“I look into your eyes and I think back to the son of mine, you’re as old as he was when I left for war…”
Odysseus can’t help but smile as he gazes down to the baby boy cradled in his arms.
He’d spent years trying to get home, trying to see his family again. It had never occurred to him that his family may have grown in his absence.
His son, his boy, Telemachus, had grown into a wonderful man. More than that, a wonderful husband and father.
Odysseus had learned quickly about you, his sons betrothed, as he settled in back home.
He watched as his son reminded him of himself, hopelessly in love and devoted to his wife. A proud feeling swelling in his chest as he reminisced and caught the softness of his son's eyes on you.
His pride only grows as he watches his son become a father. A little baby boy that reminds Odysseus so much of the one he left behind all those years ago.
Odysseus watches his son hold his own boy, watches as he shares his immeasurable joy with you, listens as Penelope tells their grandson stories, and imagines what it must have been like after he’d gone.
Baby Telemachus being rocked to sleep with stories of adventures filling his head, growing and only knowing his father as myth, finding you and falling deeply into love just as his father before him had.
Now Odysseus’s grandson rests in the nursery where his son once laid. Now a grandfather, Odysseus rocks the boy to sleep the same way he had so few times with his own son.
And as he lays him in his crib to rest he’s grateful to not miss this. To be here to watch his son be a part of all the things he couldn’t.
For Telemachus to experience all the firsts with his boy that Odysseus missed with him.