Purple Band-Aid
The Call
I hurry to pick him up at school. He looks fragile, pale, tender, raw. Trying to look strong. A storm rages inside him, but I am there. Deep down, he wants me to carry him. Instead, I carry his lunch bag and supplies.
Hours later, several stitches covered by a purple star-and-moon band-aid, we venture home to relax. He doesn’t like the band-aid. “It’s for toddlers.” I don’t know his true fear. Only that I was there, and held his hands in mine while he lay on a gurney being sewn back together. He has witnessed this repair before — his stuffed doggy bursting a seam, stuffing spilling, needle and thread healing. But there wasn’t the fear, then. Wishing away his pain. Thanking God he didn’t damage or lose an eye. I remove the purple healer and apply a flesh-colored band-aid.
Opening
Days pass, we read stories at bedtime and continue our nightly ritual of reminiscing about a childhood story of mine. Fear rises to steal my joy from a shattered moment of innocence decades earlier when I was younger than him. I’ve felt the fear, breathed it in my lungs. Fear so big it nearly took my life as an adult. And he opens, carefully, raw again. He feared for me, his mother — that I would die when my eyes met his wound. That he would never see me again on earth — because of my anguish over his wound. Gone-forever-death. His anxiety is real, overwhelming him to tears weeks after the mishap. I hold him close, run my fingers through his wildly strewn hair and kiss his head softly. Thank God, we have Jesus. Because God knows right where he will meet me. We portion our fears to the outstretched Hands waiting to hold us both, and my first-born, 8-year-old son, drifts off peacefully, secure for the moment. I am there.
Spinning
Sometimes I wonder why I’m afraid to let go. Banking my daily routine around the funnel, centrifugal force ever-pulling, fighting gravity.
I spin.
Kicking and screaming around the funnel. Desperately trying to remain atop, I cannot. The unknown creates fear. The funnel is narrow and dark at the bottom. I’ve been there. My body, mind, soul all questioned each other. Yet, after squeezing out the base, I am given new life.
Looking Back
I believe I will see heaven at any moment. The labor inducing medications wreak havoc on my body. I convulse for hours with increasing severity, I cannot deliver. Hurried in for c-section, arms strapped out wide like Jesus on the cross, padded boards restrict movement, holding me still to reveal the hidden seed inside me. I am drowning, afraid I will aspirate and die at the next wave of nausea. I’ve never known this darkness before. This wanting… to give up.
And then the miracle occurs. A baby boy, born through the advances of technology that keep us both alive. Convulsions don’t abate. Nurses report never having a patient with so severe a reaction, he cannot nourish until my body calms. My husband offers to hold him to me, and the hand of God reaches down, he suckles, and my body calms with a new life force.
He is the one and only seed God gives me. For five years, he delights our souls with joys we could only know from experiencing this miracle of life. No words of encouragement from friends, parents, siblings, colleagues or neighbors can convince us that parenthood is something we want. But God knows. We didn’t know how much we wanted children until he arrived. We try to expand. My seeds are strewn on a dusty path, only to be eaten by the birds.
We can still grow, there are other ways.
After every financial, spiritual, professional, mental and physical leaf is turned, two lives begin and die. We are led to adopt. To bond, I induce lactation, a modern medical miracle. The needle of sustenance pierces, but the fire of hell enters my body. Like a marble spiraling at the top of a funnel, I try to keep pace to prevent the fall. But we all fall. It started in the Garden. And I spiral into a darkness deeper than I can fathom or manage.
Rebirth
Caught by the cupped hands of my mother. The same way she holds her hands for eucharist. She captures her falling bird and tucks me into her nest. She is there. We are together. Death lures, attesting an easy way. My mother listens, nurtures, sustains, and I open, raw and suffocating… drowning in unshared events that no mother wants to hear. She continues to give life to me and my baby birds.
She processes, reads, connects, along with my two soulmates, battling for me, propelling me — limp and lifeless — toward light and truth. Phone calls, emails, meals, cards, scripture, truth. Unceasing. Relentless. Breathing life into my soul that I am worthy. In time, I find myself again. But I am different. A chasm ripped open the darkness, now in the light. It’s faded and dusty, yet unforgettable now. Fear rises again.
Learning to Fly
How is it that my mother, with her own broken wing, can fly? Where does it come from? This courage to save, nest, nurture, stretch, and teach a crippled, broken bird to fly, again? My mother is there. Broken, too. The One who sustained her in her own darkness, lives through her hands, her heart, her words, her doing, her silence. Creating space for me to breathe, limp, walk, run. And eventually, I take flight. Soaring again. A second birth from the same mother.
We are all broken. Somehow. Yet there is light. Our brokenness can heal others whose wounds are freshly sutured or, perhaps, draining life. Fly. And I discover, I am the mother I am because of my brokenness. Without the funnel I would not touch my children’s hearts, souls and minds in remotely the same way. And there is the gift.
Jesus turns ashes into beauty.
Broken healing the broken. Wounded nursing the wounded. Love unceasing for my baby birds. And I am happy to nest. I was made for this.
