Beloved son,
Recently you came to my bedside in the middle of the night and woke me up in a hushed voice: “Daddy, my bed fell apart.”
I can’t say I was totally surprised. We bought your bed used for twenty bucks—a style-over-substance purchase driven more by the fact that it was Elmo-themed than by any thought for its structural integrity. When we got it home that first day, we discovered that a couple bolts had been replaced with ill-fitting ones. The foot of the bed didn’t attach quite right, the legs wobbled, and the frame squeaked loudly under the lightest pressure. The Elmo decal was peeling in one corner.
You were riding off to sleep each night in a jalopy; it was bound to break down at some point.
When you told me it had broken, I pictured a heap of metal and blankets. What I found, however, was that your bed was just fine. The headboard had jiggled loose and was leaning back slightly, but the bed was perfectly intact. The frame must have shifted just enough to wake you up, just enough to give you the feeling that things were falling apart.
I straightened out the headboard, assured you it was good to go, and tucked you in. I think you were asleep before I’d closed the door behind me.
We eventually replaced that old junker with a sturdier bed, but I kept chewing on your sentence to me, that beautiful statement of need: “Daddy, my bed fell apart.” When things fall apart—or when we think they do—where else ought we to turn?
Around the time of the bed incident, that same sense of things falling apart was swirling in my own heart. Your nanny had just quit—your fifth in just over a year. It seemed that no matter who Mom and I hired, no one could manage to stay for more than three months, long enough to make a connection, learn the routines, start to become part of our home and family…and then leave.
On the surface, anyway, losing a nanny always affected me and Mom more than you and sister. Sometimes it gutted us. During that two-week notice period, we’d be working in the office and overhear your fits of giggles downstairs, or we’d look out the window and see you and your nanny drawing chalk on the patio, and we’d nearly cry, the sense of impending loss was so strong.
You and sister don’t yet have words like “grief” and “loss.” Each time a nanny left, you wouldn’t even use the words you have, like “sad” or “mad.” But surely it affected you. Like any of your experiences at this young age, it is hard to say exactly what sort of growth is taking place in your internal landscape, but there is no doubt something taking shape. What impressions will remain from these kind, loving people who, even if just for a few months, were so steady a presence in your life?
Perhaps it will be a skill whose origin you can’t place—a love for baking, an idiom, a melody seemingly innate. The other day you were making up words to the tune of “Amazing Grace.” I don’t recall me or Mom singing that to you.
Perhaps it will be a memory, like walking to MacDonald’s for lunch, or making playdough from scratch with M, or that time when K dropped the cookies in the oven and lit the parchment paper on fire.
Perhaps it will be a token, like the giant bag of markers R gave you, or the first watercolor painting you ever did with J, or the water guns C surprised you with one day.
Or perhaps it will be simply that most enduring of impressions, that deep, untouchable sense of being cared for. I still remember, over twenty-five years later, a family friend called Uncle Nick whom I absolutely adored as a little boy. I could hardly tell you a thing he gave me or a word he said. What I remember is his gray mustache, and his gentleness, and sitting in his lap and feeling at home, smiled upon, safe. Our souls are soft for the imprint of love.
While you had a special relationship with each of your nannies, a thought flashed across my mind every time one of them quit: I should just take care of the kids myself. At first, this thought came from a place of frustration, vexed at having to start yet another search for yet another nanny. I would dismiss the possibility of me taking over as a reverie, countering with rational, responsible, Grown-Up Person ideas, like “But I have a good job” or “What about our health insurance?” or “I’m just being reactive.”
Over time, though, that flash of a thought began to linger. But really, what if? I sat with it, let it simmer as I lay in bed at night, asked God for direction.
I began to develop counters to the counters. When I considered my good job, I began to ask, “What better job is there than spending time with my own children?” When I considered health insurance, I began to ask, “Well how much are we spending now on childcare?” When I considered that maybe I was just reacting to the moment, I began to answer, “Or maybe I’m being responsive, attentive to a new opportunity.”
I am not a spontaneous man. I ran the numbers on lost income versus savings on childcare (it was nearly a wash); I got health insurance estimates (we could manage it); I had long conversations with Mom, Grandpa, Mimi, and your aunt to make sure I hadn’t drifted into insanity (I hadn’t). All signals were green.
Ultimately, my decision to quit my job of six years and indefinitely pause—or at least reroute—my professional career did not come down to a spreadsheet comparison or a choice word from a loved one. It came down to something deep within me, a longing, even a calling, to be with you and sister in your early years as much as I possibly could.
So, why did I quit my job? Simplest answer: I wanted to. I could feel in my heart and my bones that I was ready to start a new role; it just took five nannies’ quitting for me to realize it.
All that fretting about how to solve our childcare problem, and the answer was right there within our means. When I’d rushed to Daddy to tell him about my broken bed, he gave it a little adjustment and said, “See? You’re all good.”
Soon after notifying my workplace, I came across a psalm that had meant a lot to me years ago, when Mom and I were first married and making very little money. Psalm 127 has this lovely, counter-cultural line, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain” (v. 1). At the time, when the temptation was strong to build our future through sheer willpower and selfish ambition, that verse was a critical reminder about the power of faith, the futility of our strivings, and our true helplessness to do or live apart from God.
In the context of quitting my job and stepping out into something very new, that line resonated again. But as I read on in the psalm, I was floored: four verses later was another line of great personal significance. Years before you were born, I had asked Grandpa why he had decided to have kids, and he cited Psalm 127:4-5: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.”
This unusual metaphor stuck with me and Mom for years, often surfacing when we talked about having kids or how many to have. And here was this verse again, side by side with the one about builders laboring in vain unless the Lord builds with them. Of all the post-decision confirmations I received—and there were many, from increased side income to unexpectedly low insurance rates to sad yet regret-free goodbyes with colleagues—rediscovering Psalm 127 was the loudest assurance of all, almost as if God were saying, “Yup, I told you it would work out.”
A few months into full-time dad duty, I have certainly had my share of tough moments with you and sister, yet I have never once thought that I made the wrong decision. In this season of life, I feel called to be with you, and I can only thank our good Father for providing our family the means to do it.
He built the house; he loaded the quiver. He can certainly handle a busted bed.
