My youngest daughter recently turned two. She is our third child which means she doesn’t often get a word in, so she only has a few handfuls of words that she says. Her favorite word, though, has always been “daddy”. Daddy this, daddy that… but for one year, 51 weeks and 4 days, that girl NOT ONCE said “mommy”, “mama”, or even “ma”. She said many other inconsequential words along with daddy, and every new one that she added to her vocabulary, I found myself being more and more… nearly insulted.
You hear about people saying, “I carried this baby for nine months and he/she came out looking like their dad! That’s not fair!” My thought process was, “oh don’t mind me, carrying you for nine months WITH kidney stones, nursing you for 14 months, and showering you with snuggles and attention but SURE, don’t even mutter the first syllable of my name”. Most of the time, I didn’t really take much stock in those thoughts. But sometimes, I really was so puzzled as to why she wouldn’t say my name. My older two children constantly say mommy… over and over and over. My husband even refers to me as mommy when we are around the kids.
But… this girl. You’d ask “where’s mommy?!” and she’d point to a picture of me even though I was standing right there. You’d say “say mommy!” and she would say “daddy!”. I would look her right in the eyes and beg her to say mommy and she’d close her eyes and pretend to fall asleep. It started getting to the point where I stopped asking. I started saying things like “Oh so you can say cheek but you can’t say mommy?!” My kids even wrote on her birthday cards “when will you ever say mommy?” I really think she was being silly 99% of the time and knew darn well how much I wanted her to utter my name so, obviously, she wouldn’t. To be honest, that sounds like something my stubborn self would do, too.
Then once during Mass she said “MA!” and I got tears in my eyes. The rest of the Sunday, I was just waiting for her to say it again – she didn’t. But then… the week of her birthday…
“MA! MA! MA!” for the first time driving in the car.
“MA! MA!” when I came home from dropping my son off at school.
“MA! MA! MA!” when she fell in the hallway.
“MAMA!!!!!” while I tickled her.
“MAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMAMA!!” at 5:30 AM one Saturday morning.
How sweet it is to finally hear my name from my daughter’s mouth – even at 5:30 AM. I’ve never hopped out of bed at that time of day so fast. I all but ran into her room. After waiting to hear my name from her mouth and after being passed up by so many other words that (quite honestly) have no real bearing on her life, I find myself smiling every single time I hear it.
I can’t help but think that it must be similar to how God feels when we stop resisting Him. When we let Him in. When we acknowledge Him. When we no longer close our eyes to His requests. When we finally utter His name. How joyful and ready He must be to scoop us into His arms.
Acknowledge God today. Allow Him in. Even if you have already and do regularly – it brings Him great joy, every single time.
