July 10

Hey, watch this!

I wait for your wings to grow
because something always comes next.

In the kitchen I’m busy with wrinkle-watered hands
As you crawl and open and learn new sounds
(even sudsy, I know your living-room ways)
and I know just when my minute is up
so I let drip-dry the last plastic cup and enter the room
where Fischer Price is the latest décor and I go to you
(scanning stereo wires still intact)
and my eyes find the coffee table—
you’re standing, rocking and baby talking when only yesterday
you stared upwards from the ground.
I say your name in my proudest voice
and you smile at me in your proudest way
and I get on my knees to play your game
because I can think of nothing better
than feeling proud close to the ground;
that way I can catch you if you fall
or if you decide to fly away.

“My patience, resolutions and beliefs are tested to the limits – sometimes daily.”^*

Right at this moment one of my challenges is the constant, tuneless whistling from my elder son. When my boys were babies it was getting them to sleep or trying to figure out why they were crying. On any given day now, it might be squabbling, fighting, teasing, screaming, shouting or rudeness. Who’d be a parent? We might well question ourselves after the event, but we can’t very well put them back! Just how we find those inner resources, how we constantly demand more of ourselves, how we keep marching up that hill with a smile on our face and gladness in our heart at the sight of our ‘babies’ is one of life’s mysteries.

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