Saint Loudmouth

My beautiful wife suffers from allergies. She has an especially vicious allergic reaction to any hour ending in a.m.' which tends to manifest itself at its most crippling on Sundays.

Our plan is always the same on Saturday nights. I'll attend the class I help teach at church on Sunday mornings, and then my wife and son will meet me for Mass at 11:00 am. The one time this plan may have come to fruition, I inadvertently swiped her car keys, stranding her at home with our toddler. I realized this halfway through the service as I yanked my buzzing cell phone out of my pocket with annoyance to see who the hell had the nerve to bug me this early on a Sunday morning. Oops.

My eighteen-month-old hasn't inherited my wife's disabling affliction. He's fully awake and excited to be a baby in the 21st century at any time of any day. He favors the early morning hours between two and five.

This past weekend, my wife was battling a debilitating bout with the a.m. demons, and we decided, like so many weekends before, to skip eleven O'clock mass, and instead go into the city of New Haven and attend 5 p.m. service at St. Mary's Cathedral.

My wife still wasn't feeling well that afternoon so I decided that the boy and I would go to church together, just us men, so she could get some rest. The sweetest gesture parents can make to one another is to give their mate time away from the baby. That sounds awful but it's the truth. We just don't love our kid as much as we used to. He's needy, loud, and he often smells terrible. Who needs that?

I say the above in jest. Our son is every happy thought ever conceived all rolled up into one sticky-faced little bundle. He's the dawn sun that burns the mist from between the rolling green hills of Ireland. He's a reverently played note on the bagpipes held in perfect beauty just long enough to echo off the wise old moss covered stones in the Highlands of Scotland; a note that proudly crescendos into Amazing Grace. He's a ladder of sunshine up to the heavens over the turquoise seas of the Caribbean. He's the warmest blanket on a cold damp night, despite the fact that he often makes our blankets cold and damp by morning.

With something so precious, a parent is in a perpetual state of worry. We worry about his safety, his eating habits, his sleeping habits, his happiness, his discipline, his progress, his future, the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he picks up the puppy by the head everything about him.

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