Man – had one of those moments where I hugged one of the kids who was still sleepy and vulnerable and it took me back to when she was a baby and that armor you grow as a parent around your heart to deal with the day to day of parenting broke a little and cracked.
It’s the armor you grow when you’re going through something with them or because of them. It’s the armor you grow when someone bullies her or calls her a slur at school. It’s the armor you wear when someone breaks her heart or she breaks your heart or the one you put on when you take her to emergency room for the first, second or third time because above all else, through all this, you had to be strong enough to help her lest you fall apart.
It’s the armor you wear when you go out in the world to deal with those who don’t see you or regard or treat you like a human being. It’s the armor you don when your heart cried so long ago in the past from your own childhood heartbreaks or those from friends or loved ones or flames that scorched your heart forever ago so badly that you had to armor that place so much harder to protect the scar from the wound.
It’s the armor that shields you so you can move and breathe and stumble through the day, gives you the strength to push forward through disappointment, through the malaise of the world that once seemed friendly but now forever broken, not just broken, but even more so for her. And through the cracks of that armor, cast off through the memory of that child, at her weakest, her feeblest, her littlest in my arms, I was consumed by a love more transient than the earth, the sky, a love deeper, more brighter than the darkest abyss.
It’s the love of the first hiccup you hear, that first gasping cry, the first bottle, the first walk, the first crawl. It’s the love of surviving that first real emergency or going through your child’s first suffering and her first heartbreak. It’s the love of the first time she hugs you or plants a little baby kiss on the cheek or calls you mommy or daddy or falls face-first on the pavement. It’s that love you have when you hold her because it’s the first time she cried because she doesn’t understand the cruelty the world taught her or why something happened to her that caused her so much pain. It’s the love you feel the first time you enjoy yet suffer sending her to school or when you smile when she mashes her hands in cake for the first time, smiling a largely toothless smile, eyes aglow with the terror she unleashed on that poor confectionery. From an unarmored heart, an unprepared, unready, unexpectant heart, it was nearly devastating. And it felt like I had to send her to school for the first time all over again.