Your hands are tiny and pudgy, but someday you'll have long, strong, browned fingers like your dad's.Your face is round and dimpled, but with our lines mixed someday that chin will become strong and your nose will be cartoonishly large and straight. You are a tiny person who will be a big person. You are a baby who will be a man, a warrior, a leader, a laugher, a sufferer, a hero, a friend. I hold these tiny hands and smile into your grinning baby face and I know I have you now, but I won't have you always.
What does it mean to be the person holding a baby, and with him the promise of all he'll be? To be the one tasked with never forgetting that he must be strong and wise and good?
What will it mean to be the person who waves goodbye to a man, who follows him in newspaper clippings and long-awaited phone calls, who mourns his sufferings in the face of evil and delights in his success and his strength, but always remembers that he was a baby, that his hands were little in mine and I held him and he's gone?
I don't know. I am new, and young, and the bigness of life and the littleness of you tower over me like an anvil cloud, an unscalable mountain, a pillar of fire.
Today you're little. I'll cuddle you to sleep tonight, wash your dimpled hands tomorrow, kiss your tears away the day after that and after that and after that. I will watch you become, step by step, the hero you were made to be. And I will let you go.
What will it mean to be the person who waves goodbye to a man, who follows him in newspaper clippings and long-awaited phone calls, who mourns his sufferings in the face of evil and delights in his success and his strength, but always remembers that he was a baby, that his hands were little in mine and I held him and he's gone?
I don't know. I am new, and young, and the bigness of life and the littleness of you tower over me like an anvil cloud, an unscalable mountain, a pillar of fire.
Today you're little. I'll cuddle you to sleep tonight, wash your dimpled hands tomorrow, kiss your tears away the day after that and after that and after that. I will watch you become, step by step, the hero you were made to be. And I will let you go.
When you can, please, come back. I will be old, and softer still. Let me hug you again, stand on tip-toe to kiss your stubbled cheek, stare again into your eyes, whatever color they grow to be. Let me hold your hand and remember that you are the one who was little.
Because I will be holding little you in my heart for the rest of my life.
