My father's joy

In counseling, they’ll give you a wheel of emotions to get you started talking about your feelings. What they don’t tell you is that when you have kids, that little wheel is going to expand every birthday.

I have felt the belly laughs of (Mom, forgive me for writing about this online) farting, and my Abigail saying, “Scuse you.” She can’t pronounce the “l’s” in the word “belly,” but she knows that flatulence is rude.

I have felt the temper shot when she makes her first forays into defiance: a refusal to get off a swing when we’re late, a swipe at my face when it’s nap time, the outright rage when I have the audacity to turn off “Bluey.” (Which she also can’t pronounce, but I remind you she knew farts were rude.)

And I have felt joy. Which was the idea, because we named her Abigail, which means “My father’s joy.”

We celebrated her birthday with Mac-N-Cheese (her favorite) at Chick-fil-A and then went to get ice cream, followed by watching a few episodes of the aforementioned Australian dog show.

That night during bedtime (after a brief tantrum because I turned off said show), I prayed.

I work at a church and write about spiritual things, but I’ll give you my prayer secret: I never know what to say. It’s not like God was like the pretty girls I wanted to ask out in middle school. It’s a different type of not knowing what to say. He’s God and Father. So on one hand, what can you say? And on the other, how many of us know what to really say to our dads?

Most nights, I just ask Him for something to say. So on Abigail’s 2nd birthday, I imagined what I’d say to her if she were old enough to hear someone tell her who she is and what she’s like. You know, those powerful words that felt like someone took a typewriter to your guts and slammed them into you forever. We used to call it a benediction. We don’t do it much anymore outside of church buildings, and we wonder why we spend so much on counseling.

Abigail is 2. Is there really much about her personality that sets her apart? She laughs when tickled; she cries when she doesn’t get her way; she likes Mac-N-Cheese, and she has a smile that melts her parents. You could say that about most of her age.

Joy.

Yes.

From the beginning, joy.

Before Emily and I had even really thought about kids, we’d just bought a house and were remodeling it. I was here by myself one evening in early August, tearing up some wooden floor I thought looked fine but my wife said was ugly. I wasn’t thinking about kids. Emily and I had discussed it a month before on our anniversary. I wasn’t against it, but I didn’t see myself as a father.

I took a break from the floor and walked into one of the back bedrooms off the master.

“This could be your kid’s room,” the thought came—unasked for, unlooked for, maybe hoped for, but not to my conscious mind. And I felt tears start in my socks and run through my body to my eyes to where I couldn’t stand. Joy.

Twenty-seven days later, I was in Target, looking for something to mount a TV to our freshly painted walls. Emily called, and something was wrong. We have a deal that only one of us can freak out at a time, so I went into consoling mode:

“What’s going on? Want to talk about it?” I said, aimlessly turning into the baby clothes section.

“I think I’m pregnant,” she said.

Joy.

I don’t know if pregnancy tests can be wrong, but I really hoped they weren’t. I picked her up one of the nicer ones, and it said the same thing: joy.

When she was born, when I held her and she opened her eyes and saw me: joy.

Any time she walks into a room where my grandmother is: joy.

There’s a reason when my nephews and nieces see me, they do not say, “Hi, Uncle Sam!” They say, “Where’s Abigail?”

“Lord, she brings joy into every room she’s in. She always has,” I said as the string of memories I just recounted for you swept my mind.

Her name is Abigail, which means, well, now you know.