I love none better

"Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,

I whisper with my lips close to your ear.

I have loved many...but I love none better than you."

-Walt Whitman

I awake on this Friday, the tiny lips of my youngest son pursed against my own. Though somewhat resistant to leaving my dreamlike state, my blue eyes blink open in the semi-darkness of the room and are greeted by eyes deep and dark inches from my own. A smile spreads across his face.

I meet my oldest son on the steps. Rather than passing one another in the hurry of our daily tasks, he blocks my movement, opening wide his arms, "Hold me." An offer such as this from the growing boy who has begun to scrunch up his face and hesitatingly receive my kisses-on-the-lips cannot be forsaken. His eight-year-old body is weighty. His arms press against my throat, clasped behind my neck. I feel him breathe. Together we sit on the kitchen chair, too heavy too stand, mother and first-born son entwined and silent for a moment, the warmth of the morning sun penetrating the kitchen, making it glorious, making it holy.

It was a bone chilling day, a day many winters ago, back when we lived in Chicago, back when I worked and walked to work. My body was heavily draped with sweaters, a coat, a hat, mittens, ear muffs, and a black and gray wool scarf pulled tight around my mouth. The snow not yet cleared from the sidewalks crunched beneath each step. A house not unlike many of the brick bungalows so characteristic to the area caught my attention, drawing me in. A light glowed out of the frosted windows and I longed with every ounce of my being to cast aside my present wintry circumstances and live the life I imagined - a life where I sat with a cup of coffee heavy with cream, it's handle grasped by my fingers, my hand wrapped around it's heat, as a baby springing with life snuggled in the crook of my arm.

This week I scrounged through our metal file cabinet in the basement, attempting to secure my medical history file. Opening up the manilla envelope, I read our doctor's scrawled handwriting from twelve years ago. A record of our initial meeting in 2001, where my husband of then four years and I sat full of hope and expectation that we, like so many of our friends, would without hindrance or obstacle commence our journey into parenthood. The record of our meeting a year later when there was no child nursing at my breast, no conception even born out of our love. The year in which tests were initiated, prescriptions written on white pieces of paper, medicines for healing ingested. Records of the years following, years of the poking, the prodding, the humiliations, the surgery, the anger, the tears, the hope, and the despair, and then the last record, a final note from our doctor in 2004, "total failure with fertility treatments." I wince just a bit at the seeming harshness of those brutally honest words, but mostly I smile at that watershed moment for rather than the end of the story, it was really just the beginning.

"Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him." Psalm 126/127

For you who cannot wait until spring so you can pick violets

 For you who invites me on magic carpet rides

For you who asks during morning prayers if we are over the rainbow

For you who finds fairies in the sunbeams flitting across the floor