Today is the birthday of my youngest child, Abigail Christiana Newsom. She is two years old. Her name means, "joy of her father," and I don't know any better way to describe what she means to me. Happy Birthday, Abigail!
I have mentioned before that for several years I’ve had a tradition of writing poems or stories for my wife and children on birthdays and anniversaries. For the next few days, I’ll be posting things I’ve written for Abigail.
Before I do, let me again encourage parents (especially fathers) to do something like this. Homeschool Dads need to engage their children’s imaginations, and one great way to do that is by creating things just for them. Not everyone has the same talents and gifts, of course—there’s a very good reason I don’t paint pictures for my kids on their birthdays. So this kind of creative endeavor can take many forms: songs, poems, stories, pictures, letters, sculptures, hand-carved toys, or tree-houses. Maybe it’s as simple as buying your son a new camping knife and putting a good edge on it. But whatever you do, use it to bless and encourage your family. This was the practice of G. K. Chesterton’s father, and it left a profound mark upon his son, who would go on to shake the world:
“One of the sports of the imagination, a game I have played all my life, was to take a certain book with pictures of old Dutch houses, and think not of what was in the pictures but of all that was out of the pictures, the unknown corners and side-streets of the same quaint town. The book was one my father had written and illustrated himself, merely for home consumption…He was the sort of man who likes to try everything once. This was the only book he ever wrote; and he never bothered to publish it…the same sort of invention created for children the permanent anticipation of what is profoundly called a Surprise…His den or study was piled high with the stratified layers of about ten or twelve creative amusements; water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination…He never dreamed of turning any of these plastic talents to any mercenary account, or of using them for anything but his own private pleasure and ours. To us he appeared to be indeed the Man with the Golden Key, a magician opening the gates of goblin castles or the sepulchres of dead heroes…If my father had been some common millionaire owning a thousand mills that made cotton, or a million machines that made cocoa, how much smaller he would have seemed…All the things that happened in the house, or were in any sense done on the premises, linger in my imagination like a legend…”
The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton
Now that I’ve ridiculously prefaced my own work with Chesterton’s, here at last is Abigail’s story. It says many things that I want her to know, especially for one just starting out on the journey of life.
A Birthday Adventure
A Story for Abigail on the Occasion of Her Birth
By Her Father
This story happened when Abigail, who was the youngest of the children in those days, had just been born. Mother was lying back in bed, weary but very happy, and Father was beaming like that sun-face on the Raisin Bran boxes. The older children (Abigail had two older brothers—Nathanael was two and William was five—and a seven-year-old big sister, whose name was Grace) were trying to get a peek at the newest initiate into the World of the Little People, and Nurse Waters was talking to Mother about Weight and Length and What a Good Strong Voice She Has.
The whole thing started when William accidentally knocked his plastic cup of water off the table in the corner. It was one of those great and terrible Moments for a five-year old, fraught with the kind of temptation and hidden danger that fills even the most ordinary events with unexpected grandeur and nobility. But William of course didn’t know all that, nor would you or I if it happened to us. For him it was a rather commonplace temptation: no one saw him spill the water, and he didn’t much feel like cleaning it up. He hesitated, perched on the edge of a cliff that was a good bit higher than he realized, his Spider-Man tennis shoes sending bits of broken rock plunging into the unseen abyss below. He glanced up, saw everyone’s heads turned the other way, and walked away from the spilled water, upon which his young conscience begin to pelt him with rocks from the gorge, a process it would continue for the next hour or so.
