Parentheart

Parentheart (n): the condition in which seeing harm come to any juvenile of one's species, or in some cases of any species, causes much weeping, melancholy and sadness.

It really didn't take me long after pregnancy to self diagnose myself with parentheart. I couldn't make it through Dumbo at one point, I accidentally chose East of Eden as a book to read in my second trimester, and the last movie I saw in theaters before the boys were born was Noah. I'm going to make you look up all those plots on your own to understand why my parentheart would flare up for any of those stories.

Parentheart is, I think, one of the reasons Andrew and I thought that having kids would be a good idea. We weren't dewy eyed at the thought of a tiny little Laura-Andrew creature. We knew having kids would be distinctly uncomfortable to my body (and therefore Andrew), our personal goals/activities, sleep, etc. for around two decades. But we embraced the discomfort because we thought there was something in there that would help us clarify our relationship with God as our father (of course other reasons too but not the point here). We wanted to understand how he feels about us.

And ouch.

A co-worker in Maryland just lost her nine year-old daughter to brain cancer today. How does this even happen? How can it be ALLOWED? I never even met her, but here I am bawling my eyes out. I cannot even imagine, don't want to imagine, how incredibly impossibly difficult this is for Kathy and Sam.

And God views us all as his children? I can't even.