The Best Reason

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

The Best Reason

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Son #4 is physically intimidating. He has deep-set eyes, and he’s almost a foot taller than the average height of men in the United States, so he literally looks down on most of us. He’s also the only one of my children who has any idea what is hidden in the recesses of my husband’s workshop. Recently, he was voted by his siblings as “Most Likely to Inherit Whatever Mess Dad Leaves Behind” when my husband passes on to the Great Junk Yard in Heaven. (Son #4 was not included in the balloting.)

So, when Son #4 called me a couple of weeks ago and asked if I was “getting excited”, I didn’t anticipate what came next. “Mom, do you realize in only four or five weeks, we are going to have two new babies to cuddle?” But I was not surprised. Despite his physically intimidating appearance, Son #4 has a very soft heart. At the age of four, he was visiting a neighbor’s house and watched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time. All the other kids in the house were racing around during the movie, creating minor havoc, but he sat mesmerized in front of the screen until he was certain ET made it home safely.

Son #4 loves babies. In fact, all my sons do. The babies he referred to in his call to me aren’t even nieces or nephews. One is the child of his wife’s niece; the other is the second offspring of Son #6’s best friend. But for Son #4, a baby is a baby, whomever it belongs to.

I don’t know exactly what family line the baby-loving gene came through, but I do know my dad loved babies, too. When I was a sophomore in high school, the Branch President called my dad and reported that a sweet member of our branch had fallen and broken her back. She was going to be in the hospital for a while; her husband was overwhelmed with two or three other young children, and they had a week-old baby. (The details here are a little vague because I was a clueless kid.) It was going to take a little time before the family was in a position to care for a newborn. Would my parents consider taking the little boy for a few days till that happened? And just like that, a baby came to stay for what turned out to be several weeks. I have a clear picture in my head of waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the creak of the rocking chair from the other room. When I peeked around the corner, I saw my dad feeding the baby a bottle of warm formula; it was the picture of peace. The day the baby’s dad came to take the baby home, our whole family (including both my brothers) stood in the doorway, wiping tears from our eyes.

We call Son #4 the “Baby Whisperer”. When Son #6 and his wife adopted twins, Son #4 could often be found in the middle of the night walking one baby or the other up and down the street, whispering a lullaby or two in their tiny ears. He even relieved Daughter #2’s husband on occasion when their fourth child screamed for hours and mom was at work in the NICU of a local hospital.

And he’s not the only baby lover in the family. Son #5’s wife reports that not a Sunday went by (when regular meetings were held before the pandemic closed most church doors) that her husband didn’t borrow a baby during the meeting from one mom or another whose husband was on the stand and needed a little help to manage a whole row of young children. Son #1 told me once that his wife went on a girl-trip with high school friends, leaving three young children at home, one of whom was sick. His mother-in-law was shocked to find him up in the night administering medicine and changing diapers. Men from her generation simply weren’t that involved in the care of their children.

A week after Son #6 was born, I left the sleeping baby with Son #1 while I walked across the street and returned dishes to the neighbor who had brought dinner the night before. While I was gone, the baby woke up screaming. Son #1, 12 years old at the time and an old hand with babies, assumed his brother was hungry, so he fed the newborn half the bowl of chocolate pudding he had been eating as a snack. (Son #1 has always been an out-of-the-box problem solver!) Apparently, the baby loved it and went immediately back to sleep. Today, Son #6 has a serious affinity for chocolate cream pie. But then, he learned to appreciate it very early.

Good news for Son #4. His wife’s niece had a baby the day before yesterday. When I opened the family message string on my phone the next morning, Son #4 had already posted pictures of the new little girl, pointing out with some pride that her tiny head was covered with wispy RED hair, which runs in his wife’s family.

I have a friend who claims that babies come camouflaged with “cuteness,” so we are willing to put up with the unending care they require. For Son #4, it’s pretty clear that babies are a reason to get up every morning. Perhaps the best reason of all.