Sunday, December 17, 2006

The love of a child

When I was 15, I wrote an essay called "The Desire to Bear"...

In that essay, I analyzed what I thought were the reasons why I felt like I had a strong desire to be a father so early in life. Later in life, in a church talk (I think it was on mothers), I talked about a memory I had when I had just starting understanding how life works--how people are born, grow up, and have babies of their own. I understood that each baby had a mommy and a daddy. Girls grew up to be mommies and boys grew up to be daddies. Since I was a boy, I would grow up to be a daddy. This line of thought made sense. But there was a problem. Being an honest, innocent child, I had no problem in admitting that I "loved" my mommy more than my daddy. This caused great alarm to my simple mind, as I came to understand that my children would never love me as much as they would their mommy.

I have since grown up, done many things, married, and now have two children. I now understand that my understanding of "love" as a child more similarly resembled "like". At least, that is my hope. A common occurence in our home is wanting to go from daddy to mommy, referring to mommy as the boss, or not believing something that daddy says until mommy confirms it.

However, I had a bit of a treat today, as Kiya, our 8-month old, seemed to have occassional fits of wanting her daddy. It was rather strange, but very welcomed. There is something about a baby clinging to you. I soak up such moments, fully realizing that someday I may be lucky to get her even to want to talk to me.




1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lucy has always been a little Daddy's girl. I love it.