To My Someday Son

I got this idea from Hilary Yancey, who wrote a similar letter when she was a similar age and now loves and cares for the very special boy she didn’t know she was writing to. You should check out her letter, and the other posts that go with it, and also maybe her book. But without further ado, here is mine.

Dear son,

I am writing to you from my bed, in my college dorm room, where you are even less than a twinkle in my eye. In fact, but for your existence in my mind and maybe also in the mind of God, you are not even a possibility yet, and perhaps you never will be. But you are my biggest dream and even though all my friends with broken hearts are pretty sure dreaming is bad, I think it’s good and right because dreaming teaches us about hope and faith and placing those things in God instead of the outcome.

So here I am, dreaming about you.

I think a lot about what it will be like to find out you’re coming, to run squealing into your dad’s arms and dance around the kitchen in the excitement that here, now, finally, your life exists. After all of these years of waiting, we finally get you. And there will be still more waiting after that moment and you will be worth every moment of anticipation and impatience, even this one that I’m sitting in right now.

I don’t know what it will be like to have a boy. I have brothers, but I didn’t raise them. Girls are easy for me to understand; I’m not worried about relating to your sisters. But you will forever be something of a mystery for me, and that’s okay.

I love mysteries, actually, especially when they come in people. I love trying to figure them out. Some of my friends laugh at me because of it, but I think it’s a gift God decided to give because every new person feels like unwrapping a present. It will be a good day when I get to sit across from you at the kitchen table, each of us with a cup of that thick, rich hot chocolate your grandma taught me to make, and I get to unwrap you and ask you all the questions about how you think, what frustrates and delights you, what sins you struggle with, what part of God means the most to you.

And someday, bud, we’ll probably be out for a drive or a walk and you’ll tell me that I’ve hurt you, that you walk out your faith with a limp now because of how I’ve raised you. Or maybe you won't tell me, at least not in words. But you’ll tell me with actions, with how you avoid my eyes or shrug my hand off your shoulder or give me one-word answers when I ask you how the day was. I hope I’ll be safe enough for you to say what you’re thinking, even if it might hurt me. We’re family and sometimes families hurt each other—but that doesn’t mean we lose love.

You won’t lose my love, bud. I don’t know much about motherhood, but I’ve heard there’s this unshakeable affection that good moms have for their kids and based on the way I feel about you now, before you exist, I think it’ll come. There will be days when it doesn’t feel like I love you, when I clean up your messes with every passive-aggressive nerve in my body poised to strike because you wouldn’t listen when I asked you to do it ten times, or when I yell because I can’t control you and it scares me. My love isn’t perfect. It never will be. But guess what, dude? God’s love is.

That’s what I want to pray over you with your dad when we bring you home and wonder what in the world we were thinking, and what I want to whisper over you someday as I lay you down in your crib. It’s what I want to kiss into your messy, sweaty hair as you cry over my spankings, and what I want to sing with you in the car on the way to the grocery store. It’s what I want to weave into bedtime stories for you and your siblings, and what I want to teach you to see as your own stories begin to be written. Because eventually, it’s what I want you to know deep in your gut, the impulse I want you to act on, the truth I want you to lean on. If you can learn to live imperfectly in the perfect love of God for the rest of your life, I think I will have done my job.

It’s time for breakfast now and another one of the days between you and me, a day in which I’m learning to live imperfectly in the perfect love of God. I can’t wait to talk to you about it when you get here, but until then, I’ll keep dreaming.

Love,

Your someday mom