On Daddy Time
It’s quiet time in our household. Six am and the house is hushed and quiet, save the occasional giggle and laugh or whatever other noise she uses at the moment to focus my attention. The walls pop and creak as the house stretches itself alive in the morning sun and the rays of a new dawn slowly cross the floor to bathe us in warmth and frame my favorite time of day.
It’s daddy time.
A ritual of accidental making, this is. It is partially of destiny and partially of design. Mom stayed up late and attended to her waning hours and in exchange I focus myself on the morning ones. Gone is the 5 am visit to the gym, gone are the quiet mornings sipping coffee and perusing emails. Gone is the hushed absence of the world as I gathered myself alone each and every morning.
I can’t say it’s missed.
Our mornings are spent getting lunch ready for brother, watching some cartoons, invariably playing a few of her games, which I can’t say I totally understand but I try to keep up. We sing (her) and dance (me) and create our own little space in time for each other. I cannot say there’s a better way to wake. We’ve taken what is handed us by life and made it a ritual we both have come to love.
It’s daddy time.
We sit on the couch sometimes and have conversations about the funniest of things. We laugh and giggle and roughhouse and do just about whatever it is we want to do. We sneak bites of things mommy wouldn’t approve of and roll about the floor. We get messy and for a brief moment in time, the world shrinks into it’s rightful place of irrelevance as my focus is centered on her.
We play blocks and cars and peek-a-boo and games we haven’t named. We have moments that are ours and will remain so, untold even to you or anyone else for that matter.
I could put on a show of it being about her, but that isn’t entirely true. No, it isn’t remotely true. It’s about me as much as it is about her. Daddy time is a blessing that cannot be measured in conventional terms. It is the time where I am relieved of the anxieties of the coming day, the stress of being a father, a husband, a breadwinner……a human. It’s a period of time that I am immersed in the distracting and absolving presence of another human who is just happy to………………be.
It’s pre-daddy time right now. And though I’m doing something I love, in this, I find myself anxious and excited for today’s installment. What will we learn? What will we play? What will the morning bring for us both? I don’t know. I have zero clue, she takes the lead and I follow and for those couple waking hours we become an inseparable duo in discovering anew the miracles and majesties of life here on planet earth.
Too easy it is to grow cynical about this life and our place in it. It is far too easy to lose our focus on the things that matter and focus on troubles and trials and tribulations. The world will come, it always will. It will be there at the door, in the next envelope, in the next email or phone call. The world will come. It’s inevitable. But it will have to wait.
It’s Daddy Time!
