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Paul's Diary Entries Diary Navigation: Choose A Diary Entry -------------------- Latest Entry: 9/27/00 -------------------- 9/5/00 8/23/00 8/3/00 7/19/00 7/12/00 6/28/00 6/19/00 -------------------- Paul's Introduction

September 5, 2000

Hello, readers.

Well, it's a pretty inelegant way to say it, but I hit an emotional pothole this weekend. It was a three-day weekend, but I never gave myself a break. I spent the entire weekend running after one errand and one more item on one more insurmountably long list of things to do: house projects, yard stuff, anything and everything ...

And by Monday afternoon, I just stopped myself and said, "What are you doing?"

And then I sat down on the back porch with my pregnant wife and I cried. And cried. And cried like I haven't in at least 10 years. Needless to say, it was slightly embarrassing to experience; far more so to admit.

I was manically filling my weekend, and my life, with manufactured errands because if I stopped and tried to relax, I would be faced with the magnitude of what's coming and how it's going to change my life.

I finally did stop the compulsive cleaning and poured this all out to my very understanding and impressively well-composed wife. (She'd only seen me cry once before, on a very bleak occasion.) What got me the most was the fact that there was now going to be another life whose heart is as intimately tied to mine as Anne's. For the rest of my life, all of the wonderful and the painful milestones of another person's life are going to affect me profoundly. It's going to be this other person's first day of school, first broken bone, first major accomplishment and first big failure that are going to be the big emotional events in my future. Let me give you an example from my own family. My brother died when I was 9 and he was 16 of a very rare brain cancer that started as a seizure and ended four days later. I look back at my Mom and Dad coping with the loss of their son to a very fast, untreatable brain tumor. How in God's name does a parent cope with that?! If you love your child as much as I know they did, as much as I know I will love my son, how can you possibly make it through a broken bone or a fever, much less that?

But I wasn't just dwelling on the dangers of loving that deeply, I was also imagining the elation that you feel when someone you love has some great joy in their life. It was just the profundity of the connection that captured me so tightly on Labor Day afternoon. My heart tied to another heart. That's the image of the week.

As luck would have it, Anne and I have another three-day weekend ahead of us this weekend, and I intend to spend it far more productively. I'm going to kick back with my wife and take a nap. Maybe a couple of 'em. Have a good week.