Overcome with memories so thick and warm, I felt them and slumped face down to the floor, tears and snot tangling curls. Our baby doesn't live here anymore.
He came on a night when all the natural birth labor and delivery rooms were full. What was left - a c-section room - ill equipped for a natural birth. Away was our regular man doctor so ma'am doctor took charge. Back and forth nurses hurriedly went and came bringing supplies not required or stocked for a c-section delivery room, making the doctor wait and wait again. Unnerving these travels in and out.Code blue. Rapid running, the pallor of worry painting faces in blue scrubs. Bubum, bubum, bu bum, bu....bum, bu......bum, bu.............bum, heart beat slowing slower. Scrubs scurrying. The code blue panic button pushed just in time, and the baby heart pounded again in right rhythm.
Then, exit blocked, baby shoulders stuck, vacuum in hand, doctor sucking him into light. He slid into his outside of me life, and the doctor dropped him. In slow motion I watched doctor and Michael dive for baby - doctor touchdown catching the blue body, then popping bare butt.
Zach's cry, the unexpected sound, like a tinkling, twittering bird, fragile, with wings floating, not hard or loud or scream, almost quiet, a soft chirp, chirp.Our miracle baby with the extra short umbilical cord, grown thick, tied in a knot. "This is how I know there is a God," doc says softly, "because he shouldn't have made it with a cord like this." Thick cord, daddy sawed clean through. Our gift. Our boy blushing pink as blood and oxygen stretched though tiny veins, arms and legs kicking, alive.
We took the tiny wiggling bundle home. We snuggled. In our bed, that pulsing life pressed against my heart, him nursing, hungrily slurp-slurping, dripping white foam smeared on cheeks and chin. We cuddled. His sweet boy, sweaty, baby head dreamed on my shoulder. He grew in a wide green prairie of love. We loved him. All of us, we loved him. We love him still.
Crystal clear is the day and memory as if I could touch his 8 month old cheek - him straining forward in stroller - captivated by the baby orangutan at the zoo. Bottled breast milk perched in his mouth balanced on the branch of my hand. That was his last day to nurse. He realized he could watch life while eating instead of burying his head in the twilight of my chest. He never went back though I tried. A sad day, him already growing away from me. So blessed I was to be called mommy through diapers and solid food and Hot Wheels and Thomas Tank trains and tracks, and dump trucks, and monster trucks and Legos, and he grew - farther from the babe I burped. 
I want another day, year, lifetime. Another smile, another clap of high five, another whiff of boyhood pubescence on his neck as we held each other in hug - only briefly those hugs now - he was growing up, and some days it is hard to think about the long miles of steps until I see him again - all those steps. Some days one more step feels better if I go backwards. Some days I don't want to try. The ache a chasm so dark and wide it swallows. Yet, there are the girls, smiling, hugging, in the right here and now, alive and living their lives, growing into their futures. A bridge, those girls, God given to Michael and me carrying us over the chasm.
We love our children. We long for Zach. Love your children. Hug your children. Breathe them in and watch them grow. They are a gift from God. A God of grace who gave me this Zachery son, gave us His son; a God full of grace; He fills the chasm I can't cross alone. I am thankful for every moment God gave us with Zach. What gifts, these children. The one gone home and the treasures still here. These people, these gifts, make me a better person than I would ever have been without them. Gifts - a family, a mother, a father, a child, children, and the surrounding hedge of family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Don't ever take family for granted. Especially, don't take God for granted; the giver of all good gifts who calls those who take His son - His family. Forever, His family.
Be heaven bound, and let God carry you across the chasm to your eternal address.
John 3:16 is the map.
No comments:
Post a Comment