Today is Thursday, November 1, 2007
Lizzie’s birthday, her seventeenth.
And I want to start off by thanking God for her and for my whole family and everything. iverthang.
Maybe this is an opportunity to enumerate all of Elizabeth’s particular features, for which I’m grateful:
first, that she exists.
That she was born at all is a miracle.
I guess that’s true for all of us in a sense, but in her case, anyone who knows us will know what I’m talking about.
She’s had a few health challenges in her life
when she was less than a year old, she had pneumonia and that gave us a scare.
Anytime you have a sick baby,
she had a lot of ear infections when she was little which caused us some grief,
but once we got the tubes in everything was fine.
She had a bout of scoliosis,
which was pretty severe, but again I’m thankful we live in a day and age
where the screening for that is quite proactive.
And I guess it happened in a hurry — they screen them every year,
I guess it became quite pronounced within one year, between examinations
But we got that taken care of,
and from all the research that we could do
we were fortunate enough to have access to possibly the number one facility in the world for treating that condition.
And she’s all righty tighty, she’s all squared away.
But that’s not even a fraction of what I want to talk about.
Elizabeth has some wonderful attributes that
endear her not only to me but to many people.
And I can honestly say that I’ve learned a lot from her,
I’ve learned a lot from both of my children,
and I think that’s something for which I’m grateful —
that I even have the capacity to learn at this stage.
I think I’m kind of a late bloomer, so my calendar age
is maybe not what you think of ..
I’m not in a phase physically, mentally, or psychologically that you might
stereotypically think of someone my age.
But I think also my career has forced me, sometimes against my will,
to be flexible and adaptable and continue to learn.
And so maybe I have some capacities there.
But also the lessons I am being taught by these kids are very compelling.
It occurs to me I may have recorded this before, but I guess it bears repeating,
what I’ve learned from Elizabeth:
I think I’ll start with her capacity for reconciliation or counseling.
She’s a fun person,
she’s got a great sense of humor,
but she’s a really good listener.
I think she gets that from her mother. Her mother – Anita’s really good at that too.
But maybe I’m too close, I’m close to both of them, but I get more of Anita when she’s listening to me. What I mean is she’s got her own unique perspectives and wishes and things like that, but anyway she’s a very good listener, and Elizabeth has that attribute as well.
But ever since she was little I always felt I could talk to her as if she was an adult,
and Elizabeth responds as an intelligent, good humored, good natured, sensitive adult.
She was wise in a precocious way, and it was funny to hear such thoughtful things coming out of the mouth of such a cute little kid like she was. We used to call her an “old soul.”
And now she’s seventeen and I think by some measures she actually is an adult, but you have this concept of adolescence, becoming an adult, and we’re all, every one of us in the process of becoming something else, so I don’t know if its fair to say that adolescence ever ends, or your human-escence — I just coined a word — becoming a human being — your humanness is always in a state of development.
And so in that sense she’s still becoming an adult but in another sense she already is one and has been for some time.
Of course she’s brilliant.
Elizabeth has the whole package: she’s beautiful, she’s smart, she’s got a good heart, she’s good natured, … and she makes me feel like maybe my life is worth something after all.
When I look at her, when I hug my wife and we say together “we made that!”
And the world is a better place because this person is in it.
And I love her without bound, without limit, and in ways, as a father, that … I don’t know about other people, I can just tell you that I myself could not have imagined the devotion that a parent feels for a child until I became one. I didn’t know such love existed. Although in retrospect I probably should have known, no doubt my parents loved me in just the same way, and I didn’t appreciate it. And it makes me want to go back to them and tell them, “now I get it! thanks for everything!”
I knew what love was, love of a romantic nature, desire, those sorts of things. But this is different.
So I conclude with another prayer: if God loves us half as much as I love my children, we are going to be o.k.