Butterflies and Signs

“Do you remember the blue butterfly?” he asks, his voice slow and sleepy. My youngest child is draped across the small couch positioned at the foot of my bed, trying his best to delay the inevitable slumber. It’s late enough that I should ignore this question and urge him toward rest, but the butterfly…

“Maybe. But Mama’s pretty sure it was meant for us.”

We typically spend our August awash in the final weeks of Midwestern heat. But this year, instead of baking in the Michigan sun, we spent part of the month in the hot blaze of Central America as we explored the beaches and mountains of Costa Rica. This dream had lived within me forever, but with my 40th birthday around the corner and the weight of five years of foster parenting on my back, I was eager to escape and experience a different way to live out the evaporating summer.

Fully adept at the American road trip, I am rarely phased by travel with children. We have ventured near and far with our gang of ruffians, but we had never attempted to buckle these boys onto a plane and out of the country. With the exception of Canada, international travel was not something we’d done with any of our kids, let alone all of them at once. I would not be deterred, though, and in early winter when the sun was nowhere to be found, I cracked my dust-covered guide to Costa Rica and started booking beachside huts and lodges tucked deep in the rainforest.

Before I knew it, I’d plotted out a 12-day itinerary and reserved the only 4WD rental car I could find that would accommodate all 6 of us. Then, I filed that dream away until the end of July when I pulled it back out and found that my brazen January confidence had left me. I sat on the floor of my closet, packing and repacking the same four carry-ons, wondering what I had done.

There was plenty of evidence to support the conclusion that this was a horrible idea. I’d never been to Costa Rica. None of us speak Spanish. It was the middle of the rainy season. Diarrhea and Dengue Fever were not on my list of desirable souvenirs. And, of course, it was mating month for the deadly fer-de-lance, making the infamous snake more agitated and aggressive than normal. In my pre-40’s panic, I had signed us up for a rain-soaked, potentially fatal birthday disaster.

But what awaited us was none of these things. What awaited our family was the world laid open and ready for our arrival. “Where have you been?” it seemed to say. “We’ve been missing you all this time.”
A light rain began as we crammed our carry-ons and overstuffed backpacks into the rental car, leaving just enough room for the wide-eyed, curious boys tucked snugly in the backseats. As my husband pulled onto the highway leading away from the airport, the skies emptied.

“Good thing we loaded up when we did,” we laughed. This would be the first of countless tiny blessings and perfect timings Mother Earth had in store for us. Her gentle nudges and nods were what I will remember most from our weeks together in this magical place, every little gift a sign assuring me of everything my center told me: I can trust myself to know what this family needs. I can trust myself to know what I need, even when it scares me.

Those days were exactly what we needed. My greatest loves and I spent those treasured afternoons on open ocean, humpback whales blowing “hellos” beside our little fishing boat. Our boys chased the quick lizards clinging to the walls of each new place we called home. The leaf-cutter ants always in formation, showed us the way, undeterred by our feet tromping along beside them. One sunny morning, with little left to do, a lone Halloween crab appeared on our pool deck, the perfect temporary pet for four boys who had begun to grow restless.

And on that day I had dreaded for oh-so-long, that milestone 40th, the entire universe rose up to carry me through. The whales returned, playing freely at sea, as our family raced across the waves toward an emerald island of sand and sun. Three of my boys donned snorkel gear and flippers for the first time to join me for a swim over a rocky reef. Their excitement at the fish that raced beneath our bodies kept me afloat for weeks after, as did my surprise and delight when my land-loving husband surfaced atop the water behind us. I was certain he would stay back on the boat with our similarly land-loving son. But as fate would have it, our boy had made his very first travel friend and was happily playing dj on the catamaran with the crew and his new best buddy.

Three days later and 200 kilometers from where these boys first met, the two fast friends, one from Spain and one from the States, crossed paths again on a jungle hike down a trail neither of our families had intended. One speaking only Spanish, ours responding in quick English, the two ran and laughed and chatted the rest of the way through the National Park. It was all the things that drive me to travel wrapped up in two sweet seven-year-old boys. It was everything.

On our final evening, resting far above the clouds in a small mountain village, my eldest and I took a stroll to find the toucans who called into the air before dinner each night. But despite their constant song, we could not spot them. Certain we had missed our chance to glance their brilliant colors one last time, we returned to our hilltop home. As we looked just beyond our front door, though, a single toucan sat expectantly in the tree stretched tall beside our front porch. Then a second landed atop another nearby branch. We hadn’t missed anything at all. They had been patiently waiting for us to finally see the place we already were.

And the giant blue butterfly – the one that guides me even now, at this dining room table, on my way to pick up kids from school, or toward my pillow at day’s end – this sacred butterfly ascended from the clouds and led our muddy SUV down the mountain road toward home.

“Can you see it? Can you see it?” I asked my boys as they strained their necks from the back of the vehicle. Three of them spotted the Blue Morpho through the windshield as it floated in front of us, but my son stuck in that faraway third row could not find it.

“Unbuckle,” I told him. “It’s okay. Just hurry! I don’t know how long it will stay…” He fumbled with the seatbelt as I asked our visitor to linger just a little longer. Up and down, it fluttered, working feverishly to move its huge, iridescent wings. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

“I can see it!” he finally shouted. Then, as if it heard him, the gorgeous creature disappeared back into the sky, out of sight.

The rains came again, straight from the very center of me, tears of joy and gratitude because in the moment right before the butterfly appeared, I had silently thought to myself, “How lucky are we? For this trip. For this time. For the people and creatures we’ve encountered along the way. We’ve been shown everything we had hoped for…except that blue butterfly…”

And then there it was, the final nod from the great big world, from the Mother of all things, letting us know we were not too little to be noticed, our long-buried dreams, our unspoken hopes – for a butterfly or a sign – they are worthy. They are heard. And, in the end, as we travel the road that leads back home, they might just be the thing that guides us.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Grace