Forever: A father’s thoughts for mother’s day

Our twenty-four-year-old son broke his leg, needed surgery, and would be laid up for a couple months. With crutches and cast, he could not work his job as a professional captain. He couldn't even get to his own place, up a long unpaved driveway on the side of a mountain. So he moved back in with us just as summer was finally budding after a long Maine winter.

 Parenting is forever. 

 Though he had moved out years before, his childhood bedroom remained a place where time stopped. It was just as he left it, forever ready for him to come home. And sometimes he did, to do laundry or even spend the night.

 For years my wife had yearned for her own art space in our small house, but we never had the room, or the time, until the winter I finally turned the boy's room into a studio for her.

 This house was already old when we moved in with a toddler and an infant. One of the first thigs we did was carpet their bedrooms for soft landings when rolling out of bed or wrestling in the floor. In ripping out the carpet and sanding to repaint the room decades later, some art on the closet door stopped me.  One of the boys had drawn a knight wielding a sword in the air, ready for battle. As I scraped and sanded every surface from the plaster ceiling to pine floor, I left the knight standing forever.

 My wife loved her new space with fresh paint and wooden floors. And yet - and I know for sure that this is true - there was an ache I saw emerge in her when our boys grew up and left. Though our nest became empty, it was still full of memories and relics our sons left behind. In her studio closet were still some clothes our son didn't wear anymore, one of his guitars, and a violin he wanted for Christmas one year. After the boys left, though she worked full-time, she wondered what her real job was.

 After being married thirty years, we started praying together. Getting sick, and scared, will do that. She did get better, but even if she hadn’t, I was grateful for the new way we started ending our days together. The intimacy and clarity from praying - together- at the end of our days was blessing I never could have asked for.  Words like forever and Amen made it easier to fall sleep. One night after the lights went out, she said "If I had to keep just one word for my life, the word would be mother."

 So naturally, when our son got hurt, his mother immediately offered her new room for him to come home and heal.  

 My wife and I laugh about which of us get different kinds of calls. We're about even in number, but I get the physical injuries and boat questions. "Dad, I think I broke my leg. Can you come get me and take me to the ER?" It is a blessing to have your son call when he's hurt. That's a strange thing to say, I know, for though we never want our kids to get hurt at any age. I called my wife at work with the news and that I'd be coming home late, with our son.

 After leaving the hospital, in spite of my unspoken judgement for getting hurt, curiosity got the best of me: "Did the attempted maneuver have a name?"

“Yeah. Blunt to fakie,” he said. I didn't ask him to describe it. In the moment I didn't want to hear the details of a trick for the young who are never going to get hurt or die. He said he'd done it a hundred times.

 Many years ago, a kid bombed on a skateboard down the steepest hill in the town where we lived on the California coast. My wife was shocked with alarm that switched to loving anger when she recognized, before I did, that the skater was one of our sons.

 We tried to turn around and chase him down, but caught in the flow of traffic, a precious minute went by. By the time we got back to the place he'd flown by us, he was long gone. He never even saw us, so enthralled he was in the gravity of the moment.

 Later, as a preamble to my fatherly scold, I shared my secret confession to him that my first response was admiration for his daring and confidence - until the moment I realized he was my son, whom I love and admire and want to live abundantly and to be well. Such is paradox of parenthood, perhaps especially so for fathers, who are not and can never be mothers. 

 One morning, a melody resonating with lament and longing descended into the kitchen as we had our morning coffee. With the carpet and padding from the boy's room gone, every sound from the old violin drifted into the wooden floor and through the plaster ceiling, as if our house itself was an instrument of the music.

The familiar tune had a few off notes as fingers felt their way to the right places. I looked at my wife, still seeing the twenty-seven-year-old beauty on the day we met. Then she, the mother of our sons, reminded me that sixty was coming upon us. How could such a thing be? They were just born two weeks ago! The melody, the moment, and a flood of memories from all the years we'd shared in the adventure of marriage and parenthood floored me again.  "Thanks for being such a wonderful mother of our sons - and for making me a father."

“You're welcome," she smiled.  For reasons I could never explain, a deeper understanding of a most familiar word at the end of our prayers came back and filled me with gratitude. What a lovely word is forever.