“Dad, where are you?”
Every morning for years these were the first words out of my older son’s mouth.
“Dad, scratch my back and sing,” was my younger son’s oft-repeated goodnight ritual.
By this time we’d moved out of the beautiful baby days.
With all the tween years involved, it was easy to forget the baby years, the work, the mountains of laundry.
It is easy to forget the sleepless nights.
But, tucked into the mundane and the repetitive, are things so miraculous that a middle of the night baby moments can transform into holy encounters.
Our lives together were, and are, lessons of love, moments of kindness, volumes of vulnerability, sometimes encountered so powerfully and painfully they could only have come from the heart and mind of the Divine.
“I’m exactly where I was when you said goodnight. I have hardly moved.”
“No, I did not sing only two verses. I sang all three. But you were asleep by then.”
When the washing machine dies and the dog jumps the snowy fence to explore the greater neighborhood and one son has a splinter in his finger and the other is hungry and needs his nappy (diaper) changed and the bills are mounting in a stack of unopened mail, it’s easy to lose sight of the trail of miracles that come with every baby.
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