On Our Lady of Guadalupe and manhood for my 9-year-old son

By Ray Salazar, White Rhino

I value taking my 9-year-old son, Adrián, to the barber shop.  As we walk from the car to the shop’s door, I take his hand.  When he was smaller, his little fingers barely wrapped around the edge of my palm.  Now that he’s older, his grasp inside my hand is changing. These days, his fingers remain outstretched like a comb in my grasp.  My little boy is searching for his independence.   So I encourage him to tell the barber how to cut his hair: “I want the front long.”

Adrián, it’s too long,” I step in.

“Noooo,” he responds with a disappointment he’ll likely use one day when I say he cannot use my car or stay out late.  For now, the barber still looks to me for the final word.  “Fine.  Just a bit on top.”

On Sunday mornings, I want to repeat the memory I have of my father combing my damp hair when I was a kid.  With brilliantine on Easter and on school picture days, my dad sent me off proudly with the scent and slickness of a new haircut.  I treasure the few moments of my father combing my hair, making the perfect part on the left side of my head.

My son doesn’t want anything in his hair on Sunday mornings.  “Just water,” he says as we prepare to go to church.

In what seems like only weeks ago, I lifted my little boy up with one arm, carrying him next to my heart: my little boy who looks like me and, at three years old, sang off-key.  But these days, he is a too heavy to hold on one forearm.  Now, his voice blends smoothly into songs as it does into prayers.

At mass, dressed as an altar server, Adrián’s hair sweeps across his forehead as if brushed over by someone’s blessing. In the procession bearing a heavy cross high above his head with hair I want to comb neatly, my son struggles to balance the pole.  He persists.  On Sundays, this is how he carries out his faith.

I watch him from a pew wondering how he remains comfortable with the tips of his hair in his eyes.  Then I begin to wonder in my internal silence, more soundless than a prayer, if or when my son will question the Mexican Catholic faith he was born into.

The other day in the car, out of nowhere, my son asked me, “Papi, what was your greatest fear as a kid?”  I couldn’t find an answer.  “I don’t know, m’ijo,” I said after some silence.  “Maybe failure.”

If or when my son asks me to explain the complexities of our faith, I don’t know if I’ll find the words.  So, for now, on this December 12, on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I find the words to explain what I believe about our faith to my nine-year-old son.

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This article was originally published in The White Rhino.

[Photo courtesy of Ray Salazar]

 

 

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