Country music, backpacks and canned chicken, Shawn and Gus and Henry, unbreakable grumpiness and unending tenderness.
Shifts and turns and kicks, an expanding belly, tight bellybutton, aching hips, hiccups on ultrasounds, ten fingers, ten toes, four chambers, one heart, button nose.
I am fighting for my two pound miracle, and she is letting go of her eighteen year old baby.
Good things come with a price. This price, for what is the best thing, is the steepest and the most straight to my heart. Actually, it seems to be the heart that creates the best thing--the heart that cares too much, which is just enough. Someone told me today that it is the messy parts of our hearts, the parts that are bloody and bruised, that connect to the messy parts of others' hearts, and that this is what makes meaning. The messy parts of my heart care too much (which is just enough) and they ache and hurt for my baby, and for my baby brother, and that is the price I pay for what is the best thing.
Ben left for a two year mission to Chile yesterday. I've known glimpses of what motherhood must feel like as I've felt this deep, insecure fear for him to learn the pain of loneliness. I cried when he got his mission call and everyone thought I was being sweet and so happy for him and I blended in with the rest of everyone crying, but I actually cried because I was scared. I wanted then and I want now to somehow encapsulate him in a bubble of happiness and goodness and joy. If I could protect one person from paying the price to learn the deepest kinds of things, it would be him.
But these most beautiful things really do come with a price, and he deserves to discover that for himself now.
My baby's heart decelerated multiple times while I was in the hospital last week, and the doctor almost had to do an emergency c-section. I will have about five doctor's appointments from here on out, and I will be constantly on guard for an emergency delivery. I have never been as strong as I was when I was fighting for her, and it was this new, lioness type of ferocity that motherhood also must feel like. I ache for her, because she is two pounds and no one who is two pounds should ever have a hard time breathing. I will fight this battle for her. When she is eighteen years old, she'll have plenty of her own and I'll send her off to Chile or somewhere, and then she can learn whatever she needs to in the big world. The exhaustion and brilliance of sacrifice, the brutality and exhilaration of life.
My mom called me after my baby brother left, crying, in his room, and I fed her this line about how he's ready and safe and his mission will surely be miraculous, and then I gave up and cried too, because neither her nor I nor anyone who loves him desperately will be able to fight any battles for him for the next two years, and now he will learn the exhaustion and exhilaration for himself.
I am fighting for my two pound miracle, and she is letting go of her eighteen year old baby. Both of them hurt and make me want to squirm away, but the messy parts of my heart keep reaching out and remembering, and I choose to feel it anyways.
The price for loving is this wrenching pain for the people our hearts reach to. As much as I want out of the fear of "letting go" and "fighting for" that being a mother feels like in a terrible and wonderful way, remembering Ben's sweet sensitivity, his ability to hold me and my sister and my mom like our own little man, his perfect, quarter-note flat voice singing Andy Grammer, his deep spirituality and diligence, his thoughtful, personal notes, his yogurt and his bad moods and his agonizing over hurting anyone, his endless kindness and his raw vulnerable moments of needing his family and his home, and then watching my sweet baby wiggle her fingers on the ultrasound machine, her adorable lips opening and closing and hiccups shaking her spine and causing her toes to curl, feeling her kick when she must know I'm trying to fall asleep, and having absolutely certainty that she will be brilliant and she will be strong--remembering this makes the price and the pain so good and so sweet and I want more of it if only I can feel this deep a little longer.