Growing Stronger

From the back of the car, my four-year-old daughter’s, Leila, clear little voice sang, When I get older, I will be stronger…

I asked her how she knew that song, she told me she hears it on the radio and likes it. Now every time it plays, I think of her.

As I drove home last night from my running group, wipers smearing raindrops across the windshield, it played through the speakers.

When I get older, I will be stronger.

How quite literally true for a four year old. It’s a simple concept really, and one that she has never questioned (nor should she). She sat on the bathroom counter this morning, watching my husband shave.

You have big arms, Daddy, she told him, but mine are just little. Her told her one day she’d have bigger arms, too.
How come your bone sticks out funny like that? she asked, pointing to his bicep.
It’s the muscle, he explained to her,  see how it can move when you move your arm up and down?

When I get older, I will be stronger.

I’m not sure when  exactly we lose faith in ourselves, but we do. Maybe it’s not that we lose it, but that it becomes a challenge to believe in its existence. Leila’s innocent belief that she will be stronger is nothing more than sheer faith. But as we grow (perhaps more cynical), faith can be hard to come by. Unfulfilled goals and un-taken paths sometimes make us feel that we don’t have what it takes to truly maximize this life.

In so many ways, life is so beautifully simple. Some days I’m quite sure I have discovered the secret to happiness, and I keep it here, in my home. It is love. It is the innocence of children and the love of a good man and warm suppers on rainy nights and wine on the porch after the kids are in bed and parents who are two of my best friends. It is laying beside my two-year-old in her new bed as her eyes grow heavy with sleep and it is spending the day alone with my four-year-old and it is the way I feel after a run and the sheer joy that transcends so many aspects of my life. It is reverence for the magic of the universe and how it has incomprehensibly sent all of these blessings my way.

But it’s not always that simple, because life is also filled with death and divorce, confusion, challenges, pain, loneliness, war, abuse. And for those, I don’t know the answer. For those who don’t have a warm embrace to come home to, or who long for a child to hold but struggle to conceive. For those who’ve lost a child or a spouse. For those who are alone, utterly and completely.

In my innocence, I continue to whisper my thanks, to anyone who is listening. I try to pay it forward. I dig deep for patience and remind myself constantly to Judge Not. And through this journey, through running and raising children, I too believe that as I get older, I become stronger.