Parenting With Someone You Love
Sometimes I think God was showing off
Dear Myles,
Ten years ago, in a couple of months, I stepped onto a hot subway platform in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and found the courage to talk to a woman who would later become my wife. There are moments that leave me in awe. How no two leaves on any tree are exactly the same. How millions of us can look up at the same moon from different corners of the world. And how, in a city where six million people ride the subway everyday, I somehow met the woman I would spend the rest of my life with because we happened to be standing on the same platform, waiting for the same train.
You tell a story long enough, and it doesn’t start to feel as special anymore. But yesterday morning, as I watched you two sleep – you snoring wildly and your mother wrapped like a mummy in a blanket, even though the house to me is a little warm to me –I’m reminded of that day we meant.
I’m reminded that every story led to the one before you were born: when we decided to sell nearly everything we owned and move to Ethiopia, where, two months into a two-year contract, we finally conceived after two years of trying. I’m reminded of the days your mother longed for home instead of injera, and so I searched for a new job on spotty Wi-Fi until I found one that brought us to Birmingham, Alabama; the place where she grew up. A place I never imagined I’d live, but love can make a man move.
I’m reminded of how it felt like our house found us before we ever found it. As if the family who lived there before us had simply been taking care of it for eighty years, waiting for the day you, your mother, and I would finally call it home.
You tell a story long enough, and it doesn’t start to feel as special anymore. But I’m reminded that everything we have, and everything we built, started with us meeting on a subway platform. God does not play about us.
I try to remember this when I come home exhausted after a long day, desperately needing just 5 minutes to myself. I hear your little feet tapping in excitement as I pull into the driveway and you screaming, “Daddy’s home!” before I even open the front door. For a moment, I don’t feel tired anymore and instead feel like the most famous man alive, like I’m living in a sitcom. You run up to me as if you just didn’t see me just eight hours ago. Your mother kisses me, a little exhausted but a little relieved like the cavalry just arrived. The house is warm because it’s filled with love, laughter, and joy. And even when we get into it the way any family does, we always find our way back to each other whether it be over a smile, a tickle, a juice box, or even a toy.
If God did nothing else, He showed up and showed out. Because there are people who have all the money on the planet but have no one to love. There are people who have love but cannot find a home. There are people who have the money and the home but cannot conceive. But God saw it fit to give us all three. And when I look at my bank account and wish there was a little more, and wish our house were just a little bigger, I remind myself that if God does nothing else, He has already done it all.
And it started with your mother.
Parenting with someone you love is a gift. And although I didn’t see this in my own home growing up, having someone to love with, cry with, call your best friend, fold into each night, and raise a child with has made me understand love on a level my words never seem to capture.
Just as our steps found each other on a steamy subway platform, and just as the face of a sunflower always seems to find the sun, I pray our hearts always find each other too.
I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Love,
Daddy
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Let me know your thoughts:
What’s one small decision that completely changed the course of your life?
Where did you meet your person?
What’s a moment in your life that felt too perfectly timed to be a coincidence?
When do you feel richest, even if your bank account says otherwise?
How’s your heart?