Held & Held & Held
To witness the work and the love of the matter just changes things. Children can experience and elicit love the way nothing and nobody else can (apart from maybe this one guy...). There’s a purity to the way we engage with children, and to the goodness it inspires in us.
Family is rooted in childhood, and I suspect that’s what makes it so special. There’s the Dawkins-ish argument that actually it’s the fact that you share genetic code, but I think that’s stupid and lame. It’s the having known one another since childhood, since helplessness that does it.
Helplessness, humility, being held, these are the things that make us most good, most engaged, most human. None of them are easy, neither side of the equation is simple, but they are all Good with a capital G.
We all come from weakness and we all fall back in to it. We move from requiring help, to helping, and back again. While I’m helping Roby these days, I’m also being helped by my parents emotionally, financially, spiritually. The fact that I’m physically able and am not wearing a diaper the way Roby is might make it slightly easier for me to wax poetic about the equal sides of care, but I like to think that by musing now, I might enjoy it later, too.
Mother Theresa and all the saints who helped those in need the way my Grandmother did with Ro’s sister Adrianna, my aunt, were one side of a relationship opposite the person they helped. We might like to think that it was the person helping that is the truest saint, and it’s true that they are moving with agency to do a thing that is hugely charitable and beautiful, but to be cared for can be beatific, it can be just as saintly.