On rainy mornings ...
June 27, 2006
Smallwood
I've been up since 4:30AM, the rain hasn't stopped for three days and the constant splatter of it has my thoughts racing on about flooded basements and "did I turn the dehumidifier off?" and other things that fill the mind at this hour. As tired as I am I just couldn't make myself go back to sleep so here I am in the living room, listening to the rain and waiting for His Holiness to wake up when I trip on something or put my coffee cup down too loudly ...
He is changing right before my eyes. Last night he wanted to play with me, to build things with blocks and legos and boxes and we bargained with each other for pieces and built buildings and small towns and had a wonderful time. A bit later we had ice cream and soon he was ready for bed. He didn't argue or struggle, he just crawled up into bed and his only condition was that I read "Big Red Barn" which I did and then we kissed each other good night and he waved to me and blew me kisses out the door. I don't know what in life could be any better than that - I really can't. Maybe winning the Academy Award, or the Nobel Peace Prize - certainly a life that permitted both the accomplishments of the marketplace and the home would be something quite wonderful, but I don't imagine myself conquering the marketplace anymore ... I don't suppose I have ever held that dream very firmly in my mind although I have flirted with it now and then and dreamed about it and probably spent too many nights with a wine-addled brain bemoaning the absence of it.
I didn’t go into this experience of being a father because I thought it would define me in some new way or give my life the purpose it has always lacked, probably because I couldn’t have imagined the things I have experienced in the last two years and nine months since he was born. I’m not smart enough to have forseen the world I inhabit right now, but I am seasoned enough to realize that there will come a day very soon when this will all be over – it is inevitable – it is life. This is a role that is designed to end and the little boy who sleeps not 25 feet from this chair will grow older and away, as surely as the rain outside will rain itself out and morning will come and another day.
Smallwood
I've been up since 4:30AM, the rain hasn't stopped for three days and the constant splatter of it has my thoughts racing on about flooded basements and "did I turn the dehumidifier off?" and other things that fill the mind at this hour. As tired as I am I just couldn't make myself go back to sleep so here I am in the living room, listening to the rain and waiting for His Holiness to wake up when I trip on something or put my coffee cup down too loudly ...
He is changing right before my eyes. Last night he wanted to play with me, to build things with blocks and legos and boxes and we bargained with each other for pieces and built buildings and small towns and had a wonderful time. A bit later we had ice cream and soon he was ready for bed. He didn't argue or struggle, he just crawled up into bed and his only condition was that I read "Big Red Barn" which I did and then we kissed each other good night and he waved to me and blew me kisses out the door. I don't know what in life could be any better than that - I really can't. Maybe winning the Academy Award, or the Nobel Peace Prize - certainly a life that permitted both the accomplishments of the marketplace and the home would be something quite wonderful, but I don't imagine myself conquering the marketplace anymore ... I don't suppose I have ever held that dream very firmly in my mind although I have flirted with it now and then and dreamed about it and probably spent too many nights with a wine-addled brain bemoaning the absence of it.
I didn’t go into this experience of being a father because I thought it would define me in some new way or give my life the purpose it has always lacked, probably because I couldn’t have imagined the things I have experienced in the last two years and nine months since he was born. I’m not smart enough to have forseen the world I inhabit right now, but I am seasoned enough to realize that there will come a day very soon when this will all be over – it is inevitable – it is life. This is a role that is designed to end and the little boy who sleeps not 25 feet from this chair will grow older and away, as surely as the rain outside will rain itself out and morning will come and another day.
posted by Berlinbound at 11:43 AM
3 Comments:
Richard;
You are famous; a rich and wonderfully famous father. You should write a book based on the things you write here. I am sitting at my computer, with my coffee, bemoaning how dead tired I am from my two young boys. Meanwhile I read this and get tears in my eyes and know that you are right. I fear them getting older, growing away from me...you have captured this feeling. Fleeting, the daily doses of love that will inevitably float away in the fog.
xoxoxoxoxo
But you know what? My boys are 10 and 13 now, and they still need me (us) as much as they did when they were 3, just in different ways. You've got a long, long way to go yet...
Beautiful...
You have an attitude about fatherhood that you share with my father, who has had the bittersweet experience of raising two girls and watching them go on to live their own lives. I admire that no matter what stage we were in, he always soaked up the moment knowing it wouldn't last. I imagine he has no regrets.
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