First Day

     I don't know whether I'll keep up with this or not.  We'll all just have to wait and see.

     Today, though, it seems like a good idea.

     Now realize this going in: I'm going to have to be pretty light on the details.  The stories I'm living are not going to mine to tell during this experience.  They will be stories that belong to small ones who don't even realize that stories are unfolding right now much less that they are the main characters in them.  As such, I will leave those stories to them that they may tell them when they decide the time is right.

     No, here I will only be able to convey the nebulous.  My feelings.  My reactions.  My struggle.  This morning, for example, I struggle to hold back tears at the injustice that has brought our world to this point.  I struggle to understand how a parent could make decisions so poor that the society around them feels the right and the obligation to enter their home, abscond with their children, and terminate their right to ever see the children again.

     I struggle to comprehend the sheer outpouring of love that I see on my wife's Facebook feed, as she posts that babies have finally arrived after the arduous process of classes and forms and inspections and all the rest that eventually leads to licensure.  She posted last night that they are here - home, for now.  And "friends" from folks we've always known to people who she's only ever known as the sum of zeroes and ones on a monitor send their love.  They ask how they can help and a discussion of sizes and socks and gift cards ensues.  I have to hold back tears, as I grope for an appropriate reaction to this, the other side of society.  The side that sees a need and wants to fill it.  The side that sees a child and wants to give love in whatever available form.

    And I wonder how the equation - no, it's an inequality, I think more and more - ever became.  What? It's human nature? Good and evil?  I don't know.  How can Person A look down, see his own eyes looking back at him from within the cherubic face of a child who is just old enough to walk, and turn his back for either his own gluttony or through his ignorance of the right?  And how can Person B look down at a computer screen, "follow" a person she's never met, then months or years later read that - despite all of the previous outpouring of love and generosity - a need remains, and immediately reach down into her imagination to find a way to send help in whatever way she can?  And how can these two people even exist in the same world?

     I don't know if this is helping or not.  I can't tell, yet.  What I have learned this morning (and what I've always kind of known about myself in a very general way) is that the tears threaten to come harder and more certainly when I describe the love and kindess side of the puzzle.  When I think of the place from whence these little ones have come, there is a small spur of anger, a smattering of pity (NOT my favorite emotion to experience), and a lot of empathetic regret.  The regret I know I would feel if I ever lost my way to such extent that my loved ones had to be forcibly taken from me.

   I'll try to let you know how it goes.