Remembering

So, after a week of bumming around Iowa with us, my husband has returned to the Northwest to continue working. It's hard to believe that we are already to this point of our journey, it seemed so far off when we started out and here we are, almost August and soon we will all be back around Seattle settling into our little campsite.

I'm staying with my folks, but I'm suddenly in the role of the single mother, not a moment to rest with barely time to think. Baby girl noticed her dad's leaving and got extra clingy, and the little man expressed his sadness many times. So, today we went online and chatted via Skype, which is a video chat. The sweetest moment a parent can experience happened today as we opened the Skype and called Nate. Once his face popped up on the screen baby girl started hollering ‘dada!, dada!’ and clapping her hands. I’m not sure where she thought he had gone, but seeing him again brought forth a visceral reaction that I didn’t expect. She smiled and giggled and tried to touch his face on the screen. They have a beautiful father/daughter kinship that was made so evident today that it gave me goosebumps watching this all unfold. It’s hard as an adult to keep in mind the developing perspective of babies and toddlers. Our 4 year old kind of gets that his dad is gone, but we’ll see him in a couple weeks. So while he doesn’t really like this reality, he still knows that dad is alive somewhere. I’m not sure that our 1 year old understood that. She got to say good bye at the airport and watch him walk away, but based on her reaction today, she may have thought he had just disappeared. To my well aged mind, it’s old hat, people come and leave and some of them come back, nothing to be concerned about, but to a one year old it’s as if an integral piece of her life just fell off the face of the earth. But is does make me think that sometimes we do act like we are still in the stage of a one year old. We know people who have moved, or who we have moved from, still exist, and we appreciate their influence on our lives, but when they are gone we forget. We don’t forget how much we loved those people and what they meant to us, yet we do forget that they too are somewhere else, living life, and moving on, maybe even wondering what we’re up to.

This weekend we attended our old church on Sunday. Nate was the youth pastor there and I was the church secretary during our first year of marriage. It is the singular place that impacted the course of our life and faith journey. That’s not to say there hasn’t been other points of influence, but this is our home. This is where our old views were knocked down so we could see the towering heights behind the shrubs. From here we began our journey, the one we are on now, and it’s from here that we pursued certain courses of action and communities. So when we return, I am always teetering on the edge of complete joy, and total sadness. Joy that we are indeed home, in a place that revives our souls with fresh water and sadness that too easily we forget this place, and too quickly we are again dried out. There are some people in the world that I would like to miniturize, stick in my pocket and carry around with me everywhere so that I could pull them out in moments of doubt or despair to let them whisper words of life and hope into my being. So, instead, we renewed a vow to keep in touch better and use the good old telephone. And I want to remember. I want to grow out of my infant self, forgetful of others and mindful, much too mindful of self. So I wonder, do we make ourselves grow up, or does it just happen? Does it just happen during these moments of realization, times of widening perspective during which we lean across to other human beings and simply say I love you, you exist, you are more important than me? Or do we have to work at it, remind ourselves, continually remove ourselves from the center of our minds and little galaxies to shatter what comes between us?

To the county fair tomorrow, it should be interesting. Hot, dusty, and full of interesting people.