Full Circle

I Instagrammed this photo of Ken over the weekend after catching a glimpse of him being a father. I don’t know if you have children, or if you have husbands or someone in your life that you’ve lived with for so long that sometimes you look up over the steam of broccoli for dinner and realize that their face has transformed into something else – something wise. Aging is a slow growth, most of the time, with lots of waves below the surface that sometime rise into finer lines and then deeper wrinkles until you’re silver and gray and your hands begin to look a lot like the hands that raised you.

But other times the waves hit fast and quick and hard and in an instant, the faces of the people you love look a tiny bit unrecognizable, because in your mind he’s still 20 and your baking pans aren’t rusty and your parents aren’t old. Sometimes it hits you fast, and the wave crashes you to the sandy bottom and you rise heavy, readjusting your perspective to notice the tide has changed, ever so slowly.

And that the horizon is much closer than it had seemed before.

Yesterday marks the first day that I saw Ken as a father. Sure, he’s technically been a father for over a year and a half, but it took a bit for the wave to crash onto my shore. For me to realize that while I was busy making sandboxes – head down, hands messy – the breeze was moving the day forward and the sun was starting to set as the world began to change all around me.

I wanted to mark the occasion, to document the day that Ken’s wave of fatherhood rushed over my feet, so I snapped the photo above. And within an hour, a sharp commenter noticed that the image bore a strong resemblance to one she’d seen a few summers ago on the day my daughter arrived into life’s oceans:

Proof that sometimes, the wave crashes twice.

Top Image Credit: My Instagram / Bottom Image Credit: Betsy King

p.s. Bee’s birth story.