Go Ask Dad: Bruh time

For Mother’s Day, I gave my wife a sleeveless T-shirt that read:

Mama
Mommy
Mom
Bruh.

Bruh-itis has fully infected our 10- and 7-year-old boys. Some days, “Bruh” is every other word out of their mouths. Even the dog is learning to answer to this name. That’s probably a story in and of itself …

But the evolution of my wife’s moniker has caused me to think about the passage of time.

The old wisdom states, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” The seasons change and the passage of time means that we all change in physical, emotional and spiritual ways; such changes can be good, bad, or indifferent. Relationships also evolve, and not just what we call each other. “There is a season turn, turn, turn.” There is a time to be born and a time to die. Our mortality is the painful truth that comes into focus for many people on Mother’s Day as well as other holidays.

Yet, a magical, holy aspect of time is that our perception of it is not always linear. The past is not dead, claimed William Faulkner, it’s not even past. Bruh, a.k.a. my wife, is still our babies’ “Mama” and also that hard-working grad student whom I fell in love with. She is still that testy teenager and that little girl who loved an audience. I never knew her at those previous points in her life, yet there are glimpses when the past turns back into the present moment.

On Mother’s Day, we were at my parents’ neighborhood pool in Raleigh, and my wife did a front flip off the diving board! As she spun in the air, time unspooled and unwound, turning back to when she had learned that flip many summers long ago in her hometown pool. The boys and I were speechless.

Then, their Mama/Mommy/Mom came out of the water grinning like a little girl who was proud of her trick. We all cheered!

Bruh, it was delightful.

Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of Gently Between the Words: Essays and Poems. He is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church. He and his wife, also an ordained minister, parent three children and a dog named Ramona.