Imprints

Today, I had the day off. It is part of the beauty of spending my nurse practitioner career in emergency medicine. I only work 11 days a month. As awesome as this is, the downside is, I get to spend some of my days off cleaning, taking care of household stuff etc... Today was one of those days. I spent my time cleani out the fridge, doing laundry and cleaning off the layer of dust that had collected in my living room and dining room. As I took some Murphy's Oil Soap to the dining room table I was once again reminded that we need a bigger table before the babies come home. Until today, I was looking forward to it. Ours is ten year old and starting to show some significant wear and tear. As I ran over the divots in the wood at Zachary's place I was reminded of how he would bang the bottom of his fork in the table right after we switched him from the high chair. I saw the splotch on the finish toward where Jack sits. This is leftover candle wax. Jack likes our meals to look perfect with the centerpiece lit each time. One time I warned him not to, because the candles were getting small, but he lit it anyway and halfway through our meal our table was doused in a river of red wax. Then there were the nicks along the edge of Katya's seat. These were from her shoving her chair in during a dramatic exit from the table. It is funny now, but teenage girls are sometimes a bit of a struggle. Nonetheless, she now prepares to leave for the Air Force in a few months. There is the little hole in the upholstery on Zachary's chair. It would seem our little cat could not go a day without joining him in his chair at the dinner table, and at one point his claw got stuck. Then there was the missing chair. This made me smile as I guiltily recalled one fateful Christmas when a particularly obese relative ended up flailing around on the floor after the sound of snapping wood could be heard for blocks around.

It was at this moment I no longer saw my beat up dining room table that was missing a chair. I saw all the imprints of my children. Every dent and scratch suddenly meaning so much. I let my mind wander to what imprints my babies are leaving in Haiti. I thought about the missionary that was so moved by Alex's story of his birth mother bringing him to the orphanage as a newborn because his father denied he was his and could not feed him. I thought about one of the girls who spent three months at the orphanage who was there when Grace arrived. She saw a mother give up this beautiful girl and marveled at that decision. A friend mentioned the other day how hard it is to see pictures of our babies in someone elses's arms. How we would love to be the ones in control of who holds our babies or be there as they meet their developmental milestones. She went on to point out though, that maybe they would impact those they come in contact with. I tried hard to swallow that, but my selfishness to want them here won out, until now. Today, I think maybe them being there is like my dining room table. They are leaving their imprint there as directed by God. He will bring them in and out of visitor's lives and maybe I will never know what it is they have accomplished there, but one thing for sure, He will look at their imprints as fondly as I do my lovingly weathered dining room table.