The Fourth Seat

I found our current dining room table on Craigslist when Lily was just a few months old. We borrowed a friend's truck and drove 45 minutes to pick it up, and we couldn't have been more delighted. The colors and style appealed to us, the fit was perfect for our dining room, and--best of all--it had an additional leaf that folded out from the middle, allowing us to extend our seating from 4 to 6 or even 8. As we sat at the table that first night, two chairs were left empty: the one that Lily would occupy once she was old enough and... the other one.

As Lily got a little bigger and moved from our arms into her high chair, I began to see our family materializing around that table, but looking at the fourth spot was always a bit bittersweet. We had yet to decide whether we would attempt to further grow our family to fit that chair or whether it would remain empty. The latter thought inevitably brought pinpricks of tears to my eyes; in spite of all that is our amazing daughter, I still sometimes feel that infertility and miscarriage robbed us of the family that we were supposed to have--the one we would have had if I just had been able to carry our early pregnancies to term. Now, with Lily over two and my own 40th birthday fast approaching, it just seemed I'd have to live with the constant reminder that I couldn't have all that I wanted.

And then a funny thing happened. That empty space started to get filled more days than not.

For the amount of food required to feed our family of friends at our annual Winter Whimsies party, the extra leaf was mandatory.

Lily had no trouble filling the additional seats we'd once thought we didn't need.

And, sometimes, chairs weren't even necessary at all--we just wanted to snuggle in as our perfect little family of three.

The days our table feels the most full, though, are the ones when that fourth seat (and often a fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth) are filled by the friends we are so blessed to call our family. It's not unusual to hear our door open at dinnertime and have a friend quickly pull up a stool at the corner to catch up about the day, and it's a rare weekend that doesn't see the table weighed down at least once with a variety of glasses, plates, and meals as an impromptu neighborhood potluck appears.

See, here's what I've learned about our fourth seat: it's not empty at all. It's full of more things than I ever thought a single chair could hold, some tangible and some not, some expected but most surprises. I've learned that my vision for our family table was so minute, so temporary, so myopic that only a complete upheaval of my design for my life could ever give me the freedom to allow it to hold all that it is able to.

Whatever your fourth seat may be, I wish it filled with more wonder than you could ever imagine.