Four years ago today I would go into labor with Teddy. We knew many things about him already. We knew even that his name was Teddy. But the list of things I wish I could now tell myself that day is heartbreakingly long and breaks my heart.
I didn't know how much I would truly love him. I didn't know how much I was about to miss out on by wallowing in my sense of overwhelm about raising a child like him. I thought so much in terms of "a child like him" rather than just him. Four years on, I am haunted by knowing that I had everything back then. Everything. And I didn't see it. I didn't appreciate it. It would take me far too long before I did, and it would be only after I lost invaluable pieces of the gifts God had given me: moments that build relationships, that build our souls and our lives.
I do remember that my deep sense of grief was only relieved when I cuddled his tiny body to me. Among all the harsh truths I know about myself then, knowing that this, at least, is also true gives me some comfort. Yet, I would too often trade that gift away in favor of "getting," as I saw it then, to do the things I would have been able to do if I hadn't had a seventh child, all the things my friends were able to do. As if somehow I was owed that. As if somehow coveting the lifestyles of others borne of their choices and circumstances was better than cradling my own gifts borne of mine.
Four years ago, I grieved what I thought I had lost. It is appropriate to grieve losses, and having a child with a significant disability does involve true and serious loss. But what I couldn't see was the gift inside of all of that, the gift of my little boy as he was--which thing (who he was) I also didn't know. My grief over what I had lost delayed me from coming to know what I had. And it caused me to lose out on so much that should have been mine and his and redounded the pain I started out with. I wish I could go back and just be. Be his mom, allow him to be my baby, the center of my world as all newborns should be. Resisting reality only exacerbates your pain as you are dragged along life's harsh surface and blinds you to those joys tucked underneath that can only be found when you sink down in full surrender to whatever your life is.
The trouble is that I am doing it again, this resisting reality. I am on the ocean's surface fighting the waves, looking back at all I did wrong as if regret can change the past rather than root our pysches more deeply in that illusory and vanished place which visiting only tortures us. I know I must do what I always should have done and let go of whatever raft of what-ifs I am clinging to on the surface and dive under the mayhem of waves to whatever is in the calm below. I can even sense Alexandra of the future warning me to accept my life as it is today, with all the mistakes and regrets and heartbreaks, all the things I have irretrievably broken, because, even with all of the ugliness I myself have caused, I still really do have everything.
Maybe it is contrary to human nature to be able to appreciate the fullness of our gifts in the moment of full possession of them. Maybe "time running out is a gift," without which our hearts would never grow to the point of breaking. Maybe we need the breaking just as much as the growing. Maybe it is the only way.
Teddy, you have given me both. I think you always will. I love you.
