Beloved son,
My dearest moment of the day with you happens early in the morning, before the sun has yet risen. You wake up around 6 o’clock – too early for our taste on the weekends – so I fetch your little body and bring you into bed with me and Mom. Sometimes you are still so sleepy that you end up back in child’s pose, butt in the air, neck craned sideways to nurse. After a few minutes you are sated and dazed, and you sit up to look around our dark bedroom like a mole freshly popped out from his burrow.
I scoop you up and put your pacifier back in. Pacifier – it’s become one of my favorite words. It’s not its utility that I love (although the tool certainly does its job well); it’s what the word embodies. It pacifies, brings peace. The word makes it that much cooler that you are a Pacific Northwest baby.
In our pacified moment, the curtains turning deep-ocean blue from the faraway sun starting to shake off its sleep, you tuck your head into my shoulder, almost pressing into that shallow recess above my collarbone. I walk slowly – deliberately so – for I know it is only a few feet from our bedroom to yours. Your arm wraps around my neck. Sometimes you paw at a tuft of my hair. I cannot see your face, and you cannot see mine, but we don’t need to. We know what it means to be together, still, and at peace.
Your room, the warmest in the whole house, feels like stepping inside a giant sweater. I stand in front of your crib, rubbing your back as we sway to a looping harp rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or “Hush Little Baby.” I think maybe we could stand there in our embrace forever, but I know that you should get more sleep, so I lay you down. Though you are nearly a year old now, in this moment you act as still as a newborn, flat on your back looking up at me. I know that as soon as I leave you will turn over and fall fast asleep.
As I walk back to bed, I am at once as calm and as energized as I am in any other part of the day – like I could just as easily sleep or stay awake for 24 hours straight. It’s the closest I come to feeling like I could do anything.
I wonder how you came to know the significance of cuddling – not just being held but holding back. I wonder how the most tired nighttime moments I’ve had with you these past months have settled in my mind as the ones I’d last trade. And I wonder when, in the partitioning of my day and the busyness of my heart, I ever grow still or sated enough for our heavenly Father to have his dearest moment of the day with me. He does instruct through parable, doesn’t he?
