The Seventy-seventh Load of Laundry

Beloved son,

The night before your fifth birthday, you threw up for the first time in your life … and then the second time, and then the third. Hardly the best way to herald in a new year. Mom and I felt so bad for you. Your attitude, though, was incredibly cheery, buoyed by the utter novelty of it all. Your response struck the same tone as the android Data from Star Trek when he first learns to laugh: almost giddy with the chance to record a new human experience.

After your third visit to the toilet, I was settling you back into bed, my heart full of pity for my poor boy having to sleep with a bedside bucket. “I sure hope that was the last time,” I said. You responded wide-eyed, “Maybe I’ll never stop throwing up!”

I can’t say I’ve ever shared your enthusiasm for the experience. As a kid, I feel like I was throwing up every other Tuesday. I shouldn’t be too surprised; I ate like an idiot. In the sixth grade, I developed a reputation for having an iron stomach. Kids would pass a milk carton around the cafeteria, each inserting an ingredient of choice, and when the bubbling brew finally made it back to me, I’d close my eyes, stifle all rational thoughts, and take a swig. Cheers and gasps abounded. Then I’d head straight to the soccer field for recess.

Shockingly, this had a less than salutary effect. One fateful morning—and if you’re feeling queasy right now reading this, you may want to skip ahead a couple paragraphs—I had just sat down on the hard plastic stool of the cafeteria table when a foreboding salty taste came into my mouth. The string cheese I’d packed suddenly looked revolting. Uh-oh, I thought, not here. Not now. But yes—right there, right then. I abandoned my lunch and raced for the door. I wasn’t even going to make it to a bathroom; I rerouted toward the nearest trash can. Didn’t make it there, either. I made an epic display all over the linoleum floor, no more than five feet from the garbage can, and in full view of the entire sixth grade class.

Maybe my stomach wasn’t so ironclad after all.

Most of my stomach bug stories weren’t so dramatic. Thankfully, I was usually home to suffer their wrath. Even at home, though, I don’t recall any sense of novelty or excitement like you seemed to have. I recall the dread brought on by that salty taste in my mouth, like the black spot of nausea, miserable hours on the couch, trash can within arm’s reach as I awaited my doom.

But through it all I also recall one comfort in the misery: the salve of my mom’s steadfast care. In those awful bouts, she became like an angel standing over me. I recall her gentle hand on my back, her bringing me cool towels, offering 7 Up and saltines. I recall making messes that, I’d later discover, had been cleaned up as if by magic. I recall her sympathetic I wish I could do more for you smile.

What her face communicated was, in a way, true: she really couldn’t do much for me, couldn’t heal me. But those little gestures—and, most of all, her sheer presence—were powerful and sustaining, refreshing like a clear mountain spring. While the physical sensation of throwing up remains a distinct memory, just as enduring is the impression of my mother’s love, which seemed in those moments simply boundless. She would do anything for me, I thought.

I have similarly heroic memories of my dad—not so much around sickness, but around backpacking. In my teens, my dad and I went on many outdoor adventures throughout the far reaches of the Colorado Rockies. We’d wake up long before the sun, drive for hours, and then hike all day, or often several days.

When we returned to the car, exhausted and famished, would I, the youthful, athletic, Energizer Bunny of a hiker offer to drive? No. I didn’t even take a shift. Without fail, I would sleep like the dead while my dad drove the long haul back home. Sometimes my eyes would crack open long enough to glimpse a waterfall or craggy switchback, and before blacking out again, I’d glance at my father behind the wheel, seemingly tireless, a vision of indefatigable strength.

Indefatigable, boundless—are these the words that typify my experience of parenthood?

Generally no. Quite the opposite, really: I’ve been tired pretty much since the day we met. You know this better than anyone. Once when I was reading you the classic tale of Corduroy, I fell asleep mid-page and, in a dreamy haze, made up my own sudden ending to the story: “And then … he died.” Just yesterday I sleepily inserted an earthquake into Frog and Toad. These are not infrequent occurrences. I usually have to stand up to tell you your bedtime story, lest I doze off before you do.

Sadly, my fatigue doesn’t just result in silly storytime antics. It makes my fuse short, my patience thin, my grumpiness all too near the surface. No one witnesses more clearly than you just how bounded and fatigable I am.

And yet when you were born and Mom and I took on the mantle of parents, something infinite cracked open inside us. We woke at all hours of the night to feed and soothe you. We handled every imaginable bodily fluid without second thought. We carted gargantuan loads of baby gear around town and country. We budgeted for you, rearranged for you, splurged on you. We sang you countless songs countless times, reread books till their covers fell off.

If one could somehow quantify the amount of care that goes into raising a baby—let alone a toddler or child—the figure would be staggering. But of course Mom and I don’t quantify. There would be no point. We don’t do any of this for compensation. We don’t tally or clock in. Our role follows a different logic: we love you because we love you. Just as my mother took care of me in my sickness, just as my father drove those long solo stretches, Mom and I give to you happily, freely, without resentment or expectation.

There is a word for all that, of course: selflessness. Now I don’t mean to say that becoming parents made us saints. A paradox of parenting is that raising you and sister brings to the surface two polar extremes co-residing within me: my selfishness and my selflessness, both etched deep into my character. Being your father gives me so many opportunities to choose one or the other. It embarrasses me to admit that no one in my life frustrates me, provokes me, and brings me to the end of my rope quite so often or so efficiently as you do. What a strange byproduct of life together that you, my darling children and heart of my heart, get to see the worst of me.

And yet you experience my very best as well. In the thousands of little chances I have to show you patience, kindness, goodness, forgiveness, in the innumerable moments of your neediness that I am called to respond to, I get to shower you with the love of a father. I get to pat your back, offer you a 7 Up, clean your sheets for the seventy-seventh time.

Indeed, in my role as your father, I get to reflect the love of the Father. It’s the miracle that Paul describes in calling Jesus’s light “a treasure” stored within us fragile “jars of clay” (2 Cor. 4.6–7)—the infinite transported in the finite.

If my experience of parenthood is one of finitude, of limits and fatigue, on some level surely my parents’ was, too. But that’s not what stuck with me from my childhood stomach bugs or long mountain drives. What stuck was the image of strong, endless love—even if carried in faltering, limited people.

Perhaps, then, what matters more than my own experience as a parent is the image you take of me: a flawed, tired daddy who, thanks to a mystery greater than him, is able every so often to brim with an overflowing love.