I am someone who loses my mind over babies.
Every single time. It does not matter where I am or what I am doing. A baby enters the room and I am gone. I want to pick them up and squeeze them and buy them everything in the world. I want their biggest problem to be choosing between two toys. I want their hardest day to be the day they have to go to sleep when they are not tired yet.
That is what every baby deserves. To be so loved it is almost ridiculous. To be so protected the word problem does not yet exist in their world.
I saw a baby this week.
He could not have been more than three years old. Tiny. The kind of small that makes your heart do something involuntary just looking at it.
He was carrying two cans of water. Each one nearly as big as he was. His whole body leaning sideways with the weight, his small legs moving carefully, one step and then another, the way a child walks when they are carrying something they cannot drop.
He was not playing.
He was working.
I thought about what a three year old should be carrying. A stuffed animal with a missing eye. A blanket that has to come everywhere. Not cans of water the size of his body. Not the weight of survival on arms that have not yet finished growing.
He has not learned to walk properly yet. And the world has already taken his childhood.
And yet he did not sit down. Did not give up. He just walked, one careful step after another, this tiny boy with his enormous cans, with the quiet dignity of someone three times his age.
He does not know he is extraordinary. He thinks he is just doing what you do. He has never known anything different.
And that is the part that undoes me completely.
He has no idea that somewhere in the world there are children his age whose greatest effort today was climbing onto a sofa. He has no idea that what he is doing is not normal, not okay, not something any three year old should know how to do.
He deserves to know.
He deserves to be that child.
I want to spoil him rotten.
I want to take those cans from his arms and replace them with something soft and ridiculous that he loves for no good reason. I want his legs to be unsteady because he is running too fast, not because the weight is too much. I want someone to tell him that today his only job is to be three years old and that is enough.
I want to feed him until he is full and then offer him something sweet just because.
I want him to sleep in something soft and wake up and have the day ask nothing of him except to be a child inside it.
In any other world that would not be called spoiling.
It would just be called childhood.
That is what your gift does today.
It does not give him back the mornings he spent carrying water. It does not undo the weight his arms have already learned to carry.
But it feeds him. It clothes him. It reaches him in the middle of everything and says someone out there thought about you today. Someone who never met you decided that you deserved something good.
You cannot give him back his childhood.
But you can make sure that today he feels something close to what every child in this world deserves to feel.
Seen. Fed. Held, even from a distance.
Spoiled rotten, in the only way we have left.
For the little boy whose arms were never supposed to know that weight,
Hafsa
