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In today’s world, I don’t think we can over emphasize the importance of dads. I am grateful for the father that Dave has become. Being an only child, he was not expecting to be a dad (and a stand-in dad) to five children. But yet I watch as he hands the Alan Wrench to 2-year-old Emme to help fix the wobbly table, as he says “NO WAY’ to skirts too short for our teenagers, wrestles with martial arts intensity with Ty, and empties the dishwasher every morning – the job that is the most hated in our household. He doesn’t understand periods, or nail polish, or how one girl can get to 15,000 texts in one month… but he still sits by in a sea of 11 years olds and exclaims, “that is sooooooooooo cute” as Lily opens all her birthday gifts and gives “how to get out of a goodnight kiss” advice to Jade on her first date (which wasn’t really a date, she says). He raps in public. He listens to Justin Bieber. He is actually giddy that Jade will be taking chemistry next year. He is the first to hold a crying girl when the emotions are just too much (and we have a lot, and I do mean A LOT of emotions in this house!). He dodges blaster fire from 6 year old boys. He builds inventions with Ty. He changes poopie diapers. He handles bath and bedtimes every single night. He has learned to make pasta, quesadillas, and a killer grilled cheese sandwich. And he never yells at the kids. Ever.
Oh, and have I mentioned that he has amazing biceps?
I look at the men in our neighborhood, my friends’ husbands who coach their kids’ teams, host bbqs, show up to school open houses, cook dinners, stay home with the kids so their wife can go to work, stay home with the kids so the women can go away for a whole. entire. 24. hours. And I am blown away. We ask them the do all this (and so much more!) and also to be proficient at careers, providing some, most, or all of the income for their families. These men not only take it all on, but they do it pretty darn well…considering that they are not women.
There are days when I think I could simply get by without a man in my life. I mean, who needs another freakin day of tripping over those giant shoes in my kitchen. Or of explaining that cream cheese does not go in the freezer. Or of sharing a bathroom with someone with that much hair.
But I get over it.
So, today I celebrate the dads I know: Dave, Steve, Jim, both Ryans, Ben, Tom, Darin, Mike, Jonathan, and all the others that have turned Father’s Day into something to really celebrate.
Happy Father’s Day!
Last night Dave and I watched as Emme — 22 months — tried to put on her own shirt.
As cute as it was, it was a frustrating experience for ALL of us. Mainly because Emme kept trying to stick her head in the neck hole first, rather than go up through the big waist part of the shirt. I can see her point. She was thinking, this is where my head goes. But it doesn’t work that way. And she kept trying and trying and failing and failing.
And, she would not let us help her. Every time I reached over and tried to just show her the right way — she furrowed her brow (a trait she inherited from her father….) and frowned, jerked the shirt away, and continued to try to put her head in the wrong way. So, I sat on my hands. Finally, even Dave couldn’t take it anymore and he tried to just SHOW her the way to be successful and she actually shoved him away and said, NO ( a trait she inherited from her mother!)!
So, we both sat on our hands.
And as I sat there and watched her it struck me that we were experiencing a microcosm of parenting that we would face for the rest of our lives. It is nearly torture to watch your child try their best and fail — especially when you know… YOU KNOW… how to help them, how to reach over, turn the shirt around and just hand it back to them so they can do it! You are not trying to take over, just help, for the love of God! But she insisted on doing it herself…wrong.
And that is what we get to do over and over. We watch our kids try and refuse our help and fail. They insist that they know better than us — or that they can do it themselves — or that they don’t need us. And we have so sit there saying, “Please let me help you, I can’t stand to watch this!” But they GET to do it themselves. We GET to wait, watch, pray, and lose sleep.
Finally, Emme solved the problem. She switched to a different shirt. One that buttoned up the front. She put it on and then… and then…. asked Daddy to button up the front.
Thank God.
There is just something about your last baby.
But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after–oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.” Barbara Kingsolver from The Poisonwood Bible
I just can’t put Emme down — even when she squirms out of my arms, I am still holding her close. Maybe it is because I know what is coming — namely the hormones of a 9th grader, which I would not wish on anyone. But mostly I think I just know in my heart how fast it all goes, how even when I try to hold on to every single detail of what she looks like and what she says, that so much of it gets lost. And so each afternoon when I rock her to sleep for her nap, I put away the to-do list that threatens to rattle in my mind, and I stare into her eyes. I whisper promises of ever-lasting love. I hold her and try to memorize what it feels like to nestle her in my arms. To remember what it feels like to cuddle someone who oozes joy. And I am so thankful that at 21 months she is still so much of a baby. She only has a few words and talks in her baby babble most of the time. He hair is a mop that has never been cut, in some sort of flip, feathered, girl-mullet… and I love it. I don’t want to cut the hair that has always been there. Maybe for her 2nd birthday, but not. just. yet. I love that her kisses are outloud, spoken “mmmmmmmmmwaaahhhs” and her cheeks and legs are chubby and delicious. She can point to her nose, her ears, her belly button, and her arm pits. And will stick out her tongue on cue. I want to bathe in her cuteness, letting it flow over me with the profound love that a mother has for her child.
There will be time for hair and shoes and fashion and lots of talk…probably on the phone to, gulp, boys. There will be time to get her that cell phone or the latest music player or whatever it will be in 13 years that she “must have.” Dave and I laughed last night that by the time Emme is in high school (and the other four kids are out of the house), she will have a phone in her room and her own number and a TV and a computer and a lock on her bedroom door and probably no curfew. That we’ll text her to come down the hall to have dinner with her aging parents. And maybe that is how it will be when she is a teenager. But more than likely I will want to sneak in at night and climb into bed with her and watch her, hoping that she will sleep through the antics of her crazy mother whose heart aches a bit.
For she is the last one.
Through a strange series of questions and topics while snuggling in bed with Ty last night, he informed Dave and me that he plans on marrying his little sister, Emme.
This doesn’t alarm me at all — I know that this is totally normal as kids grow up and explore family relationships and love. Often times a kindergartener will want to marry the parent of the opposite sex. Ty used to want to marry me, but I have been ousted for the new and improved model…little sister.
“Oh, Ty, I am so glad you love Emme so much.” Even as I say this I am envisioning the torment she put him through only hours before. How no matter what he wanted to play with, she snatched it out of his hands and ran off with it. Not really an inaccurate foreshadowing to marriage, but still…
But just to be silly I ask Ty, “Why don’t you want to marry Lily?” One of his older sister-cousins.
“Because, Mommy, she. wants. to. be. a. dentist!!!”
Of course, this makes perfect sense to me.
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Click here to learn more about why I don’t like the dentist.
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