A Lament
When things don’t go the way you dreamed
“Daddy,” my son said as we were getting ready for bed. “For Christmas, I want a kid.”
“Oh, Buddy. That’s not going to happen.”
“Oh. But I want to get a kid for Christmas.”
“Sure. But might wanna ask Santa for something else.”
He’s been on this kick of wanting a sibling.
He doesn’t know how biology works.
He thinks you just pick up random kids that you see playing in the streets.
That is not something we want him to keep thinking.
One time, he came up to us with a random picture of a kid he found on Google and said, “I want this one.”
“Yea. Buddy, it doesn’t work that way.”
I wonder if somewhere deep in his subconscious, he remembers that is how we kinda met.
Maybe he has a vague memory or a sense of walking into a room full of adults and then going home with two of them and just staying there permanently with those two strangers.
This season, he got to see his aunt’s belly grow.
We explained to him that is how babies come into the world.
We got to meet our little niece Evie and he asked his aunt, “Did the baby come from your stomach?”
Then when we got home, the conversation from the beginning of this post happened.
I got to hold Evie who was about a week old.
I have never held a baby that small.
They are so fragile and I am so clumsy.
I did not get to hold her older sister because Lily was born in the middle of the shutdown.
I figured if I do not hold Evie now I might never have the chance to hold a baby baby.
So I gently took her in my arms, making sure her neck and head were supported.
I could not believe how light she was.
It felt like I was holding a football, which got me thinking about… you know what? Never mind. But you know… nope. Sorry. On we go.
It was wild.
For that moment it was just me and little Evie.
And that got me into my feelings.
In my 20s I heard this quote about how everyone dies two deaths:
The first is the physical death.
The second is when nobody talks about you anymore.
When I first heard that I shrugged it off.
But as I have gotten older that quote lingers and has some weight.
The source of the weight is the reality that I will not have grandchildren to spoil.
Because if I do not have grandchildren, who will talk about me after I am gone?
And listen, I am writing this for public consumption as a form of lament.
Because I think we have lost the art of lamenting.
Decades ago I was confronted with the truth that we may never have biological children of our own.
That was a difficult confrontation. It was really difficult for me to let that reality go.
But that brought Nathanael into our lives.
And I would not change a single thing about our lives now (except more money and a fountain of youth, please 8lbs 6oz Baby Jesus!).
Nathanael has been such a tremendous joy and blessing.
And in sheer honesty, I do not think my son should procreate.
I honestly do not know how we will navigate the upcoming season of our lives.
I am sure at this time the hormones are raging, as is common for kids his age.
As much as I love this boy, him fathering children…
I mean, honestly, who knows, but I think I do.
I was surprised by the sadness of letting the idea of ever being grandparents go.
It is almost like being a grandparent is the reward for parenting your bratty, sassy, money draining but lovable (most of the time) kid into adulthood.
You are the number one spoiler of the kids.
You do things you never did with your children because other people’s kids are the best kind of kids.
You get the fun stuff and then send them home to their parents to deal with everything else.
I see the way grandparents beam when their grandkids arrive.
And I was surprised at how sad it made me to imagine never experiencing that.
But that sadness also opened the door to guilt about my parenting.
The thing that weighs on me most is that Nathanael is going to be the one that ends our generational trauma.
There are things I have not worked through and many times the innocent people around us receive the brunt of our unworked angst.
Richard Rohr was right. What you resist persists.
And it seeps into the lives of those around us.
I feel enormous guilt for not having worked through a lot of generational trauma (some of it I did not even know I was carrying) and passing it down to Nathanael.
I wonder, if Nathanael were typical, would I feel as guilty as I do today?
Children do not know how to interpret their caregivers’ anger or neglect or distraction.`
They are not formed enough to think, “Oh, Dad just had a bad day.”
They only know how to internalize it. “Dad is mad, I must be bad.”
And the thing about our 15 year old is that he is physically 15.
He is almost as tall as me. He has more facial hair than me. We have to be on him about deodorant because of BO.
But mentally he is not a teenager. He is a child.
And I cannot help but recall how Jesus described his Nathanael: Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.
I feel that way about my Nathanael. Innocent. And there is no deceit (at least the malicious kind).
So it eats at me how he may have processed it when I overreacted to trivial things.
And maybe that is what lament really is.
