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Editor's Note
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The closest I felt to Christopher was in his time of greatest need. As a baby, today's nearly 6-year-old was at CHOC with meningitis. He's not a good patient, and I carried him up and down the hallways for some time to comfort him. He was a ball of baby fat and illness, and being there for Christopher meant much to me. With maturity, he has moved particularly close to his mom, in some ways the most needy of our three children. And that has left less time to pay attention to Dad. Truth be told, when I look at our three boys, he is the one I know will require the most direction. And I'm willing. I've just been waiting to get his attention. That may have come recently, when I told him I was off to Yosemite for three days with some buddies. "Will you be gone forever?" he asked. I joked to my wife that perhaps his question was wishful thinking, but those words stayed with me on the drive up north, on the hike to Half Dome, atop Half Dome, and on the way home. So it was nice to get a big hug from him when we arrived home on a Sunday night. It was a surprise, two nights later, to get a bigger hug when my wife and I returned from a too-brief date. Maybe this comes with age. Christopher and his twin brother, Nathan, have just grasped the idea of loss. They understand that life is not a perfect bowl of Cheerios. The possibility exists that "bad things" can happen, and in their innocent way of trying to make sure that everybody is always near, all the time, they've come to realize that sometimes that circle of life breaks. This happened a few days ago when Stormy, the pet hamster, died. Christopher wept as he ran to cut a flower from the garden, his voice shaking: "Breathe, Stormy, breathe." Subconsciously, if not yet intellectually, they've considered life without a parent. This may explain Christopher's sudden discovery that Dad is fun to be around. He may not want to sit with me when watching a movie, and he just isn't interested in being rocked anymore. But his conversations at me - particularly the long explanations about the little things - have begun in earnest in the past several days. I don't know if this is a passing fancy or the real thing, the real thing being a real close connection. For me, reaching out began the day he was born; it grew strong when I held his feverish body at the hospital. We may now be at a new point, where the idea of kissing the hurt to make it go away can be a deal point with Dad, as it is with Mom. We may be there, at least until the teen years. |
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