He hugs the toilet, his head hanging, his legs folded beneath him in a way mine don’t do anymore, his arms trembling because he knows what’s coming.
I sit beside him, not even a foot away, on the lid of a stool his brothers once thought it would be fun to pee in, and I am here because he asked me, because he just wants his mama, because I am the one he loves hard and hurricane-like, and he wants my comfort beside him while he works through the nausea or whatever else may come.
Down the hall, in my bedroom, sit all those things I need to work on, because it’s bedtime and they’re supposed to be asleep, not feeling sick, but I cannot leave him, because he’s my son, because he asked, because he’s gripping the toilet like it’s that old lumpy dog he’s slept with since before he could talk.
I feel angry and frustrated, in a deep place I cannot speak, that we’re here again, bonding around a toilet instead of his bed, like we did a few days ago when he ate too much junk at a birthday party, when I rubbed his back curved over the white that caught his nausea, when I curved relief around his pain. It was okay then, and I waited as long as he needed, but tonight, the ending of this day where too many people derailed too many efforts, where the time leaked into a giant, invisible vacuum, where I’ve just spent the last hour pouring out my voice and my worship and my heart to a group of teenagers in a place where pranks cornered a stage and a guitar ran out of battery and voices had to make up the difference, all I really want to do is climb into bed and bury myself deep, deep, deep, in a book.
And I’m just thinking of this when he asks, between heaves, if I’ll get a story to read to him. So I bring the one that we’ve been reading during our night read-aloud time, and he listens.
It’s only my voice he hears in that tiny bathroom, and it murmurs in waves like the sickness twisting him tonight.
My voice, my presence, is the calm of his night.
I know this feeling, the body all out of control, those sea-foam swells rolling and pushing and pulling, this never knowing when they will pull too hard, when we will lose all control, and it’s wild and scary and unnerving, but the presence of one we love makes us brave.
That chapter winds toward close, and he sits up and watches the pages instead of bending and heaving. We finish, and he climbs into his recliner bed in a room that belongs to books, and I kiss his head and finally, finally, finally close myself in my room, turning down the covers of my bed with only a few minutes to read before I need to close my eyes.
Care, when we’re parents, can look a lot like the care of Jesus, a sacrificing that feels gutting and brutal and maybe even too hard, like a cup we can’t drink, at least not today, and those words whisper in the tangled gardens of our hearts: Take this cup from me. Because there are lunches still to pack and there is bread still to bake overnight and there is a full load of dishes still to be put away, and we have given all we can give and more already, and sitting in a bathroom for an hour, where a boy writhes and cries and hangs heavy over a toilet, was not on that list of to-do today.
Here we are shedding skins of self, one after another, for all the ways they are teaching us and growing us and re-making us.
“I lay myself down for my son who is learning to love because I first loved him,” says Lisa-Jo Baker.
I sit and lend my presence and fan into flame his brave, and he learns love.
We sit and lend our presence and fan into flame that light beam of motherhood, of daughterhood, of what it means to be God’s child, and the truth of it warms the faces of all those littles so they see the way we filled their cup of milk first, even though right there, on the counter next to that empty one is a computer waiting for a deadline-passed-already story; and they see its presence in the way we washed all those stuffed animals even though the laundry piles are taller than they are; and they see it in the way we sit and wait and breathe and read and wrap in these late-night hours when the work undone waits to be finished, like it does every night.
We know it for what it is, a stretching of arms on a cross, a dying to the old and a living into the new of a life named Mama or Daddy. They see it all, and they don’t call it sacrifice, not yet, not right now. They just call it love.
And this is the voice that whispers in their waves, calming their nights.
We die every day on the altar of Parenthood, and this sacrifice is never easy and the dying is never simple, but we are raised to live freer and stronger and so much more magnificent than we ever once were.
They fill all our spaces, and we don’t even know it, but they are burning all those bridges down between the old self that wore those white shirts because they were cute and that marked all those hours as uninterrupted reading time and that thought a career path toward advancement and name-recognition and Pulitzers was the way for her, and the new self that doesn’t even own a white shirt anymore and carves reading time into the bathroom breaks; and chose to pass up that job advancement because she wanted to spend more time at home.
The children who sleep down the hall, the ones I’ve snuggled and tucked and kissed, are walking me right into the aftershock of my dying and living again, and they are stretching all the lines I once drew and knew, and they are painting a sunrise, a new day, in brighter, more brilliant colors, because who I am becoming, with them, is greater than who I was, without them.
We lay down the old self, and we pick up the new, and we let them keep stripping all that skin until we are new and dazzling and beautiful.
This is the miracle of love.
This essay is an excerpt from Family on Purpose Episode 5: We Care for Each Other. The Earth. Widows, Orphans & Foreigners. To learn more about the Family on Purpose series, visit the project landing page.
