wrong idea about Emily Dickinson. Morbid, they say. Antisocial, they say. Abstruse, they say.* They’re wrong. Emily Dickinson, I think, was so alive to the world—both earthly and spiritual—that it inspired yet overwhelmed her. She said that true poetry made her feel as if the “top of [her] head were taken off.” I get the sense that just living felt like that to her sometimes, as if she were a raw nerve exposed to the world’s every sensory output.

I see a similar kind of rawness in you, a radical alertness. How else could you be so profoundly fascinated by something as mundane as a whisk? And why else would you need to take a nap every three hours? You must be living with the top off.

But that’s not the main way you remind me of Emily Dickinson. You remind me of her because one day you do not, and the next you do. One day you don’t smile, and the next you do. One day you are all gums, and the next you have two teeth.** One day you’re carpet-bound, and the next you can stand. We can even rewind the tape all the way back and say—miracle of all everyday miracles—that one day you didn’t exist, and the next you did.

That invisible passing between is and was is the kind of magic that Dickinson noticed. I imagine her looking out her window at dusk, wondering about the slice of difference between day and night, light and shadow, when she grabbed her pen to write:

Presentiment — is that long Shadow — on the Lawn —
Indicative that Suns go down —

The Notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness — is about to pass —

Isn’t that just lovely? I often feel like startled grass watching you grow like a weed yourself. Just as the sun sets and that day is no more, almost every day I see you change into a new little person and the old little person is no more. The newborn that cannot roll over is suddenly the baby that cannot crawl is suddenly the toddler that can walk. What? My child of so many days becomes my child of so many months becomes my child of so many years. In my head I know this to be true, yet somehow I still need more warning.

Of course, it’s not like the lawn goes away when the sun sets or the earth actually disappears in the night: in a real sense, you are still the same you today that you were the moment you let out your first cry, no matter how many milestones you reach. But I understand the feeling of loss, the melancholy—in short, the presentiment—in Dickinson’s poem. There is much joy in watching you discover the world and grow into yourself day by day, but there comes with it, too, a startling sensation that something as irretrievable as time itself has just passed by.

Our poet friend captures that feeling even better in another gem:

The difference between Despair
And Fear — is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck
And when the Wreck has been —

The Mind is smooth — no Motion —
Contented as the Eye
Upon the Forehead of a Bust —
That knows — it cannot see —

Hold on a second, though—don’t think I am saying that I feel despair or fear when I see your incremental steps forward. Don’t think, either, that watching you is ever like witnessing a wreck (except, of course, when you actually do wreck, like by tipping over onto your head or crawling straight into a wall). No, I feel more like the eye on the bust, frozen in time as you accelerate forward. The difference, of course, is that I can see. Mom and I, statuesque compared to you, witness every day your unhindered discovery, marveling as each will becomes is and each is becomes was.

In a few weeks you will turn one year old. One day you are zero, and the next you are one. And when does it happen, really? When the clock strikes midnight? When we again reach December 9 at 6:23 a.m.? Which second did it occur? Which fraction of a moment divides the you that knew the womb from the you that knew the world?

Just as your marvelous little existence raises marvelous big questions, the timing of your birthday—right in the middle of Advent—inevitably turns my mind to even greater mysteries. Not long after your birthday, the world celebrates the birth of the Anointed One, Christ incarnate. The Son of God becomes the Son of Man. One day he is beyond us, and the next he is among us—miracle of all miracles.

So, when we sing “Happy Birthday” in a short while and “Joy the World” a short while after that, I suppose those marble lips of mine should turn up into a smile, for a moment is passing but another, better one follows. For as much as she pondered the fine distinctions of our transient existence, I wonder it ever dawned on Emily Dickinson that presentiment is just a shade darker than hope.

*I was hoping your first word might be “abstruse.” “Mama” won out by a considerable margin.

**Okay, maybe Mom and I could have watched the gradual progress on this one more closely, but we genuinely had no idea that you had any teeth until the pediatrician pointed them out. Sure enough, there were two ridged caps poking through your gums. I’m fairly certain you willed them into existence somewhere between the parking lot and the doctor’s office.

Beloved son,

My dearest moment of the day with you happens early in the morning, before the sun has yet risen. You wake up around 6 o’clock – too early for our taste on the weekends – so I fetch your little body and bring you into bed with me and Mom. Sometimes you are still so sleepy that you end up back in child’s pose, butt in the air, neck craned sideways to nurse. After a few minutes you are sated and dazed, and you sit up to look around our dark bedroom like a mole freshly popped out from his burrow.

I scoop you up and put your pacifier back in. Pacifier – it’s become one of my favorite words. It’s not its utility that I love (although the tool certainly does its job well); it’s what the word embodies. It pacifies, brings peace. The word makes it that much cooler that you are a Pacific Northwest baby.

In our pacified moment, the curtains turning deep-ocean blue from the faraway sun starting to shake off its sleep, you tuck your head into my shoulder, almost pressing into that shallow recess above my collarbone. I walk slowly – deliberately so – for I know it is only a few feet from our bedroom to yours. Your arm wraps around my neck. Sometimes you paw at a tuft of my hair. I cannot see your face, and you cannot see mine, but we don’t need to. We know what it means to be together, still, and at peace.

Your room, the warmest in the whole house, feels like stepping inside a giant sweater. I stand in front of your crib, rubbing your back as we sway to a looping harp rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or “Hush Little Baby.” I think maybe we could stand there in our embrace forever, but I know that you should get more sleep, so I lay you down. Though you are nearly a year old now, in this moment you act as still as a newborn, flat on your back looking up at me. I know that as soon as I leave you will turn over and fall fast asleep.

As I walk back to bed, I am at once as calm and as energized as I am in any other part of the day – like I could just as easily sleep or stay awake for 24 hours straight. It’s the closest I come to feeling like I could do anything.

I wonder how you came to know the significance of cuddling – not just being held but holding back. I wonder how the most tired nighttime moments I’ve had with you these past months have settled in my mind as the ones I’d last trade. And I wonder when, in the partitioning of my day and the busyness of my heart, I ever grow still or sated enough for our heavenly Father to have his dearest moment of the day with me. He does instruct through parable, doesn’t he?