Awe

So this amazing thing happens tonight, right?  And what this amazing thing is, is that at around 8:07 pm I look at my kid, sitting on the floor, pinging my ukulele strings with rubber bands because that makes a neat sound, and I say Hey Jack, you wanna get a bath?  And he nods his head, picks up the ukulele, puts it on the ground, runs to the bathroom, and opens the cabinet under the sink.  He pulls out some bath toys and throws them in the bath, and then stands there squealing with delight as I unbutton his shirt, he steps his feet out of his pants when I pull them down, and then dives literally headfirst over the side of the bath and into the water.

 

Half my readers are probably thinking wow, that was a boring story about your kid.  But what I’m asking you to understand is that this child was a blob barely months ago.  At first he cried whenever he felt bad, even if he felt bad because his diaper was wet and even if we were doing all the things we do to get ready to change his diaper and he still didn’t recognize the future event of Clean Diaper coming at him.  All he knew was Now.  Now is Wet Diaper, Now Sucks, and Now I cry.   We have gone from that to this.  A week ago he learned to nod his head.  Yesterday he learned to throw.  What will he know next week?

 

It’s like this: you go into the delivery room and you come out with this formless, mewling shape, all promise and potential, and it becomes your job to eke cognition and personality and skill and self-sufficience out of it.  You wrest it out of the baby, or chip away at the stone to reveal it, or mold it on a wheel, or whatever metaphor you please.  He’d learn a bit without any interaction, but me counting 1-2-3 and singing A-B-C and picking up and putting in and showing and modeling and hand-holding, me and his dad and his grandparents and aunts and uncles and our friends and the babysitter and even the dog – all of us are forming him.  People who don’t want to be parents are completely understandable to me, I totally agree that this is a huge amount of work and sacrifice, and probably a little self-aggrandizing, to create a little thing that needs you to survive.  But how I want to share with you that when my little son decides that shells are pretty and tries to hold 47 in his hands at once, or goes marching determinedly into some pretty fierce waves on the beach undeterred by their ferocity, when he bongs on ukulele strings with a rubber band because he thinks it sounds funny, those are times when I smile and shake my head in wonder and revel in the awesomeness of what he and his father and I have been able to do.  There is delight in this life that no other life could ever bring me.  There is no delight like the delight in your child, and no work that I love to do more.