We are the only ones
awake in these early morning hours.
His daddy snores beside us.
It’s been six days since
I met this newest love of mine,
six days watching the
whole world crack open, again,
six days feeling my own heart
crack open and wrap tight and
firm around the tiniest form
of another.
“Love is the whole and more than all,”
said poet e.e. cummings, and it is clear to me,
in these moments of still dark,
that his were profoundly true words.
Love is the end,
and it is the beginning,
and it is everything we need
in the world.
Everything we need to live.
To be. To see.
There was the first love,
who showed up on a sidewalk
outside a ministry building three hours late,
who met me with a smile and a word.
It took time for the friendship to catch fire,
for him to slip a ring on my finger
and wait at the end of an aisle.
Our love looked like late mornings in bed
and forgiveness granted in quiet understanding
and hands held strong through the good and the
bad, the victories and the disappointments.
It smelled like pumpkin and spice and
autumn pies cooked in a temperamental
apartment oven. It felt like meeting-new-family
nerves and adjusting-to-life-with-a-man frustrations
and overwhelming moments of adoration
for a love so big like this.
It tasted like meals cooked at home
because we couldn’t afford to eat out,
like hope and dreams and a future
that stood before us, good and promising.
It sounded like music in the
late hours of night, songs written
of love and life and time standing still.
We learned that love could hold hands
with life, that it was the only way
to hold hands with life.
And then came the first one,
added to the two, who slid into the world
on a late night in November, three hours late,
who met us with a frown and eyes like mine.
It took time to find our way in this new world
of patchy sleep and caring for another’s needs
and raising up a child, but we locked hands
and walked into it together. Always together.
And love looked like a body rising from deep sleep
in the middle of a night to watch a baby feed
by the light of a lamp, and it looked like
a blanket spread on a floor so a mama
could read to her tiny little boy, just four days old,
and it looked like staring into the fixed gaze
of an infant, together, and feeling the overwhelm
of helpless emotion at a gift so precious and beautiful.
It smelled like cinnamon and cloves and pine,
because it was Christmas, and this baby was our gift.
It felt like the hope of a husband opening the front door
and folding a weary mama in his arms at the
end of a day when a baby had been crying for
hours and hours and hours.
It tasted like a rare dinner out,
because free babysitters were hard to find.
It sounded like a song, written on a birthday
for a birthday girl who needed to hear what
he had to say about beauty and dreams and forever-love.
We learned that we were deeply loved and strong in that love,
and we learned that we loved deeply and were courageous
in that love, too.
Then came the second one,
who welcomed us with a semi-smile
and his daddy’s eyes, and our love
lurched and stumbled into deeper knowing.
It took time to match our steps, because
there were two of them now, and so many more
needs and the same number of hours in a day.
Love looked wild and tangled around the three
in an impossible-to-explain way,
and it looked like late-night Harry Potter movies,
and it looked like three stretched on a floor
to touch and talk to and stare at the new baby.
It smelled like early morning coffee before
he left for the job that paid our bills.
It felt like sun-warm on a spring day
and walks to the park and exhaustion
that turned to joy in the daylight hours.
It tasted like sour jelly beans offered in a
plastic egg, because it was Easter that year.
It sounded like a toddler voice and an infant voice
all mixing as one, and the laughter that would
come later because a little brother loved a big one so.
We learned that love would not lessen
when two became three, but would become
greater and different and much more beautiful,
like four souls finding pieces of themselves
they never knew were missing.
And then came the third,
just fourteen months later,
and he met us with the first brother’s eyes
and the same scowl and a heart that would
only know full house. It took time for us
to find our feet in the overwhelm of
two toddlers and an infant.
Love ran desperate and unmoored
and out of control, like a haze we
couldn’t quite see through, because
it was all around and everywhere and
could not be contained.
It looked like dirty blankets
in the middle of the night,
because a stomach virus would not let us go;
and it looked like dishes stacked in a sink
because we couldn’t possibly catch up;
and it looked like a mama home crying
with a daddy at work, because love was so dang hard.
It smelled like lavender sprinkled in the wash,
to erase the vomit smell that stuck around too long;
and it smelled like coffee stuck to the fibers of his shirt,
because we needed insurance somehow, some way;
and it smelled like summer nights and sweat.
It felt like a hand on a shoulder, a back, a face,
just to say, I know, I understand,
I love your overwhelmed heart anyway.
It tasted like frozen yogurt in the late night hours
when kids were asleep, because life was too stressful
and this was our “date night” and we were too tired
to do anything else or even leave the house.
It sounded like a little boy laughing at his big brothers
and the second boy wondering aloud where his
little brother might be, because he was already
so hopelessly in love with him.
We learned that love for one did not steal
love from another, because we love in our giving,
and so we gave them ourselves,
and we gave each other ourselves,
and we crawled into our new reality
where love had no age or limit or death
but only offered abundant life.
Then came four and five,
who slid into the world six weeks early
and spent twenty-one days away from home.
It took time to crawl through the struggle that
strained our faces and burned our throats,
but we treaded the water of survival,
loving the ones at home and
loving the ones at the hospital.
Love looked like two babies,
caught in incubators, wrapped in wires,
held in the arms of their mama and daddy,
every night from 10 to midnight.
It smelled like milk on the breath of two,
soap at the entrance of neonatal intensive care,
sterilization in the open room of a hospital.
It felt like panic in the back of a throat,
panic that those babies would never be free,
panic of what if?
It tasted like wine,
sipped slowly at the end of the day,
after a hospital visit finished, so a mama
could sleep before another day with a divided heart.
It sounded like machines beeping in time to hearts beating,
warnings of oxygen dropping too low,
the whispered words of mothers willing
their babies to grow and eat and thrive.
We learned that love could bear anything
and everything that comes along, because
there we were drowning with divided hearts,
walking weary but wonder-filled,
and here we are still alive.
And then came the sixth, the last,
who slid into the world three weeks early
and met us with a face sweet and
small and so very lovely.
It took time to find our way
into yet another reality, to learn
this new way of being.
Love looked like a flickering smile
on the face of a boy and a mama nearly
brought to tears by the gift of it.
It smelled like baby skin and lavender lotion
and a tiny new breath on a mama face,
like home-baked cookies and
simmering roast and tomato soup.
It felt like the tiny weight of a baby,
once more, resting in the crook of an arm
or on a chest or across a lap.
It tasted like fizzy fruit juice to
settle nerves and homemade bread
to fill a belly in the least amount of time
and baby kisses in the still moments of a night.
It sounded like the tiniest cry, like all the
wild voices of boys turned quieter
because there is a new baby,
like a washing machine constantly going
trying to keep up, even though we can’t possibly.
We learned that love never, ever stops growing
but expands into a great and mighty force
that gathers all those loved ones near and
safe and tight within the arms of family,
and we could all feel our souls meeting and
joining and locking ever more strongly
together.
Love is life’s greatest delight,
a mystery that explains itself in giving,
so the more you give, the more you have to give.
It grows its garden in the rockiest soil,
blooms gently in the hardest of places,
like marriage, like parenting, like family,
these worlds shared and sacred.
Love is blind. It is costly.
It is freedom and joy and the
only way to life.
Love is all.
