I am one of the poor and fatherless ones.
According to the statistics, I should have turned my angst toward drugs. I should have run with the racy crowd. I should have dropped out of school and skipped college altogether and raised my parcel of kids on my own. Instead, I graduated at the top of my class and then became a first-generation college graduate and then married young and had a parcel of kids I would raise with an amazing, loving, creative, one-of-a-kind man.
But all those accomplishments don’t mean I escaped without deep-seated scars and a lifetime of insecurity and a wounded heart that bled at the slightest puncture.
I got all of this, too. And those scars and insecurities and the wounded heart showed up in things like anorexia and bulimia and perfectionism and isolation and fear and anxiety that chased me through whole days and weeks and months but did not yet have a name.
Then something miraculous happened. Those babies began to slip into my world, and I began to find all my missing pieces. I began to heal.
This was unexpected. It was extraordinary.
It is one of the loveliest parts of my mother journey.
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It all began nine years ago, when a Valentine’s Day pregnancy test told me what I wanted and feared most: there would be a baby.
I was young, just two years married to my husband, and those eating disorders felt too near, and the self-image insecurities hid just beneath the surface of an ever-rising scale. It was hard to watch those numbers adding up over days and weeks and months, hard to watch a belly rounding, even though it held a precious treasure, because I’d worked so hard to make it remain flat and as close to perfect as humanly possible. It was hard not to think about what that belly might look like later, after a baby no longer hid in its dark, because looks were still important, and skinny still equaled beautiful, and maybe I could be beautiful now, with a belly swelling around new life, but would I be beautiful later?
And then he was here on a cold evening in November, and he locked eyes with me and his held words my husband had tried to say, over and over and over again: You are loved because you are you. And the you you are is beautiful.
So all those days after, when people brought meals and I tried to count calories, sometimes not eating at all, when I logged eight-mile runs every day because I was trying so desperately to get that figure back, I had only to pick up my baby and look into those eyes so aware, so intelligent even then, so indiscriminately loving from the very beginning, to know the truth: Beauty does not live in a body but in a heart.
And he would grow and show me in a million more ways these nine years he’s been mine—in pictures he’d snap with an old camera, even though I was still in pajamas and didn’t have any makeup on, “just because you’re beautiful;” in that knock on our bedroom door when we’ve closed up for the night, just because “I forgot to give you another kiss;” in the smile he wears when I dress up for a date with his daddy.
It took the eyes of a child to show me just how beautiful a woman could be, in her love for a child.
And so these days after having another baby, these days when a stomach needs shrinking once more and it takes more time, because it’s the fifth time, I don’t worry or stress or obsess like I would have done all those years ago.
Because I know I am loved for more than just beauty.
And I know I am beautiful just because I am me.
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The second one met me with a compassionate heart and his daddy’s blue eyes and all those emotions that took us by storm when his brother felt hurt or when he felt alone or when he accidentally broke something that was important to him or someone else, like the paper monster named Xerxes his brother was building.
He burned all my bridges down.
Because every time tears turned blue eyes to glass, I heard the voice from my past:
I’ll give you something to cry about.
Big girls don’t cry.
Don’t be weak–like her–and cry about something as insignificant as this.
Something as insignificant as someone else’s dog getting run over or a handicapped child unable to cross the street by himself or an old man out to dinner alone, still wearing that wedding ring.
I looked at my sweet boy with his so sweet heart, and I called that voice’s bluff.
Because I learned from a little boy the beauty of emotion, the way feelings can heal a broken world, how tears can wet a dry ground and bring forth something new and green and marvelous, how big emotions can walk us deeper into life. And every time I reached my arms out to my cares-a-whole-lot-about-everything boy, I felt those pieces of my soul shift and the empty spaces fill, because he was me and I was him, and the emotion was a gift, not a curse like I had been told once upon a time.
I let it go, and I learned to live.
I could cry without shame.
I could hope without disappointment.
I could love with abandon.
I could live.
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The third slid into our lives on a late afternoon in July, and he had the eyes of the first and the heart of the second and a lion’s share of courage and daring and trust.
All those growing days he was the little brother who wanted to be just like his bigger brothers, so he flipped off couches at 18 months and hung upside down off monkey bars when he was 2 and jumped off moving swings when he was 3, and I watched it all with trepidation mixed with hope, because he, too, was finding pieces of my soul that had gone missing.
Mine had been a forced courage all my life, a measured courage that only tried what I knew I’d be good at, because failure always waited for that one little mistake, that one not-quite, that one whoops, and if I failed, who would I be then? I would not be a daughter they could be proud of or a wife he could be proud of or a mother they could be proud of.
And then I watched my daring, courageous, fire-cracker-of-a-boy try that bike without training wheels when he was too young for a bike without training wheels, and I watched him wobble and lose control and fall and then get right back on and do it again. I watched him try that back flip on a trampoline and land on his knees instead of his feet and get right back up and do it again. I watched him propel himself from the height of a swing so he flew for one second in time, but he miscalculated the landing, slipping all the way down the hill and landing on his behind and giggling hysterically about it before getting back up and doing it again.
It took the bravery of a 4-year-old to show me that trying and failing and trying again, in spite of the failure, is the real test of courage, not doing only what we know we’ve already mastered. He was still loved, even though he had failed.
I could fail, and it would not change how much I was loved.
I could fail, and it would not change who I was.
I could fail, and it would make me stronger.
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The fourth and fifth came to us in late March, and they spent 21 days in the neonatal intensive care unit, testing the will and patience and trust of a mama and daddy, and then they came home and life blurred, the whole year flashing by without our really knowing what was happening.
We could do this, and we would prove it.
And then they turned 2, and they stripped our self-sufficiency right off the skin of our backs, and people came to us from our amazing community, offering their help, and the desperation answered for us. Yes. Please. Anything you want to do to help.
All my life I’d pushed away the help of others, because I could do life myself, alone, and if I couldn’t, then it was failure. It was not enough. It was shame on you.
Two babies changed it all.
Because we needed help from the people who came to sit with three so we could visit the other two stuck at the hospital. And we needed help from those couples who offered their presence so a strung-tight mama and daddy could have a few hours away, a date of sorts. And we needed help from all those people who gave us extra baby clothes and gift cards for baby things and casseroles stacked on refrigerator shelves.
Our babies did not care that we needed help or that we couldn’t do it on our own. They just loved.
It took the acceptance of two little boys to help me see it true: that asking for help was not weakness, a deficiency that proved our mistake in having so many.
It was strength, because we are all in this life together.
We all march on, together.
I was not alone, ever. Not even in this.
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And now, this last baby, who slid into the world the day before my birthday. He has healed a heart, too, already, in his eighteen days of living, because there was a birthday, when he looked into my eyes and gave me another missing piece.
You see, I’ve never had a great relationship with birthdays, not just because of the getting older, but because, too, every birthday I waited on a call that did not come, from one I still loved even though he’d left. And this year on my birthday I sat in a hospital bed, just eight hours after delivering another beautiful boy, and I held that boy and kissed his lips and forgot all about that call, because here was a piece of perfection, and it was all I ever needed in this world.
Those birthdays used to come and go, and the silence spoke of another silence, of another Father who probably didn’t remember my birthday, either.
Except there was this: a boy born to me safe and healthy and ALIVE, even though we had wondered and worried about the alive part of it, because of a condition I developed in my liver this time around. A condition that might cause stillbirth.
That day before my birthday, all through the night and into the morning, I held a precious, costly gift, and he was ALIVE, and he stared at me and I stared at him, and I heard words that he could not speak and yet could, because a soul can connect and speak to another soul.
You have never been forgotten. You see? That’s what the voice said.
And I did see. I saw a tiny hand on a breast, and I saw eyes that might stay blue blinking hard and then fluttering into the peaceful sleep of a newborn on a mama’s chest, and I saw beauty and perfection and love in the rise and fall of a tiny chest, in the silk of a rounded cheek, in the cute curve of a nose.
I saw the love of a Father who could give new life in the hours before a birthday.
It took the presence of a newborn to remind me that I have never, not in the hardest of all my years, been forgotten.
And every year on the day that is my birthday linked to his, I will remember.
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I did not know they would do this. I did not know the exhausting-yet-precious presence of six boys would heal me in the ways I have been healed. But they have.
There is a miracle in motherhood: that we become exactly who we were created to be in all their chafing and stretching and rounding off of our edges so we can see a world and ourselves more clearly.
It’s unexpected. It’s startling. It’s hard and intense and humbling.
And there is nothing more beautiful in all the world.
