Three

My baby turned three this weekend. Three—an age that feels like both a whisper of infancy and a bold shout of becoming. She is opinionated and hilarious, fiercely independent yet still irresistibly cuddly. She is precocious in ways that catch me off guard, and tender in ways that undo me. A million things all at once—a constellation of contradictions that somehow make perfect sense in the small, brilliant galaxy that is her.

When I look at her, I see traces of myself—my expressions, my intensity, maybe even my stubborn streak. But more than that, I see her—a person entirely her own, carrying something ancient and brand new all at once. She is not mine in the way we often think of ownership, but mine in the way a sunrise is: briefly entrusted to behold, to love, and to let rise.

With each year that passes, as she and her siblings stretch farther into the world, I find myself returning again and again to Khalil Gibran’s words:

On Children

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might

that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies,

so He loves also the bow that is stable.