This Is How It Was Always Supposed To Be

I felt you.

They whispered in my ear when you made your home in me. I knew it was you because my heart sank, and my skin started to scream.

Sensations unfelt with the sister and brother who came before you.

I would later ask the doctor to double check for your heartbeat. I wished it wasn’t there. These aren’t popular words out of the mouth of a mother-to-be, so I kept this heavy truth to myself.

I wasn’t ready for you. I didn’t think I could handle your upheaval.

I wanted to surf the waves of my dreams, not build prisons made of sand in my nightmares. I cried hard and often. I yelped even. Like a scared animal surrounded by a pack of coyotes yipping furiously from all directions. Confusing me and jumbling my senses into a pile of knotted noodles.

I reached with tender fingertips toward the sky and tried to pull down for us a different path. I wanted us to eat creamy ice cream sandwiches, not tart life lessons.

You knew better. You knew we needed hefty doses of your stubborn disposition along with your soul’s commandment to live life more compassionately.

When I met you, I held back the river by looking into your eyes. I shielded you like a secret in my arms throughout the night. I told no one of your name because it felt like if I held you close enough, I could keep the lid on your startling nature.

When your days here marked a year, I felt the ground begin to tremble. The air around us was disparate. The flowers looked unbelievably kind and psychedelically bright. Something was afoot, but I could’ve never guessed the whole of it. The exhaustive manual for guiding you hadn’t yet been printed for me. The aperture of your heart hadn’t yet opened wide enough for me to peer in and absorb your instructions for how to love you.

We met with a specialist whose words stabbed my ears with all of her recommendations and observations. She meant well, but she was selling a story that told of everything you couldn’t and wouldn’t do with this one life of yours. I hated her for that. I wanted to take my money elsewhere, buy you a different story.

I knew you were different, but I wasn’t ready for your future to take shape in the form of therapy rooms and special education meetings. I wanted to be the one to help sculpt our future, I didn’t want it done for me by someone else. Certainly not by the round lady with the jolly laugh that felt woefully tone deaf in the room where my dreams for you were being trampled. The one who meant well but whose words pummeled the peace around our hopes for your blissfully ordinary life.

Your first behavioral therapist came to our house every day. Together you logged hours like a training pilot with his flight school instructor. Your wings would only come after you learned how to let your spirit take flight in a world not designed for you. She was so kindred a soul that she burrowed into our hearts like it was the natural order of things. Because it was. When we moved out of state, it would be the first and only time I’d see her cry. You see, she and I logged our own hours together. Revealing to each other the statures and dispositions of our shadow selves. But nothing cracked her stoicism until the day came when you were no longer going to be by her side. Your impending absence was the straw that broke her. One of your infinite gifts is that you see things very simply. You declared her family and for this, you saw no reason to cry, only cause for celebration.

We journeyed amid the wrath of a virus that would keep us confined to our new home, thousands of miles from all the people that aided in achieving your new normal. The walls of our life were taller than they’d ever been, a grave departure from your social appetite. Kids like you aren’t known for their need to be around other people, but you’re fine to keep the surprises coming. You’re just getting started.

The virus is its own edict to keep our tall walls erected. At least until there is enough data to say otherwise. You’re stripped of the ramparts which stabilized you and forced to endure the faultier variety of safety. The push and pull I feel from you is hopeless at times, beautiful just an hour later. You keep trying. Apathy isn’t a label we’ll ever be able to affix to you for your spirit is akin to that of a wild mustang, wanting to be free and respected all in the same moment.

Now when I dream of days ahead, the clouds are faceless, and the winds don’t tell me of the strength with which they will blow resistance into your face. For these answers, I have to settle deep into my soul and rely on something more primal. The way a woman in biblical times relied on herbs and incantations to secure a promising future for her child. It’s a surrender of sorts.

Maybe that surrender is faith. Faith in the unspoken contract between a mother and the universe that says her brood will be allowed to thrive. For me, that surrender feels more like a rupture. A rupturing not only of this contract, but of my ability to imagine your destiny or the journey you’ll take to get there. Because with you, faith now feels like a loose-fitting dress I try on but don’t know how to alter to my shape.

The rupture tastes bitter in my mouth, the notion of faith still too alien, so my surrender turns into hope. Hope, as a mother, to illuminate any number of safe paths for my young. Step here, the sugary sweetness of joy lies ahead. Don’t step there, the certain ruin we all want to avoid awaits you. But your frenetic beginning here leaves my lips full of questions about your path. How much to build, how little to plan, how often to check in with the specialists who assault my heart with tales of your shortcomings. Well-intentioned souls who pierce the bubble in which I sit and watch movies of you in my mind. Saccharine daydreams destroyed.

Then my primal instincts start purring to me the promises of acceptance and peace as the road to the truest and most sustainable equilibrium. It’s a crystallization of the hope I’d manufactured in the early days of your story. A nebula formed out of the dust and gas my heart spewed when it was deflating into a near-death state.

These feel like nascent revelations. Promises that brim with possibility for a future we can maybe even enjoy. Ours is likely to be meal of tart cotton candy and sandy ice cream sandwiches. Beautiful and cruel. We’ll construct castles instead of prisons. Slapping the air with our blanket, we’ll lay it down and maybe tell a story of how we came to be in this world better oriented for me. You’ll show me how this was your plan all along. My skin wasn’t screaming when I realized I was carrying you, it was rejoicing. It wasn’t sure how to accept the supple nature of your soul. It was expecting cashmere, not kevlar. My heart wasn’t sinking, it was freefalling into a love so deep that all it knew to do in that moment was reach out and hang on with a crushing grip to the lip of the edge that didn’t use to look like a cliff. To clutch it with a fierceness never known to my heart before. It was being unlocked, in earnest, for the first time.

As you and I plumb deeper together, I can feel an incantation of your own seeping into the bones of my ribcage, the fortress around my heart: Nothing was ruptured, Mama. This is how it was always supposed to be. Come sit down here beside me and let me breathe hope into your ears. Swim in the song of my journey from the celestial sphere to you, my chosen sanctuary. Take my laughter and preserve its sound in the vault of your memory, drawing from it the knowing that I am okay. Dab the sensation of my sweet kisses on your temples when you find yourself awash in my struggle. Above all else, do not be afraid for me. I decided to steward this ship long ago, and I knew you were the one to fortify me for my journey. Come along with me, we are meant to be.

With that, the sun whipped the clouds of my fear into a state of banishment and kissed my cheeks. The cloudless sky a peaceful tabula rasa. My cheeks stamped with the promise that the contract is intact. Beautifully cruel, but not ruptured.