Well, baby girl, this is going to be a different birthday for you … one you will remember and tell your kids and grandkids.
I will deliver your gifts (at an appropriate distance) and probably a McCain Deep’n Delicious cake (because that’s your favorite). You will receive your annual birthday call of Grammie singing Happy Birthday, a birthday gift from Gramma and Grampa added to your bank account (hello Amazon), numerous calls, texts, messages and chats.
But I won’t be able to hold you in my arms, inhale the scent that is you and whisper ‘I love you’ so that just you and your heart hear mine.
As I thought about your twenty-third birthday, I kept coming back to thoughts of the months of expectation, the first days and years after your birth. So many minute and personal details that, perhaps, you don’t know.
It was 1996 when we discovered that we were expecting … again.
Though you are our second child, you were our seventh pregnancy. The losses between the birth of your sister and yourself each broke our hearts, adding layers of calluses that your arrival helped to fade.
We had just moved from Ottawa, Ontario to North Vancouver, BC.
We had gone from home ownership to renting, from established community to everything different, from big sky to tall mountains, from four season to two … summer sun and months of dark monsoons, from quiet suburbia to the nightly echoes of sirens off the nearby mountains, from only a days drive to visit family to a day of flights (and prohibitive costs), from established friendships to knowing only one family (and really it was only your dad who knew them). Everything about life was different!
It wasn’t long, after confirming your existence, that, once again, there were signs that we might never hold you in our arms. Every twinge in my abdomen, every trip to the bathroom could be a catastrophic sign of your demise. Each day was a threshold of celebration and fear.
All was not dark and fearful in those nine months of waiting for your arrival. On New Year’s Eve your dad and I got to hear the Three Tenors (Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Luciano Pavarotti). We explored the beauty of the North Shore Mountains, walked with new friends in the sun or the rain, tasted scones and Scottish shortbread that could bring tears to your eyes, learned bits of Afrikaans language, food and hospitality, learned to love living in a diverse and multicultural community and made friends.
You were born the year that Mother Teresa, Princess Diana and James Stewart all died … the year Kylie Jenner and Malala Yousafzai were born. 1997 was the year of the Titanic, George of the Jungle and Air Bud. The year when Caillou and Teletubbies premiered.
You were born blue and silent … silent for what seemed forever, before you discovered the breath of life, the power in your lungs.
It was the Saturday after Easter, on a sunny, warm day, with Magnolia trees fully in their glorious bloom.
We cried, we laughed. Held you close, ran our fingers across the fine copper hairs on your head, face and back. You were quiet and delicate, frail. You would stretch and wriggle as if needing to work the kinks out. We were in deep love and appreciation.
Your sister arrived soon after, with eyes of love and adoration (and intent on leading you all the days of your life).
You loved people from the very beginning. Young and old … all people. You wooed the elderly with your acceptance of them.
And then were the creatures … any creature would do and you wanted to touch them all.
And the painting and crafting and creating … always an endless supply of refrigerator door art at my disposal, from you!
You were born, in a hospital encircled by magnolias. Like them, you were delicate, soft, gentle to the eye … but what they and you are made of, on the inside, is strong structure that scaffolds your life. It is the fragility of who you were made to be that makes you strong, capable, fearless …
lose that scaffolding and you will lose your life’s greatest strength.
“Oh, we are not as strong As we think we are We are frail We are fearfully And wonderfully made” Rich Mullins (We are not as Strong as We Think we Are)
We can be haunted by things that go bump in the night … not just the noises, but the dreams that awaken us with tears, shivers, cold sweats.
It had been a long time since I was awakened by such things that go bump in the night but it’s impact is still felt days later, as a shiver goes up my spine, and my mood is still there … in a funk.
When I am in such a funk I feel more. I feel the hurts and sorrows of others … I understand what it really feels like to carry the burden of others.
As I was trying to shake this funk, the memories of the dream, the bad news of this week (globally, locally, within the lives of people I love) … I remembered that there must be something in my memory of scriptures that had been buried in my heart (from the post, Whatever). But nothing came to mind.
Then the lyrics of a song I had heard earlier in the day began to sing in my head.
“This is what it is to be loved And to know that the promise was That when everything fell, we’d be held”
A rather melancholy song, but not one without hope. I had forgotten about a particular line in the song :
“Why should we be saved from nightmares?”
Nightmares, whether in the form of disastrous life experiences, or things that go bump in the night, happen to us all. They are common human experiences … ones that allow us to share in and understand the sorrow of God. They lead us to him and divine human transaction that is his son … who provides the hope of being held.
“You have to begin to trust that your experience of emptiness is not the final experience, that beyond it is a place where you are being held in love.” – Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love)
itsawonderfilledlife 