He had a cranial cleft
and went in for surgery yesterday
and today he looks like this:
I've been crying off and on all day because I cannot stop thinking about him and his family. They are tears of joy and amazement and hope and honest sorrow for this poor Mom who can't hold her beautiful little boy as he's suffering. That's the part that's getting me the most. The not being able to hold him.
I keep thinking of Our Lady who held Jesus in her womb with such love, I'm sure rubbing her belly as I do with joyful anticipation, and then as a baby as much as she could, with amazing love and as a child and when he'd trip and fall and all through his life... until his greatest suffering, when she couldn't hold him at ALL. She could just "be" with him and not leave him and watch him suffer... but her greatest offering was her inability to "hold" him and take his suffering away.
Ava's was fighting her nap today and lately has needed a bit more rocking to sleep than usual, but I can't help but hold her and hold her and think with gratitude how grateful I am to be able to HOLD my beautiful wide-awake-when-she-needs-to-be-sleeping-baby! Thank you to Dominic's family for making me SO grateful for these small favors.
So... in my current place in my pregnancy, I started thinking... thinking about this dear baby in my womb and how I love her already and haven't yet seen her face... but I love her. I love her more and more each day and isn't that the way it is with motherhood? You love them in your heart before you hold them in your arms?
(not my belly)
I was talking to my Mom about this today and so many other things and relaying the story of a movie called
"The Memory Keepers Daughter"
it's a beautiful story and while we were talking about it, I was thinking about how God ALWAYS knows best when he sends us a child. No matter how difficult, no matter the challenges, he ALWAYS knows what our future holds and what this child will teach us. We don't know... we can't and sometimes we're afraid, but whether the child is given for adoption and is the greatest gift to the family that has been growing in love and longing in their hearts for them or they are kept and the family grows through this new life, whatever the circumstances, God ALWAYS knows best what He wishes for that family to learn through this gift. Our fear keeps us sometimes from seeing the gift.
Do we always learn what we're supposed to? No... not always... but it's amazing how He has a way of "writing straight ...with crooked lines".
I have become "friends" with a beautiful "blogger" named Jamie Jo and fallen in love with her sweet "Simeon" and think of him often and their amazing family and how their children are learning amazing lessons about life... REAL life, through the gift of this beautiful child. I told her once that Simeon in the Bible had the gift to be able to see God hidden under the form of an ordinary baby in an ordinary looking family and how I truly believe that her own Simeon was sent to teach others (especially his family) to see Christ in all his "hidden" forms and to learn that what we love is so much deeper than the skin we see.
I'm so grateful to know her, and to have been introduced to Dominic's family and to be forced to think and reflect during Advent about all the ways God comes to us in his "hidden forms" and invites us to "look deeper" and find love and mystery and HIM hidden right before our eyes.
These are the things I'm thinking about today. Thanks to these beautiful families and their amazing little boys who have been a gift to not only their families... but to mine. You have made me appreciate so much and I'm CERTAIN that is what I was meant to think of this Advent day.
OK, I bawled through that whole thing!!
ReplyDeleteI, too, have been thinking about Dominic and his family, the not being able to hold him. How very blessed that I am able to hold my baby afterward. (even though, I am unable to comfort him and have to hold him in ways he doesn't like, he prefers upper left shoulder) I am still doing something, trying to console. To watch, unbearable. They are an amazing family.
I have told people your analagy about Simeon's name--we hadn't even thought that before he was born. My husband did say before he was born, he felt that this baby was going to bring us all closer to God.
Thank you for your beautiful post--I'll have to check out that movie--is it in video?
Your welcome, Jamie. Your family really touches my heart.
DeleteAs for the video, I think it's a Lifetime movie. I know it's a book, but haven't read it. I watched it on tv.