spreading the evening sky with crows

I cannot help but think that it is all a terrible mistake.

My children trust me. They trust me with all of the love and strength and confidence and joy and facile, "you're so silly" cynicism that their little hearts are capable of generating.

They trust me to have their best interests in mind. Always. To be able to look beyond the petty concerns of whatever occupies my day - stresses of work, my wife's work, family, extended family, daily logistics, long-term planning, existential ennui, emotional swings, exhaustion, the slow, inevitable decay of my carcass, the rapid and senseless descents into rage and confusion, the omnipresent fear of just not being good enough - and focus on them: to apply the whole of my attention and compassion upon the three of them with the infinitely quick and gentle touch of a hummingbird's wings in flight. Each feather-soft moment of contact an expression of love.

"Daddy, why does..." they ask, and my eyes make contact, and my arms reach out to touch their shoulders and in that moment - with each passing second, each fading breath and each quiet beat of their tiny, strong hearts - a language of belief, riddled with complexity and variation, tense and subtext, comes into being and gives their lives substance, foundation, reality.

They trust me to be strong when they need strength. They trust me to understand when they are sad; to heal when they are hurt. To make sense of the world, and to bend it to their will.

They trust me to love their mother — deeply, profoundly, unquestioningly. They trust me to love their siblings as I love them: unabashedly, ocean-deep, endless as sky.

Their trust is an assumption consummated by birth: that I will always love, will always protect, will always care and provide and work to bring them joy. An unexpected right of passage — a badge of honor and responsibility delivered in a squealing bundle of blood and blue eyes. Alchemy transforming expecting into expectation.

Their confidence was not earned. It was gifted. Is gifted, each morning they awaken and howl to see me. Mother is the name of god on the lips and hearts of all children. Father is the unspoken truth; the firmament upon which they stand and reach for the fleeting heavens of being four, of being six, of being here and now and alive.

I am not what they deserve. But I am what they have.

I make another promise, knowing it will break: I will be better.