Look at My Son

At some point not everything in my life will be related to Hamilton: The Musical. At some point. This is not that point.

My wife gave birth to our third child last week. Beckett Alan Coffman. He's a cute fellow. My wife was amazing during the delivery (of course). We went to a local midwife clinic down the street from a hospital in case of emergencies. We left our house at around midnight to head in, he was born at 2:16, and we made it back home shortly after 6. Our kids didn't even know we were gone. They went to bed, oblivious, and woke up with a baby brother. Surprise!

Beckett mostly sleeps and eats and occasionally poops and every now and again opens his eyes. We are smitten, all of us. My oldest son was not yet two when my daughter was born. He dug it, but doesn't remember it. He's now 5-1/2 and my daughter is 3-1/2 so this one will stick for them. My daughter refused a Super Bowl party at her grandparent's the other night because she wanted to "stay home with my baby." She told him the other morning: "I will take care of you until you're all grown up and then I'll take care of you some more." It is darling and wonderful and lovely and all of the adjectives.

And one thing that has struck me in the past few days of wanting to tell everyone about my son and show them his picture and heap up superlatives as to his ineffability is how hardwired that impulse is in any parent. Look! We all scream. This is my child. 

I'll bring C.S. Lewis into this before I fall back on Hamilton. In his book, Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis explains at length this desire to praise that all lovers feel.

But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless . . . shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. 

The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses [Romeo praising Juliet and vice versa], readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. . . . Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. . . . I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

We praise what we love. We are inveterate praisers. Our love of something is bound up in our communication of that love. When I see people I can’t help but tell them about my son. It is, as Lewis says, a spontaneous overlow.

Lewis continues

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.

My love for my son is completed, somehow, someway, in the praise that I lavish on his very existence. I would feel stunted in my love if I couldn’t share it, express it, consummate the enjoyment I get from him.

Now on to Hamilton. One of my favorite songs in the musical is after the war when Hamilton and Burr are singing to their newborn children. Hamilton’s first line in the song is, “Philip, you outshine the morning sun, my son. Look at my son, pride is not the word I’m looking for; there is so much more inside me now.” Clara argues that Lin-Manuel Miranda was able to write this song because of the birth of his own child in the middle of the composition of Hamilton. I maintained that creativity could account for the line, but after beholding my newborn son the other day I am leaning more towards my wife’s perspective. The line seems to require parenthood.

And Hamilton the character is right—there is more to what I am feeling than mere pride. It is something holier than that, something like a desire for others to participate in the beauty and grace of my son. There is a glory that emanates from his tiny body that has the power to illumine the darkness, that beckons us all to the light.