I recently plopped down on the couch with our youngest. He’s a wild child. He turns 2 this summer and he can’t seem to make it a day without plowing head-first into something.
He likes to sit down on the couch next to me with a book. In this instance, he flipped it open and moved his fingers through some of the pages before I noticed his movements slowing.
Shortly after that I felt his head dip and then spring back up as he caught himself. He was falling asleep. Noticing this, I turned him toward me. He quickly obliged and rested his head on my chest.
The first thing I felt was his weight. I smiled. His legs were bent around me just right, his arms tucked around my sides. He was settled in for a nap and I was here for it.
I heard the little mouth-breather not long after. Heavy breaths, in and out, his back rising and dropping with my chest. “One day he’ll be able to smother me”, I thought.
That day isn’t here yet.
For now I’ll take the slight discomfort on my collar bone. I’ll gladly trade it for an hour of nap snuggles, maybe more. My brain fired off another thought, “this is what everyone says they miss”.
His little warm body comforted me in that thought. I was thinking I should try to lay him in his bed, to no avail. He instantly woke with outstretched arms. He wanted me to pick him back up.
I did. He fell asleep. Again. So I retreated back to the couch, back to feeling his warm weight on me. Like a soothing blanket.
I thought about how much I love him. There’s nothing in this world that replaces this bond.
No amount of money. No vastness of cold metal from a new vehicle. Not the echoing space of a giant house. Nothing. Nothing compares to this.
A warm embrace from my little guy. He might never know how much I love him. Maybe when he has one of his own. Maybe then he’ll understand.
But if I can just get him to know that it’s the warm bodies that matter in this life. It’s the people. Moments like these. Maybe I’ll feel like I’d done a good job as his dad. For now I won’t wish the time away.
Right now I can’t be bothered.
And I think that’s what we’re after in life. We’re after the moments where we can’t be bothered. Nothing quite compares, and we don’t know how many of them we have left.
The trick is recognizing when we’re in one, and then sucking the life out of them. We need those to resonate with us. Some of them are easy to spot—even planned. A beach vacation. Can’t be bothered.
But some of them we have to discover or catch before they’re gone.
And when everything in our life is operating as it should, these moments are less noticeable. We take them for granted. We rush through them.
Our mind is always tempted to stray. To make the unimportant, important. But it’s when those truly important pieces in our life are threatened—that’s when the material world fades.
We fall back to love. Every. Single. Time.
The snuggles on the couch won’t last forever. Nothing will. I’ll only deeply miss them when they’re gone.
But right now I’m going to feel every weighted breath he has to offer. Because every single one of them are more important than any trivial thought or anxiety I can muster.
And I simply can’t be bothered.
🥲