first, love

Today, I will hug each of my children as many times as I serve them meals — because children’s hearts feed on touch. I’ll look for as many opportunities to touch my children today as possible — the taller they are, the more so. ~Ann Voskamp

Every day breathing, for me, means learning this: love comes first.

I remember evenings, warm and thick and heady with the fragrance of flowers~honeysuckle growing wild on our back fence, azaleas, the dogwood blooming outside my bedroom window~and the way we’d fall on top of my dad, drunk with laughter.  Tired from a day working, he’d prop his head on a pillow against the bottom of the sofa and stretch his long body out on the living room floor.  From the kitchen, the smells of supper mingled with the perfume of Lowcountry Spring, breezing in through the screens on the windows.  Our little feet thumped the floor around Dad’s legs as we ran laps around him, clambering up on the couch (and I don’t even remember now what it looked like, only the soft, nubby feel of it beneath my fingers), tumbling in faith over his head and into his lifted hands.

Good fathers always have time for loving.  And the love of the perfect Father never ceases, not in all our wandering, nor all our racing.

Already, as I soared into the air, the laughter spilled forth, unhindered, overflowing.  For a moment, I felt that I could fly.  He lifted me high over his chest, and then gently brought me down beside him, tickling me as I curled into a delirious ball on the floor.  I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.  And then I clambered up, sprinting around his legs as one of my brothers soared into the air above him, lifted, touched by those strong, gentle hands.

I still hold my dad’s hand sometimes, when it’s just him and me and we’re out on our annual date at Christmas or sitting on his back porch in the ripe heat of Summer, as the breeze from the ocean tickles my cheeks and we talk.  Those hands feel just as strong, just as loving, as they did when I was small.  And when I sit with him that way, a healing happens, and the broken things are knitted whole again.

Months ago, I found Ann Voskamp’s 10 Point Manifesto for Joyful Parenting.  I swallowed every word, giving thanks that she made it a free printable.  I tacked it on my bulletin board, tucked it in my journal, sliding it in with all the other God-gifted words that inspire me.  For days after the first reading, number 8 still sat heavy on my heart, the hand of God laid there, just where it needed to be.  Today, I will hug each of my children as many times as I serve them meals.  Yes, at least that many.  Sometimes life moves so quickly that I forget:  There must be time for touch.

I’ve started laying down the things in my hands when my children walk into the room.  Whatever I’m holding, whatever occupies the space that should be filled with their growing bodies—dish towels, knives and chopping, coffee mugs, clean laundry for folding, my phone—whatever fills my hands must be emptied to make room, and time, for loving.  Seeing them, I open my arms wide and beckon them in, wrapping them close.  I still have to ask Adam to put his arms around my waist, still have to remind him to squeeze.  And when he starts to wiggle, I hold his face in my hands and make us matching halves—forehead against forehead, nose against nose.  He reaches up and touches my ears, and I smile, remembering that he said I love you in just that way before he ever said the words.  We used to have to explain that to our friends.  I remember hearing Zoe’s voice outside, from the knot of kids in the backyard, “When he does that, it means he likes you.”

The first day I started trying to be more conscious, more present, more ready to touch and hold my children; the first day I resolved to have more time for it; Zoe sighed, resting her cheek against me, inhaling deep, closing her eyes, savoring the moment like a delicious taste of something sweet.  There’s nothing more delicate and homemade, nor anything so sturdy and remaining as an embrace.  For all the ideas I gather like treasure, this one seems best of all, powerful and simple.

“We need to do more of that,” she said more profoundly than even she knew.  “We’re all so busy…sometimes we don’t have enough time for hugging.  But we need to…we really need to.”

I walked around the kitchen that afternoon with her arms looped around my waist.  Long after the hugging moments, when the ticking clock spurred me on to making dinner, still she clung to me.  I remembered the years I spent holding on to my mom, always beside her, resting the weight of life against her.  She never let me know how weary she must’ve sometimes been of all that touching, my fingers reaching for her.  Sometimes now, when she is here and we work side by side, one of us will stop to hug the other, briefly sighing, resting, stopping time together.  And in those frozen moments, healing happens.

All this remembering makes me snicker, thinking of Riley, who never knows the wrong time for hugging.  I have to ask, remind her to let me hug her, but she finds Kevin while he’s working, nearly every morning when he’s making breakfast, and she wraps her arms around one of his as he lifts a jug of milk or moves to spin the whisk in the eggs.  He flashes me a look sometimes, in the whirling of minutes, but his voice is always kind when he responds to her, stilling the hurry, love demanding something more important than the rush.  “How’s my girl today?” He asks, stopping, turning to her.

And sometimes she stops us still when we least expect it, planting herself in front of us, laying her hands flat on our cheeks.  She says nothing with words, just looks into us, stretching an uncomfortably long pause with her smile and her touch.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that people with autism do not want to be touched.  It’s one of the most unfortunate stereotypes attached to the disability, because for every person with autism for whom the sensory input is just too much—sometimes enough to bring pain–there’s another person with autism who longs for precisely that kind of connection.  Some of the autistic children we know and love simply cannot get enough squeezing.

And lately, trying to remember to hug my children, I am reminded that this too is about being made in His likeness.  Holy hands, the rough-hewn, strong hands of a carpenter, always touched—a leper, with compassion (Mark 1:41), as a human voice laced with the authority of a king said, “I am willing;” blinded, empty eyes (Matthew 9:29); the clammy hands of the sick (Matthew 8:15); the lifeless and unclean body of a mourned child (Luke 7: 14); even the bloody, severed ear of a soldier making his arrest (Luke 22:51).  And every time His hands touched, power rushed from holy fingertips, and people were healed and cleansed, loved and counted worthwhile.

And these days, every time I hug my children, it feels as though time stops.  For just a breath or two, the rush that presses and whirls and stresses stops.  The distracting details cast aside, a healing happens.  Divine power, the breath of a God who is love itself (1 John 4:8,16), travels through an easy embrace, knitting together something broken, something missing and needed in all of us.  Moments stretch, and eyes closed, we breathe deep.  For just a bit, we savor living.  We rest.  We fold into loving each other.  And it’s just me and my children and God and the love between us, the only thing that lasts forever.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1 Corinthians 13:13).