Father's Day Letter to Grayson
Happy Father's Day Grayson,
This morning and last night has been given over to a long rain, and now at mid-morning the damp air has the pressing company of the sun within it. The day at present, emersed in a freshness with the wet and happy sparrows, is at the same time opening to the promise of a lazy humidity. Our dog Daisy has now begun, in short intervals, to pant already as the streets and sidewalks dry. Many days have been plated and served up to us since my last letter to you;each season delivering faithfully its brand of transformation, even as seasons mix without their days delineated.
As Father's Day approaches this Sunday I am thinking about your becoming a young boy. I remember mornings seeing you lay in bed and thinking that you had become so long, but I am not sure when that stretching happened specifically. I remember looking at your face and thinking, he is looking like a little boy, but what has changed, really...his nose or forehead? What marks the change specifically? When did that happen? Many changes have been plated and served up. Few if any of those transformations can be marked distinctively. Growth for us is complex and mysterious. Many of our enormous and monumental shifts- like the multiplication of our cells thousands of times transforming us from infant into a young child, delivers us faithfully to the elusive edges of the next promise. Looking at it as if a growing child in tangled bed sheets, we cannot be sure how we got to that growth. Even so, not in a million years would ever get to five years old by our own wits,-which is funny. All of us are taken through that growth as a child, and as we grow it all happens with us only a little conscious of it all. That is sacred.
Somewhere along the way you grew into a five-year old. Along the way you began Kindergarten making the journey in the school-bus with Bronwyn in September. I wept quietly before the prospect of a long journey. A mourning dove rescued from a frozen streetside storm-grate by Bronwyn and Grammie was named by you... “Spunk”. You sang him inspirational songs, and read a children's book about all the different kinds of people in the world before we launched it back to the frozen hill behind our house the next day. Your attentiveness was profound. You became quite conscious of being a Preacher's Kid this year. You remarked quite proudly to a couple of long-standing members of Eden Mills United Church, that, “my father's a minister you know. And he has four churches”. The things you are proud of are larger than life itself! You still show a profound awareness of the need to make apologies in order to right relationships, and I am still humbled by how open you are to receiving apologies and how ready grace is inside of you to make way for a new beginning with people. Last Christmas you were the Shepherd in the Sunday School Pageant, and had worked all week memorizing your line. Through some mix up you ended up missing your one line, so gave it as a Commissioning at the end of the service. Perhaps it was the most fitting I've ever heard or given myself! Someone said to me a little while ago, “Grayson...he is very...zen”. You do have a gentle detachment in your personality. This allows you to accept the next moment as it comes. Mystery surrounds your growing capacity for grace and improvisation, balance and resolve; when was it seeded in your life. We took your training wheels off this spring and three hours later you were on your first long ride to Uncle Donny's house on the other side of Derry Road, then a few weeks later we rode to Rotary Park in downtown Milton. You were in great humour all the way in spite of me rushing you and haranguing you about watching for cars and staying close.
You have grown, and me along with you, but not so steadfastly. It seems growth at my age is something we lay our lives down to only by intention. We are apt to stay in the same well worn ruts unless we surrender to the transformation that is trying to pry itself into our blue print of life. In my dreams I wrestle with you being hit by a bus, or being lost in a mall, and once you were an outcaste because of your birth and origins. You were left to starve. I had to choose between you and the larger family. Once I tried to put you out of your misery. Unsuccessful and relieved, I went back to you, looked at your gracious face and told you I would never leave you again. You and I went away together, neither of us outcasts being that we had each other. My dreams are about my limitations as a parent, the last one being about my short comings as a father and the opportunity that persists yet, dragging me by the hair of my regret to embrace birth and the fullness of life as a parent. In short to entrust my fatherhood to the season of growth- as long and in whatever form that is to take from here.
I need to remember always that your growth is quick but mostly seen only in sideways glances if recognized at all. It is different when we are older. We catch glimpses of ourselves in the mirror and somehow are less apt to think we are growing. We talk to ourselves about how we might hold onto and maintain what we have.
This year, again, I come with the knowledge that my patience is the area of my life that growth has been trying to happen. I remember mornings trying to get you and Bronwyn to the school bus on time. Once in the dead of winter minutes before the bus was to arrive, I noticed you didn't have your mitts on. I was quite sure I was going down in history as the nagging father, but that morning I was convinced, and I yelled as if that would help. You went looking for your mitts amidst my rant and came back with them on your hands, holding them out cupped as if waiting me to fill them with sand or smarties. It was mercy you were looking for, and then you opened those hands and hugged my legs. “Daddy” you said, “I am sorry I make you angry. I love you very much”. I grabbed your little body wrapped in snow jacket and snow pants and said sorry too. I will try harder to be patient. Has there been a call to growth put more plainly, ever? Yet patience still did not come, except in it's insistence that it must be born. There were more moments when mercy would be exchanged. Such momentsfor both of us, all of us, rest on the words “mercy” and “hope”. Little by little I learned to “chunk” the tasks of the morning, so that we were more efficient in one area and there was a reduction of stress and less need for patience actually! It took three months of constant reminders that you not come to the breakfast table in your pyjamas. I noticed last month that you will now come down suited for the day. I am not sure when that growth happened but I suspect it was happening over a long period of time, before I saw it squarely. Patience is about living with something for a while longer than we would choose to. Eventually, I was surprised to notice, growth had happened. Never did it follow my time-line, and never was it's work entirely finished.
Taking my queue from you, I must be reminded that like any growth there is no one moment one can point at and say, “there, I have arrived; patience has grown within me”. I want it to be like that, and am impatient with myself because I cannot fabricate and make manifest the gift soon enough, and rise with brilliance before the important moments when I have sensed afterwards that I needed the gift most. Growth is still elusive, and its time-line is given from a source outside ourselves. I can only hope that, like passing from an infant into a young boy, there will come a time when, surely, I have arrived at the place growth has been so long calling me to.
The afternoon has passed by as I have written this letter on our front porch. I have had to go inside twice for fear of rain. It never materialized, and I returned twice to my perch amidst the threat of continued rain and the pressing promise of the sun and its child – humidity. What are we in for with tis weather today? As father's Day approaches I think about your growth, my growth, the elusive boundaries that separate the transformations that happen in us and without us. Surely though, growth takes us all into the future with its own time-line but always with hope that renewal is what life is bringing us closer to.
You are growing my child. I notice it from the corner of my eyes. A sideways glance in the mirror and I know that you lead me, well, into a future where I will be known as God knows me...in truth and fully in love.
Happy Father's Day my son,
Grace and Love!
Daddy
