The other night I engaged in my nightly pre-bed ritual of quietly tiptoeing into the boys' rooms. I walk over to their beds where, God willing, they're fast asleep. I lay my hand on their heads, just for a second or two. I don't really say or do anything, but I guess it's kind of a prayer of sorts. A parental blessing to end the day.
When I went into our oldest son's room, who turned 9 this week, I lingered a bit. Something was keeping me there. And then I heard it - well, in my head I heard it. A question from my past, dragged out of my subconscious:
Do we really want to bring a child into this mess?
It was my wife who posed it, many years before. She was the braver one, to be honest - brave enough to voice the question that'd been rattling around in both our brains in recent weeks but had, up until that moment, remained unspoken.
Even before we got married, we knew we wanted kids. Eventually. A few years to ourselves would be wise; get used to each other and this lifelong dance known as marriage. But over that summer, things had taken a turn. Conversations about having kids had gone from strictly hypothetical to more imminent. As much as we ever could be, we were ready.
And then 9-11 happened.
When severly misguided and sick men fly loaded commercial jets straight into skyscrapers and government buildings and a Pennsylvania field, it can't help but cause you to second-guess your convictions. And one of those convictions, for us at least, was being parents. It's hard enough bringing a child into the world and dealing with paying for college and feeding and clothing them, and that strong desire to shield them from anything that would do them harm. There's a certain accepted level of uncertainty to life. But after the morning of September 11th, uncertainty kind of burst through the floodgates and saturated us.
The question came a week or so after it happened. It was a legitimate question. Why would we want to subject anyone, much less our own flesh and blood, to the sick world outside our doors? It was hard enough making heads or tails of all things post-9-11 as a grown adult. How could we ever expect a kid to deal with it?
In the end we realized that, on the contrary, this was the perfect time to have a child. It was our dream, our calling to be parents. And to give up on that dream would mean letting the terrorists win. Because the truth of the matter is that they never really were after buildings and a body count. They wanted to strike at the very heart of our soul. And we weren't going to let them do that.
**************
Fast forward a few months. My wife talked me into going to see some new movie about a kid named Harry Potter. Kind of strange, two grown adults at a kids movie; but it seemed important to her. Afterwards we dined at the Schlotsky's Deli down the street - good stuff. We got into the car in the deli parking lot and I asked if there was anywhere she wanted to go before we headed home. How about Babies R Us? she asked excitedly, with a noticeable sheepish grin on her face. I was confused at first. Why in the world would we ever need to go to.....
Oh.....!
And that's how my wife told me she was pregnant with our first child.
**************
It was the morning of September 11, 2002. I was parked in front of TV, and every channel that morning carried the one-year memorial observance at Ground Zero. Amazing how beautiful the day was, just like before. It had been a busy year, a jam-packed year. And yet watching the television, the horror of that morning came flooding back to me as if it had happened yesterday.
There was something different this time around, though. I was holding our two-day old son in my arms.
We were at the hospital, and we were getting ready to go home. My wife was in the room packing her bag. Any minute now the nurse would come with the wheelchair, and our family - now three strong - would head to our car parked right outside the hospital front door, courtesy of some strange kindness called "valet service." We were prepping to leave the comfort and security of the hospital, the nurses and doctors who knew far more about taking care of a newborn than we did. We were going out into the world that, just a year ago, seemed like it was falling apart.
I held our firstborn son and couldn't stop staring at him, then I glanced up at the TV and the memorial service, then back at our son. And then I understood:
The terrorists lost.
Hope comes, as it always does, in new life.
Recent Comments