How Our Family Is Like a Squeaky Rocking Chair

The house is quite. The faint aroma of baked chicken lingers in the air. Going down the hallway you can detect the sweet innocence of infancy. All is zen and peaceful and then…a sudden, loud, squeeeeaaaaak. And then another and another until a fast paced rhythm of squeaking fills the sound space.

Yes, this is the scene at our house every evening. Ear wrenching, squeaking, rocking chair!  It is completely unheard of, but we have a squeaky rocking chair. It is ridiculous I know. I keep wanting to ask my husband to oil it or do anything really, but I haven’t and maybe there is a reason behind that. The chair pretty much started squeaking about a month into baby life so Emma does not notice it. She’s been a squeaky rocking chair lover her whole life.  She will fall asleep with the rhythmic squeaks as if it was a sweet flute accompanying my lullaby humming.

Why do I keep it? How did this happen in the first place? After all this is our first child and therefore we should have a beautiful, quiet, new chair to match our new furniture set right? Actually, no. So the story goes, before I was pregnant or even had a thought about a nursery or booties or any of that, my husband and I were out driving around a neighborhood to see if we liked it as we were house  hunting at the time. Just as we were pulling out of the end of the neighborhood we saw a rocking chair on the curb in front of the last house on the street. My husband quickly pulled over. Free furniture!  The owner just so happened to be in the yard and was able to give us the footstool that went with it. There was no real logic behind picking it up. We kind of wanted a DIY fixer-upper project was all.

Fast forward three months, and we find out I am pregnant. Crazy right? So I reupholstered the cushions and my husband fixed the broken wood slats on the back and ta da! Good as new…for the first month. Then slowly but surely a loud squeak developed. No matter what position I put myself in on the chair there it is, but you know what else there is? The hard work both me and my husband put into the chair, each loving stich, each piece of wood cut. We made something beautiful for our child, something we seemed to have a futuristic intuition about. We are not perfect parents, we aren’t perfect people, and the chair is by no means perfectly put together, but like the chair, we plan to raise Emma and teach her that she doesn’t have to be perfect. She can grow up to be the person who she wants to be, imperfect, just like her mommy and daddy who put together an imperfect squeaky chair out of love.  That is what our family is.