The Gift of Weight

Hello Everyone,

I used to have a routine called Heavyweight Fridays. It wasn’t a sly play on words. Fridays were just the day of the week when I used to lift heavy weights at the gym. Usually squats, though sometimes deadlifts as well. I couldn’t think of a better pun. Squatterday? Doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

One of my favourite things about it was feeling the weight. I’d load up the squat rack with enough weight to sag an Olympic bar. It was heavy in a way that you don’t often run across in your daily live. Most of the time, stuff is either pretty easy to lift, or too heavy to try. But not here. This was at the upper reaches of my ability, and I loved being able to move that weight. To know my body could make it overcome gravity.

The weight wasn’t a burden. It was a gift.

The weight was access to an experience. Without it, I could not feel those things, could not know I had that ability.

I always knew I wanted to be a parent. It wasn’t just that I have always liked kids, always enjoyed making them laugh or enjoyed playing games with them. It’s that I always knew, even without being able to describe it, that I would feel that the burden, the weight, of parenting was a gift.

The stress, worry and fatigue are difficult, but like the weights in a gym, they are access to an experience.

I would get sore from lifting weights. My body would ache and I have joint pain now in my advancing years. I’d occasionally make a mistake and injure myself. But that’s what it is to have a body and to use it.

As a parent I’ve had the embarrassment of realizing I was negotiating with a toddler, wiped every kind of fluid off every kind of surface, including my own epidermis, and I’ve experienced the time dilation of the emergency room, where I aged many years for every day we were there.

That’s given me access to watching first steps, happy hugs, and the million other large and small moments of sharing your life with another.

The burden allows me to be part of something that is larger and beyond me. To have a life and to use it.

Wes