Shrouded in the bleak grayness of winter’s final desperate push, under sterile florescent lights flickering in time with my breaths, you entered this world. Like a Hollywood movie showcasing the juxtaposition of the fight for humanity against the backdrop of war, you emerged chaotically, bloodied and bruised, weakened yet victorious. We welcomed you onto the battleground of your life; the floors soaked in my blood, the air thickened with dreadful anticipation, while the perfection of your face, your body, your heart and soul sucked the air out of the room and enveloped us all in a vacuum of pure wonder.

For the years’ worth of seconds that passed from the moment you exited my body and entered my heart, the world stopped spinning to welcome you. Deafening silence washed over all the whole of creation; the only sound left to be heard was the raging beat of your fierce heart. We spoke not a word to each other, and your cries were notably absent as we lost ourselves in the watery seas of your gaze, as you studied studied our features, as we all came to know each other on the most beautiful gray day in the history of mankind.

Two minutes later, you opened your mouth…and you haven’t closed it since. Bygones.

A decade has passed since the first day of our acquaintance, ten long years we have written the story of our lives together. I watch over you carefully as you become, I wash what it scratched and I mend what is broken the best ways I know how, and I hope that it is enough. I watch as you struggle for definition in an undefinable existence, and I try to remind you that the best way to find your way through darkness is by taking the hand of someone who’s already walked it. I see the same battle waging inside of you as did me a million years ago, grasping for a hold on a role you cannot comprehend, but recognize the need for.

What I will tell you today, now that you have entered the decade of your life that will see you become more than my son, more than my anything, is this: Your role is the most cherished one to me, your charge the most pressing in my life. You are the gravity that keeps my feet to the earth, the cement that keeps my walls standing around me, the air that begs me to breath in. You are the song that we all sing, the poem of our life. Even when you don’t make any sense at all.

Refrigerator.

You are the anthem of this family, the lost chords and the unsung verses forgotten in the dance from this responsibility to that appointment. You are the skip of our collective heart-beat, the pause that reminds us to live. You are the distraction from our distractions, the key to the doors of pure joy that we keep misplacing. You remind me that everything dreadful can be written down, folded up into a paper frog and jumped across the table. You teach me that there is nothing so solemn that a really good fart can’t make better. You point out to me that math is great and language is an art but there is power, pure, unadulterated magic, in a #2 doodle.

You remind me to put my hands on the walls of the boxes I’ve built to shelter myself and shove. You remind me that there is so much more that I don’t see because I forget it is there, between the lines, in that tiny gray area I try so hard not to touch. You remind me that even in the cold, dark, dreary days of life, there is unimaginable beauty, just waiting to be found, I just have to be willing to try. And I do try. I try to be better every day for you, I try to help you be unafraid of the person that you are, the mirror image of me. All the while, you keep showing me that I, that we…we are not something to be afraid of. We are divine grace, beautiful works of art, and that greatness lies before our very eyes so long as we are willing acknowledge that which we are, that which we can do.

Funny, it turns out that all I had to do was push.