Real Simple – Family

This week Heather Armstrong, super-blogger, ex-Mormon, genius writer and SAHM, was published in the family version of Real Simple – Family magazine. This particular magazine focuses on the home and family and I was surprised at how much I liked the magazine when hey, look, I’m single and I have no kids so I’m not their target audience.

I picked up the magazine because I love Heather and all her sacrilige and I pray for her soul, but my word, like Harry Potter and Eva Longoria she is an evil that I can’t quit! So I flipped through the magazine and I read all of these letters that parents wrote to their children with the theme in mind – “Read this When…” and it prompted me to thinking about what I would write if I had children of my own… so here goes.

To my sweet Bliss Madison,

I had your name picked out 10 years before you were ever born. I dreamt of taking you to the playground in your yellow summer dress and pushing you in a swing before I was even married to your mother. I wanted you before I ever had you and unlike so many things in life – you exceeded my expectations.

 I wanted to bring you into this world not because I knew how to be an amazing parent, or because you would complete the requirements that our society so often demands of married couples. No. I wanted to bring you into this world so that you could share in the joys that this world has to offer. So that you could meet your grandmother and see how funny she is and how she would delight in you. I’d want you to meet your grandfather and to experience the gentleness of his heart and the depth of his love. I would want you to see that your mother and I had the rare opportunity to see this world from a different perspective. That this world even in it’s darkest of times is not always filled with hurt and fear, but instead can be filled with the most immeasurable amounts of love.

Many people Bliss will think that protecting you from this world is impossible, they will crush your dreams, they will try to steal your innocence, they will want to take from you everything that they do not possess, but they can never take away my love, or the love of your mother, or the love of God.

And if someday tragedy strikes and this cruel world delivers a crippling blow, I hope that you don’t let it break you, that you don’t let it ruin you, but instead you take it in stride and you allow it to make you stronger. And when you don’t feel like you can’t go on, when I’ve let you down, when your mother and I are gone, when grandma and grandpa cannot be reached –  remember that God, even if you think he has abandoned you, even when you think he is no longer listening to your prayers, know that is when he is most likely working at his best.  He is right there listening… he is always there.

I love you.

-Dad