Chasing Sunsets: My Faithy...

This past weekend, B and Faithy and Vader and I piled into our spacious Volkswagen TDI and trekked on down to Dallas to visit my grandparents and Aunt Brenda & Uncle Marty for the weekend. B had been working crazy hours for a while and, well, I always miss Faith, so I was super jazzed about this family road trip. I bought Official Road Trip Snackage (the most important part of any road trip) and we were on our way – 20 hours of driving in 4 days. No biggie.

I can count on one hand the number of times that Faith has met her great-grandparents. The sucky part of sharing custody is that for the time being, I live in a place hundreds of miles away from all of my family, so Faithy just has limited access to all of them. If you live in close proximity to your family, call them right this second and schedule dinner with them. You have no idea how lucky you are. Anyhoo, Faith really doesn’t know her great-grandparents or my aunt & uncle very well, so I was a bit hesitant on how the whole weekend would play out.

How silly of me. I forgot that she’s Faithy.

She’s Faithy, so her heart is as big as my mountain of worry, and her smile is as infectious as spring weather in Minnesota. (I don’t actually know how Minnesotans feel in spring, but I am guessing the Radiant Joy emanating from the half-thawed residents is pretty contagious.) The world is her oyster. Her view of everything is Opportunity and Glitter and Sunshine all rolled up into a giant ball of Happy, tainted only occasionally by a dash of Chaos. But her princess-colored spectacles are void of entitlement, and simply allow her to see her life as one of luxury. And I mean luxury in the best way.

“Mom, do you know that I am SO LUCKY because I have the BIGGEST family??”

Not sure that every kid would see it that way, but she thinks she is LUCKY to have four sets of grandparents – two sets biological and two sets by love. She has a mama and a Beau, and a daddy and a Sarah. She has lots of cousins and lots of aunts and uncles and a whole PLETHORA of “adopted” aunts and uncles (friends who love on her like she’s their own flesh and blood), and the kid is just ecstatic.

After we got to Texas, she spent the weekend climbing up into any available lap she could find, giggling with Aunt Brenda like they were old sorority sisters, playing Daniel Tiger on the iPad with Grandpa John, cooking with Grandma Marcy and showing pictures to the neighbor’s toddler. No fear. Just uninhibited love for the people around her.

Sunday morning as I was getting her dressed for church, I told her we were going to a church we had never been to before, cringing internally because it seems like all I ever do is introduce changes to her tiny little mind. But her eyes lit up and she said, “OH!! So I can go to a new class and meet new friends?”

Like, seriously? She sees opportunity every place she goes.

I took her to a brand new preschool today, and as she walked in, one of the teachers exclaimed, “FAITH!” and ran up to give her a hug. I was confused and then the teacher told me, “She used to come to Club Fitness day care when I was a supervisor there. How could I forget her??” It has been 8 months since I took Faith with me to that gym. But the way Faith embraces her surroundings and loves on the people she interacts with has a lasting impact.

What if I lived my life that way? Not bogged down by fear of the unknown, not consumed by competing loyalties, not afraid to embrace change….

I have spent so much time stressed about how my decisions have impacted my daughter and how she will pay the consequences for my past. But the truth is, she belongs to God, and He has given me a gift in her. She is HIS daughter before she is mine, and that much is clear. She radiates hope and joy where I often prefer to analyze and fear. She gives hugs to strangers on airplanes while I pretend to