Our youngest child is named Blake, which originates from Old English and means ‘the fair one’. It was a good fit for the blondest of his dark-haired mother’s three children. Geneticists tell us that dark hair is a dominant trait, but my beautiful brunette wife kept popping out blondes.

Anyway, being born blonde was only the beginning of a lifetime of anomalous characteristics that define our beautiful blue-eyed baby boy. Blake was the sweetest and most demonstrative of our children but also the quickest to lose his temper. He was the most curious and restless of our brood, and therefore the most likely to disassemble lamps and small appliances, but he was capable of tremendous patience and compassion with classmates who were unpopular. He was a ‘gifted’ student and a discipline problem. Too much going on in that little head of his to sit still and listen to a teacher, I suppose. At an early age he displayed a very mature sense of humor with a healthy dose of sarcasm thrown in (this really perplexed those teachers – especially the dull ones). He questioned EVERYTHING and often resisted organized religion as a boy but was (and still is) the most profoundly spiritual of our three.

Life with young Blake was like being on a roller-coaster. The highs were high and the lows were low but that ride was a hell of a lot of fun!

The teenage years brought their own set of challenges, and it seemed at times that Blake might need to find a new home. Some of our fights were monumental. Tempers flared. Accusations and threats were made. Ultimatums were handed down. Our home at times felt like a battlefield. An added challenge was remaining our son’s advocate when teachers and professionals labeled him, and we nearly gave up and gave in. The problem boiled down to this: How could we ‘outsmart’ a kid who was clearly smarter than us?

Therapy helped. Prayer helped more. And love (which is prayer in action) was always plentiful. We stopped expecting Blake to be like his siblings or anyone else for that matter. Oh, and we learned to not sweat the small stuff. Turns out most of the “stuff” is pretty small anyway. We didn’t object when he came home with his hair dyed bright green. My response was just, “Well actually blue is my favorite color but it’s your hair…” We didn’t freak out when he wasn’t accepted into the National Honor Society (even though he was a National Merit Semifinalist). Apparently hurling an F-bomb at an assistant principal disqualifies you for that sort of thing. When he casually asked us one evening over dinner to start calling him ‘Hank’ our only question was why? His response: “I like the name.” And so, it was. We called him Hank. For the better part of a year, he became Hank. It was really no big deal, and we just decided to roll with it.

During ‘The Year of Hank’ he remained as academically gifted and artistically brilliant and maddeningly headstrong as ever but somehow the challenges became fewer; the fights were less intense. After a year or so of being Hank, he seemed bored with the novelty and became Blake once more. He recently told a friend that we were cool parents because we let him be Hank for a year. It occurred to me that we never ‘let him’ do anything. We usually stood in amazement as he was Blake or Hank and did whatever he ‘needed to do’, and we desperately tried to understand or catch up. Or give up.

He’s a grown man now but I still spy a glimpse of Hank now and then; in his voice; in his smile; in his compassion; in his sense of fairness and justice; in the way he loves with complete abandon; in his authenticity; in his loyalty.

I thank God for the ‘Year of Hank’ and the grace that allowed it to happen. If we’re all made in God’s image, heaven must be a hell of lot of fun or at least it will be when Blake arrives someday!

Peace,

Denis

 When God created human beings, he made them in the likeness of God. Genesis 5:1