If you've been reading this blog for a while you know we stayed here in St. Louis with Gary & Christine about five weeks ago, and that our kids met some of the neighbor kids and got to play with them. Well, I think it was the evening of our arrival here this past Tuesday. We're scattered around the living area of the house when Mika comes running into the room. "The friends are here!" she excitedly exclaims. "The friends are here!"
The neighbor kids must have recognized our van (what are the odds, considering the California plates and the oh-so-stylish car top carrier?) and come over to see if our kids wanted to play. Alec and Caedmon were occupied and uninterested, but Mika lit up like a proverbial Christmas tree, bouncing up and down and ready to pop with excitement to get outside. The joy and excitement in her voice is indescribable. In that moment of exuberance, I thought to myself this is what my job is as a parent.
My job is to let her go play with her friends. To peek out the windows to keep sight of her. To worry about her getting too close to the street. To encourage her and teach her and equip her. To give her the skills she'll need as friends come into and leave her life. To be the support and base for her adventures in whatever neighborhood we find ourselves during any given year, with whatever group of friends she finds or who find her - friends that I'll pray will be good and safe and worthy of her joy, her exuberance.
My job as her father is ultimately to ensure that she can move out into the world without me keeping her company at her side or reassuring her from behind or blazing the trail confidently ahead of her. The measure of my success in some regards will be her ability and willingness to continually meet the people in her life with that exuberance. My job is to hold her and comfort her when those friends don't turn out to be the wonderful or reliable or trustworthy people she assumed them to be, and to celebrate with her when they do. To teach her about our world, about whatever I can regarding people and most importantly about the God who envisioned her before the creation of the universe, who chose to place her in our life and we in hers. To challenge her to make that Creator God the center of her world, the plum line by which she determines her choices and actions and friends. To witness to her to the best of my ability - which will never be enough - what a friend and a male ought to be like in her life by how I am in her mother's life.
All so that as the years continue to accumulate about my feet like so many spent leaves that she will race and jump through, she can continue to cry out in joy "The friends are here!", and I can continue to let her run down the sidewalk and through the neighbor yards to laugh and play and grow and learn and come back rumpled and grass-stained and knee-skinned and fairly glowing with the joy and sorrow if it all. So that when it's time, I can walk her down the aisle to the young man waiting there who will cause her face to light up with joy the way it did this past Tuesday. So that someday, it will be her turn to hear small voices call her Mom and begging to go outside to play with the friends.
It's a big job and a lot of work ahead. I thank God for the best partner in the world in this task - my beautiful wife and Mika's mother, Gena. Happy Mother's Day, baby.
Happy Mother's Day to my mother who helped prepare me for this life. To Gena's mother who helped prepare her for this life. To all the mothers out there who dream and plan and worry and hope and pray for their children. Happy Mother's Day. And thank you.
No comments:
Post a Comment