| Sunny Side Up March 23, 2005 �2005 Kathleen Gibson Because I'm the Dad Having a child revolutionizes - no, ravishes - our most basic behaviors and emotions. I've seen funny things happen the moment a baby's last little toe exits the birth canal: freshly grown youngsters with the moon in their eyes and their heads in the clouds, launched with rocket speed onto another planet - one called responsible parenthood. Mild young women become instant she-bears; tough-talking, macho young men; mushy teddy bears. Our babies take us prisoner. When their umbilical chord is cut, they immediately grasp the raw end of every one of our emotional chords and never surrender them. Our entire lives, they yank and fray and tease and play with those chords. My son is twenty six - I still choke when I remember his long fingers curling around mine for the first time. My mother is eighty six. When I don't drink my milk, she worries. Parenting is a life sentence. Someone once said that having children is like giving your heart permission to leave your body and gallivant about on its own. If you're a parent, you know precisely what that means. If not, you can't possibly understand. "I thought I knew what love was," I've heard, "until I had my child." And from between trembling lips sometimes comes, "I thought I knew what grief was, until I lost my child." A friend miscarried recently. Her sorrow for a son who had been so miraculously knit together in her womb, who had rested far too briefly under her heart, was not diminished in the least by the brevity of his wee life. I ached for her and her husband; for their empty arms and deflated dreams. I've seen people with a Grade 12 education become medical specialists after their child receives a sobering diagnosis. Tenacious as hounds, they research the latest developments and treatment. Some travel far; learn so much that their doctors come to them for information. On a talk show recently I watched a mother discover that her son, a suspected sexual predator, had molested her daughter, his four-year old sister. "Can I see him?" she requested brokenly. "Do you have to?" her husband asked. I understood her answer completely. "I'm the mom." I'm the mom. I'm the dad. Those words are the reason that love will never abandon this old planet. In the quiet of those words countless slivers have been plucked, boogers removed (by hand), messes tidied, sorrows soothed, terrors faced, and sleepless nights endured. In the strength of them mountains have been conquered, dragons slain, universes traversed, and flames quenched. God knows about parenting. He had a baby too, once - Jesus Christ; part of his heart, one with his very self. Jesus - destined to leave heaven to go gallivanting; to make a cross-shaped bridge between God's earthly children and their Heavenly Father. It's at Easter I think about my parent-God most - his love and his agony. And soaring through the blackness of Good Friday into the brilliance of Easter morning, I hear these words �because I'm the Dad. Respond here Home |
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