Thank you for my Gift

I used to think that as a parent, it was my job to impart Gifts to my children.  Not the gifts that Santa brings, but the type of Gifts that will live on long after I am gone. I provide them with love and support.  I teach them everything, from walking and talking to how to be a kind and generous person, a responsible citizen, a respected worker, a loving spouse, and a selfless parent.  I viewed the love of parent and child pulsating between two hearts-glowing and magnitizing-but stronger and brighter in one direction.  As a child myself, I have often wondered if my parents have any idea how deeply I love them...yet as a parent, I understand the profound deepness of parental love.  A child's job is simply to love, grow up, and grow away.  A parent's job is to love, to teach, and to stay still.  We are lighthouses atop a rock-a stable beacon of safety and security for our children so that while they may wander, they may always find their way home.

Of course, as parents, we know that it is ridiculous to think our children don't teach us.  Our children teach us every day.  We learn patience and humility, selflessness and humor.  We learn to recapture innocence.  Our children force us to cast off our glasses, smeared and chipped from the smog and hardships of life so we can see life with the same brilliance they see- dazzling and sparkling under the virgin sun...all of it wondrous and new.  It is in these moments that I am overwhelmed by parenthood.  I am weightless in the joy and warmth.

We also know that our children are our beacon of light.  Yesterday I was changing my son's clothes and gave him a kiss on his belly.  He roared with laughter and shouted, "Again!"  I chuckled and repeated....and repeated...and repeated....and repeated.  We were stuck in a moment that will now forever be part of my fabric-his damp baby breath soft on my cheek, his warm hands on my face, and his sweet baby scent swirling and mixing with his laughter as it hung around us.  We were nose to nose, giggling, breathing each other.  In that moment, I was struck that my children are my Gift, straight from God.  These moments are what Heaven feels like, smells like, sounds like.  In that sliver of space between my nose and his-where we connect as one, in the absence of time and the abundance of light-that is where God lives.   In those moments, God shines through my children to show me the way home.

I know that moment wasn't a gift to my son because that moment has already passed through him, indistinguishable from thousands of other moments.  That moment was a gift meant for me-a moment captured with my breath and absorbed by my heart.

So while I give my children the Gifts they will need to grow and live well, they give me the Gift of Heaven on Earth each day. They help me to see as a child sees, as angels see, as God sees.  Every day they walk me closer to Heaven.  While I have been focusing on giving them the Gifts that will sustain them long after I am gone, they have been giving me the gift of Eternity.