Our friends are moving today, and they seem excited, sad, nervous, eager, and hopeful. Earlier this week, I stopped by their house unannounced with a box of Chapel Hill Toffee and a gift card to Door Dash. In my sadness and nervousness, I rang the doorbell without thinking, but, thankfully, the loud chime didn’t wake their napping kids.
In the six years that our families have been friends, my fellow father has been deployed twice. Their second child, a daughter, was born three years ago, on my wife’s birthday. The mom brought their son to the weekly parents’ morning out, then she came to work for the church as our nursery lead teacher with her baby girl.
I look back on the potty training, baby teeth, and first and last days of school. Halloweens and birthdays. COVID and the pandemic. More stomach flu than I’d like to remember and more runny noses than I can count. The same is true of the tired sighs and gentle laughter.
Through all the changes, we have shared the neighborhood pool and playground, with the kids splashing in the shallow end and screaming down the water slides, pumping higher and higher on the swings, and spinning faster and faster on the playground equipment. We rarely planned these joint outings; our schedules seemed to align right when we needed each other.
As I handed over my little parting gifts, I stood directly before them in the doorway, their little ones mercifully asleep upstairs, and realized how often I had stood next to them watching our kids play before us, only occasionally glancing sideways at their faces as we talked. Many times, a child’s call for attention or cry for help interrupted our conversations. And now, this last time, when we had no distractions, I could only think to state the obvious: “We have been through a lot together.”
I hope the hugs spoke volumes.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of “Little Big Moments,” a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and “Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems.” Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.
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