Family

Moments

by mary white
09/06/15
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I have written many times about our eldest son’s premature birth…..about our stay in the NICU, the needle sticks, the IV, the respirator, the medical decision to defer eating in favor of breathing.  Through it all, I only cried once; and that wasn’t even because of his suffering.  My breaking point? Finally feeding him. I trembled and sobbed as my husband and the pediatric nurse mopped my face with tissues; the nurse laughing,  “Oh sure, now you cry!”

It wasn’t until we finally had him home that my emotions completely kicked in.  For the first two weeks, all I did was cry.  In fact, I cried so much that my tears soaked his clothes when I held him.  Safe from needles and tests, cuddled with unlimited feedings, I could release.

In facing any emotional passage, sad or glad, I can never predict my response.  Certain that I would bawl my eyes out at our wedding, I waterproofed everything and then never shed a tear.  I did not cry at our oldest son’s high school graduation, yet wept uncontrollably when I handed his medicine over to him.  I stood stone-faced at the funeral of my friend’s son, but when she and I finally sat down to talk, my teeth chattered and my body shook.  The one determining factor for my hysterical versus frozen reaction seems to be the availability of tissues.  If there are none, I will come unglued and resort to random clothing items for handkerchiefs, mine or other people’s.

These past six months have been the most hectic of our life, hands-down. Our baby stage, with an 11 year old and 4 children under the age of 6, had nothing on this crazy helter-skelter present.  As the people we treasure transition in a flurry of endings and beginnings, our house is wrecked with foot tracks and suitcases; some coming, some going.  For the first time in 30 years, my fingernails are bit down to nubs, I am not sleeping (and I always sleep) and I am completely disconnected from the significance of all that is happening around me.  I have lost count of who is doing what, saying what and feeling what;  there are too many dancers with too many steps and, dazed, I sit out.

I suspect that God mercifully distracts me from the enormity of what I am passing through. Rushing from prom to graduation to nursing home, the stain on my dress, the lateness of my arrival protects me from feeling the raw power of what is happening, lest I be crushed. I will need the rest of my life to feel what I have not felt these past six months, to process these last, climactic scenes. And, even then, I think I will just scratch the surface.

When I initially searched for a column title, my dear friend suggested, “And, then there are moments.”  I loved it, but opted for “Love Stories” because it was simpler.  Right now, I would like to make her title my theme song…. because moments, the moments that we allow, that we lay claim to, say the most about us.  And I am missing mine.  In the midst of the chaos that is my current reality, I am on a 10 second (or 10 day) delay and only blearily conscious of the aftershocks.  I need a reminder that tucked inside this hecticness, buried beneath the hubbub is everything that matters, the essential beats and barest breaths of this life, my life…….a husband bending down to catch his father’s whispered fears, a grown son asking, “Aren’t you going to eat with me?”, a young daughter, so excited about her new college surroundings that she squeals at the sight of a squirrel like it was some exotic animal, two sons tenderly delivering their precious grandmother to her new home, those same sons tending a brother’s bittersweet departure while he holds his mother in a crowning still of rapprochement, and a stepmother, sitting with her grandson and son-in-law, watching a familiar and lovely belly-dancer fill the stage with spinning light. And, then there are moments…….oh yes, there are.