I watch my boy from where I sit, his back curved a bit while his head hangs over the Star Wars book he’s reading, and I marvel at how his brow is missing the soft spot between eye and forehead, how his face has thinned out of the baby cheeks and chin, how his mouth moves in silent speaking while he is so lost in the world of a book. My boy is no more a baby, but he will always be my baby.
In two days he will celebrate eight years since his birth day, that day when my body bore down and his body tore through, a day when boy became first son and girl-woman became Mama.
“I know how I was made, Mama,” he said last year on his day, when I set a birthday brownie-cupcake in front of him. “God took a piece of your heart and made me.”
He has a gift with words and truth and insight. He saw it exactly right. All my children are a piece of my heart walking and jumping and racing around outside my body, and it’s scary and risky and agonizing to let loose those heart strings so they can learn to walk on their own, but this is how we learn to really live.
The love between a mama and her boy is wide and deep and strong enough to knock us all flat.
What I have learned of love, what I have learned of grace and forgiveness and joy, what I have learned of life, I could not have foretold that chilly night in November, four days before Thanksgiving that year.
I have never been the same.
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He slid into the world late, when the sky was pitch black, and it was a mostly perfect, by-the-books birth, with a perfect, rosy-cheeked baby and a perfect love all the way from the beginning. And then they released him to two young parents who didn’t know what to do with a seven-pound, fifteen-ounce baby except let him steal our hearts.
We laid him in a Peter Rabbit bassinet that first night, after reading him a bedtime story, and then his daddy and I found sleep to the sound of a new being breathing just beside our bed.
I woke before he did for that early, early morning feeding, and he was still sleeping soundly, but the darkness, all above his bassinet, was moving, swirling, like something lived in the dark, something sinister and sharp and full of a death that did not steal breath but something greater—life.
I picked up my baby boy and held him in my arms, and I prayed while he fed, and when he was done I held him and prayed some more, and when my arms got too tired to hold him anymore, I laid him in the bassinet, but I didn’t stop praying until the first shards of light reached right through my window, until that twirling dark lifted from the corners of the room, until the fingers that fought to reach an innocent baby’s form had completely disappeared.
It was my first all-night vigil for this boy whose name means Jehovah has heard.
It would not be my last.
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Just a few weeks ago, I tossed and turned and prayed and listened and tried hard to find my way out of a confusion too dark to see through.
My boy had spent three days in school suspension for choosing to act outside of who he is, and I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart, trying desperately to crawl my way toward understanding. I tried to find the words that came so easily all those years ago, at my first all-night vigil, but the only words that would come sounded more like: Help. Please. Over and over and over again.
He is too big now to hold in my arms all night, but I held him in my heart.
It was all mere weeks after announcing we were expecting boy number six, when all those people filled a comment box with words: I guess you’re just really good at raising boys. But here was my firstborn, the boy who first stole my heart, proving them all wrong.
There was more he had to teach me here, this child who has always been strong-willed and incredibly creative and a wild hurricane of love.
Sometimes our parenting journey takes us right up against the places where it feels like we don’t know what we’re doing and it feels like we are not enough or we were never enough or we will never be enough and it feels like we are flailing in a midnight where all the stars have gone out. Sometimes we need to stall here and stay a while.
Our children will show us the way back out.
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The day before Thanksgiving that birth year we raced him to a children’s ER, because he hadn’t produced a wet or dirty diaper in twelve hours. Your milk will come in, my mother had told me the day we brought him home and I could not even pump an ounce and could not say for sure that my baby was eating anything at all.
I sat in the emergency room, holding my four-day-old, watching the way he slept so peacefully even though my whole body shook with the knowing that he could have died from his dehydration.
They called us back and woke him with a needle, trying to find a tiny vein so they could hydrate him again. He cried and screamed and writhed on a table while they poked the bottom of his foot and then his arm and then another hand and then, after all the others slid out of their grasp, the largest vein in his forehead.
I watched my baby, hooked up to a hydration drip, and I noticed the way those glassy eyes stared at the nurse whose face hung over him, how he searched the room for his mama when he realized the face wasn’t the right one, and I cried and cried and could not stop crying. My body had failed him already, four days in. I had failed him already, four days in.
It would take all the days after for him to set me straight. I had not failed him, not really, because I was still his mama, and that was all he needed.
I loved him and he loved me and that was simple, but it was enough.
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Love would always be enough.
Even on the days when strong will met frustration. Even on the days we yelled and said those words we didn’t mean. Even on the days we walked bruised and bloodied and broken for all the mistakes we made. Every mistake, every failure, every less-than-ideal moment was remaking me.
It was not just this boy who slid from a womb eight years ago. It was me, too.
A child, this child, and all his little brothers living inside my home, have led me deeper into the way. They have drawn me closer to the Way. So it is not just his birthday we will celebrate in two days. It is my birth-anew day, too.
As hard as this journey has been, the ways he has taken apart all our parenting philosophies and rearranged them completely, the times we have walked, shaking, off the ledge into a boy-world—I would not trade it for all the easy and predictable certainty in the world.
Sure, there have been days when he has raged and I have thrown my rage to meet his and we both bled through tears and words and wonderings, but I would not give away those days, those opportunities he has given me to practice asking forgiveness and limp toward a better vision for parenting, because they have taught me about humility and grace and freedom. Sure, I used to watch the two-year-old nursery where all those kids sat on their designated seats while my boy climbed onto the one he’d already chosen before the teachers pointed out a different one, and I would wonder how the other kids could be so obedient and well-behaved and calm, but I would not wish a perfectly obedient, minds-all-the-time child in his place, because he has taught me acceptance and joy and what it’s like to surrender to earth-shaking belly laughter. Sure, there would be days when he walked out the door and threw back those words, I’m going to run away, and I wanted to let him, but the truth is I would chase him down to the ends of the earth, because he has taught me how to love in all the hardest places, and I don’t want to stop learning. Ever.
The only time I ever considered my boy easy was when he was a baby, but I’m glad. What he has taught me in his challenge whispers truth about a mama’s strength, so much greater than she knows, and a mama’s hope, so much wider than she can see, and a mama’s great love, so much deeper than she could ever understand.
Thank God he is alive. Thank God he is mine.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.)
