Last Monday

​Danielle carried him out of the bedroom, his hair tousled from a restless night. He smiled and his eyebrows wrapped around his face in a cartoonish sort of way. Today is the last Monday I’ll count Pax’s age using months. Next Monday, he’ll be a year and two days old. It will also be Christmas Eve, and the day we brought him home from the hospital.

It’s serendipitous that we came home from the hospital on Christmas Eve, baby in tow, preparing to celebrate another baby. Saint Ephrem the Syrian said that at Christmas a baby grabs the reigns of the universe.i  Our reigns were also taken by a seven and a half pound ball of flesh—though, in a less cosmic sort of way.

All babies, not just the salvific kind, wield tremendous amounts of power.  A newborn’s yawn disarms the hardest soul. Go ahead and try not to smile. A child’s complete reliance demands every minute of your day. All of it. It’s a full-time job and not a once a week, for an hour, kind of a thing. All hail King Baby. I’ve had pregnant friends tell me, “I’m going to make my baby’s schedule when she’s born. I’ll still have a life outside of baby.”  And that’s when the universe gives them a baby with colic.

When we were pregnant with Eden, one friend put it to me like this: “Every day is more difficult, but I can’t imagine life any other way.” That seems right. And I think I could say the same thing about anything that really matters.

Luckily, Paxton has been gentle with the reigns, by not pulling them as taut as he might. There has been plenty of slack—quiet dinners out, decent sleep, and self-entertainment. Still, he holds the reigns. All it takes is one missed nap or an incoming tooth and I remember that I don’t captain this ship. This morning, I set up a barricade around outlets and wires because he was chewing on an I-Phone cable like a wad of bubble gum. To spite me, Pax staggered straight to the coffee table and swiped my cup of coffee to the ground.

“Uh oh!” he chirps.

It’s an apt first phrase for our species. We come into this world delicate and beautiful, and while the beauty remains, we immediately start making a mess of things. Or, maybe it’s parents who make a mess of their children. That will depend on your theology of original sin and sin, or maybe Family Systems Theory.  What’s clear is that children are more like bulldozers than flowers. Last month, I gave Paxton the silent treatment for half a day when he pulled my computer off the table and caused irreparable damage to the hard drive. Uh oh.

​And he smiled. He smiles all the time.
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My favorite part of Monday is putting him to sleep. Pax reclined on me, facing outward, nestled into me like I’m a La-Z-Boy. The soft, morning light shone through the crack between the broken, crooked curtain and window casing. He grabbed my finger like it was a life preserver before he sunk into deep waves of sleep. His shirt rode up and his rolls hung over the elastic waistband. I’d have laughed if it wouldn’t wake him. Most mornings he hits himself in the face to stay awake, or he flicks his bottom lip up and down, but today his eyes rolled around, flipped upward, and eventually closed. He snored like an old man.

When Paxton woke up from his nap he cried out, “Uh oh!” (I usually feel the same way). He woke up crying after his second nap, because he wasn't quite ready. He quickly fell back asleep to Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Daytime consists of the simplest forms of entertainment: standing and falling. He pinballs from the coffee table to the couch, to the side table. He falls over. Most of the time he’s looking to swallow some object that will end his short life. I’ve already pried the remote control from his hands twice, as he tried to pry out the silver batteries. I chased him when he crawled down the hallway. He stopped, turned his head, and giggled. Then, he kept crawling away.

Nothing’s extraordinary, but everything is extraordinary. Nothing’s unique, but everything is unique. Objectivity doesn’t exist with your children. As far as I’m concerned, mine are the best. Is that how God looks at us? I wish I could look at others in the same way.
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When we walk into Eden’s school to pick her up from class, Pax grabs my left thumb when someone starts talking to us. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s reassuring for both of us—we’ll survive the small talk. Pax misses his sister on Mondays. She makes him laugh like no one else. Eden misses him, too, I think. She ran to him, wrapped her arms around him, planted one on his cheek, rammed her fingers under his flabby arms and said, “tickle tickle.” At home, he laughed when Eden asked Alexa to play Can’t Stop the Feeling. He flung his arms in the air just like her.

My life has the potential to be interrupted by a flash mob of dancing and I'd have it no other way. 

I should mention that Pax eats—he eats a lot. If there’s a plate in front of him, and food is on it, then life is good. When he wants more to eat he says, “Mmmm,” which isn’t at all demanding. It’s more like a southern-passive way of asking for more food. I interpret it like this: “Mmmm. That apple pie sure was great. It’s a shame I only got one slice.” We gave him strawberries, rice, and other vegetables that he shoveled into his mouth by the fistful.
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​The day ended soon, but not too soon.

I work night hours so I had to leave right after dinner.  I made it home to hear a story with Eden, but Pax was already down for the night—at least, the first shift of the night. He ended up in our bed at some point and we wrestled with the dark until his eyes rose to meet the sun and we rose to meet him. Almost a year ago we held him in our arms on winter solstice, the longest night of the year, just as the sun rose. With every passing day and year, the sun rises a little more over horizon revealing who he is and who he is becoming—who we are all becoming—it happens Monday after Monday.



i. This was Jason Byassee's observation here

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