Another flurry of Maycember has swept in our older daughter’s birthday - we count the party favors along with the yearend class goody bags and pile them next to the summer clothes coming in, old books headed out. Life feels like a mash of exclamation points and question marks: we have 7 more days left of school?? 7 more days of school! 9?? How are you turning 9! This birthday has felt a bit more…weighty? Perhaps our minds are recalibrating as we’re halfway to launching her out of the nest (should she choose that path), but in the midst of recitals tumbling into spring holidays somersaulting into the end of school, I sense Clarence and I both making space to pause and notice. Time only moves in one direction, but we can choose whether to rush or ride.
A Father’s Day reflection seems especially appropriate this year and I ask what he hopes the girls will remember him by. He says, I hope they know that I really knew them and tried my best to encourage them in who they are. It’s active work, encouraging in the knowing of someone. Resisting the tendency we have as parents to see our kids as extensions of ourselves, the redemption or the trophy. What a gift, for the girls to have a dad who has no need of either.
So as we celebrate 9 and Father’s Day just ahead in the midst of this parental circus, I’m finding freedom in accepting and enjoying what is. That a 9th birthday may be the halfway point to something ahead, but more simply the start of another year around the sun. That in trying our best to raise girls who are known and loved as they are, we see them through seasons of exclamation points and question marks sandwiched between the ellipses and commas. We need only to be present.
Happy birthday, my sweets. Happy Father’s Day, babe.
To here and now,
Pat
