Entry #9

Freckle Resurrection

It is Easter Sunday and you are two and a half years old. Your mother and I stayed up late last night cutting out construction-paper bunny rabbit paw prints and setting up an egg hunt. We were ambitious.

When I went to free you from your crib early this morning, the first thing you said to me in your sweet whisper of a voice was, “Daddy, I have a polka-dot on my finger.” You showed me your finger. Right hand. Middle digit. There, on the outside of it, between the top two knuckle joints, was the tiniest pin-prick of a dark mark.

Your first freckle.

I must tell you, I was devastated.

As the morning moved forward, through the preparations for the day and the dressing and the toys and the treats, I had the urge to rewind it all back or at least to lean into it and dig in my heals and keep it from moving any farther. Your perfect little body, your blemish-free form, was now marred by a small brown speck.

My imagination telescoped forward and I could see an inventory of forthcoming devastations, of marks that time and disappointment and other terrible inevitable forces will scratch onto your pristine surface. But as I watched you smile as you struggled to pull a cream egg from the windowsill and as I watched the wonder in your face as you found Easter treasure hidden beneath the couch, the sad terror I’d initially felt eased up a bit.

By the time I was bathing you much later this evening and I found your second freckle on your chest, then a third high on your forehead, my reaction was more supine. No panic. I pointed out the spots to you, and I showed you some of my own, and we got on with our night together.

I want you to know I’m good with it. You were perfect. Trust me. You were absolutely pure - you were sculpted from a piece of flawless alabaster. But that couldn’t last forever. Now that the chips and spots are appearing, you’re more like me. I am tainted and I am marked and I am flawed but I’m real too. And now so are you!

(At least to me, anyway.)