Advent

"What do you believe?"

It is a question of faith, and one she considers with absolute concentration. She bites the corner of her lip and furrows her brow, the broad, soft pools of her brown eyes focusing somewhere in the middle distance. A year ago, the question itself would never have been raised — because the answer was assumed as a universal truth. The earth revolves around the sun. Gravity keeps us from floating up into the sky. Your mother and father love you very much. And Santa... Santa is real.

But these years stretch longer, one by one by one, and across the intervening passage of days she has learned to become more careful, more discerning, in her understanding of what constitutes the world around her. She is bright and curious and sensitive to underlying motivations and backstory. She knows that life at age 6 is infinitely more complex than the one she'd known as a young child, when each day seemed aflood with magic and possibility.

Now there are questions. Evidence to be appraised, and options to be measured. How can one man visit the entire world in a single night? How can he carry so many gifts in a single sleigh, and keep track of which ones go to which house, and to which person? 

How does he know if - in our heart of hearts - we are truly good?

She realizes these are more than supply chain issues. She recognizes there are inherent contradictions in the story, and even as she asks she is half-afraid to hear the answers. But she knows - we have taught her - that it is important to ask. That this is how we learn.

Is there really someone out there, at the top of the world, who loves us all?

It is a question of faith, and as I consider my response and half-step around the issue by answering with a question of my own, I bear the weight of an even deeper faith: that I will have answers. That I will be the steady sun around which they navigate, day by day, year by year, a point of constant certainty to whom they can look for warmth, illumination, comfort. 

My other daughter, who is already showing great promise and enthusiasm as an artist, draws pictures and creates elaborate stories for them. The other day, she brought home a drawing of me from school. It was for a project: draw something you love, and explain why you love it. She created a picture of the two of us walking across a green field. In the picture, her hair is blond and her eyes are a perfect blue. I walk beside her, tall and strong. She chose not to give me an orange mohawk in this picture, which is a change of pace. The sun shines above us, perfect and brilliant and forever-present.

The caption says, "I love my Daddy because he keeps me safe."

She tells me about it and then shows me the picture, and I bite the corner of my lip and furrow my brow and tell her it is wonderful, and try not to be overwhelmed by the impossible sweetness of it all and the joy it brings me and all the different ways I fear I am not worthy of anything this huge.

The days change and the years shift and the world slips from our grasp before we realize. I spent almost the entirety of November sick, in strange and uncertain ways. The children did not realize. Did not need to know. Headaches, every day. Nausea, indigestion, a feeling of things teetering out of balance. One week became two, then three and four. Never quite terrible enough to justify following through on my doctor's "maybe" next steps - a CAT scan, more testing - but always terribly close. 

(And a learning experience: azithromycin on an empty stomach? Bad idea.)

It finally passed, last weekend. They did not need to know, how it felt like it was all slipping away. They focus instead on the dawning of a new month: December. How they will miss me, when I am gone next week. How they will miss Mommy, when she travels the week thereafter. How we will all be together, at last, by the tree with the lights and snowfall and the music and the most wonderful time of the year... 

We do not think of all that lies between here and there. That vast chasm of time and space, bridged by leaps across an infinite, depthless ocean. It is an article of faith, that we do not consider how cold those waters must be. 

There are questions we do not ask. Answers we are more than half-afraid to hear.

In three weeks and a handful of days, Christmas morning will arrive. Our children will awaken, far too early, far too ready to leap into and through and past this moment of perfect, exhilarating bliss when they see a tree colored by soft lights, ringed by new gifts. The how and why will not matter: the moment itself will be all.

We cannot ask for more. So I look into my daughter's infinitely soft and thoughtful brown eyes, and answer her question with a question of my own.

"What do you believe?"

And she thinks, and considers, and weighs all that she knows and suspects and holds to be true, and after a minute her gaze returns from the middle distance to my own eyes. And she smiles, and she answers.

"I believe he's real." 

And that's good enough for me.