Dads and rainbows

on the things that connect us, visible and invisible

We had a lot of rainy days last week. On Friday, my husband Zac sent me a text on his way home from work. It was a picture of the double rainbow as seen from the cab of his truck.

Every time the man sees a rainbow he has to tell somebody—and as soon as he got home he made all of us come out to the front yard to look at it with our own eyes.

My oldest happened to be engrossed in a game of Mario Party at the time, so he willingly came out to see the rainbow, but promptly returned inside to business.

My daughter, in true chaotic second-born fashion, saw the rainbow and then took the opportunity while the rest of us were distracted to run around the side of the house and stand under the stream of rainwater coming off the corner of the roof. When she reappeared on the front walk completely soaked I was both surprised and not surprised.

The last one to make it out the door was Abe, our third-born (he’d taken his time with his shoes). He stepped down onto the porch stairs deliberately, looking around to find the rainbow. Once he found it, he stood there for a minute examining it from end to end, scowling in concentration. Then he went back inside.

Zac looked at me with frustration. “I guess I had too high of expectations for how they’d react to that,” he said. “I always get excited to see a rainbow.”

It broke my heart a tiny bit to see him disappointed, even though it’s normal for kids (indeed, for other people) to not share our enthusiasm for everything. I told him not to feel dumb for inviting the kids into his appreciation for the rainbow, because I believe it’s actually really important for us to do that kind of thing, even when it doesn’t pay off the way we want it to. Plus, I enjoyed the rainbow! I took two pictures of it! And that was that.

A little later in the evening, Zac went into the kitchen to make himself his lunch for work the next day. Abe followed, as he often does, and offered to “help” (read: “eat as many veggie straws as he could mooch off of his dad under the guise of helping”). A couple minutes of munching later and I heard this exchange:

“I loved that rainbow you got for me,” Abe said.

Zac’s voice lifted in surprise. “You did?”

“Yeah!” said little Abe. “Did you make that rainbow for me?”

“No buddy, God did. I’m glad you liked it.”

It’s that kind of thing that gives life to parenting, that makes you think it isn’t so complicated. Dad shared a piece of his heart with me. That’s what the rainbow meant to Abe. He wouldn’t be able to articulate the mysterious connection there, but he expressed awareness of it, however limited, through his question.

And it wasn’t explosive or dramatic. They moved on, continuing in the work of sandwich-making and thermos-filling, in that mundane world where the rainbows that connect us stretch, invisible, yet appearing in the little moments shared between father and son.