This Love Is Not Too Late
On a dreary Sunday in January, while our entire family was down with the flu, a baby boy arrived in our living room. It was not what I would have called perfect timing, but what did I know?
We had always thought this expansion might come but assumed it would happen long ago. But no. A couple years past 40, my husband and I opened the door and our lives to an infant, the sibling of our adopted son, yet another beautifully made little boy who has already, in three short months, completely altered our world in the most powerful of ways. He has reminded us that even in periods gripped by fear and doubt, when we feel too overwhelmed or ill-equipped, when it would be easier to isolate than welcome, the call to love always arrives on time.
Yes, as my estrogen levels plummet, my sons’ hormones are exploding, and all of our children are finally in school, we have a 9-month-old rolling around on our floor. When it takes two hands and all my strength to get up from that floor, I find myself doing this every hour on the hour. There are just so many diapers to change.
At first, I thought the universe had gotten it wrong. Here I am, at a time in my life when those nurturing hormones are bottoming out, and I’m starting motherhood all over again. “This is not how it was supposed to go,” I thought, as I looked around at my flu-ridden family, a stranger baby now tucked into the corner of the scene. We had made a grievous mistake.
And yet, each day I see those signs that this love is not too late. It is right on time. Last week, after hours of pre-teen angst, slamming doors, and shouting, my oldest climbed on the couch next to me and our littlest guy. He rested his head on my shoulder and breathed in that soothing baby scent. Instantly, his twelve-year-old body relaxed. “Babies are the best, aren’t they?” I said, as he reached out to take the tiny hand in his.
The next day, I caught my grumpy, over-tired ten-year-old, cuddled up on the floor showing baby a book. Minutes before, he was a ticking time bomb, but how quickly he shifted. He read in a sing-song voice and when the story ended, he was calm. Explosion averted.
Yesterday morning, after a poor night’s sleep and a headache creeping across my brow, I woke to a crying baby. Setting the screeching child in bed with my middle son to go make a bottle, I came back to two sweet boys snuggled in a mountain of pillows. I stood there a moment, taking it in, as the baby watched the ceiling fan spin and babbled to his new big brother. “There it is again,” I thought to myself, the tension in my neck and head releasing.
And my youngest son, baby’s biological brother, has finally found his missing piece. Nervous he would not live up to expectations, my son was hesitant to interact with our newest edition. Lately, though, his confidence has grown. He helps feed baby a bottle or splashes alongside him in the bathtub. I watch my youngest hone his big brother skills, duties he would have been too young for had this bundle arrived sooner. Those few months ago, back in January, I had forgotten that all-important lesson my husband and I are always trying to teach our boys–women aren’t the only ones built for raising babies.
At such an impactful time in their lives, our boys are learning first-hand how to nurture and take care. I see them work those most powerful of skills, the soft ones. Prior to baby’s entrance, our house had started to feel hostile as pubescent boys wrestled with their emotions and (mostly) one another. The mounting aggression was taking over our home just as quickly as the hyper-masculinized portraits of manhood have invaded current television and social media.
As building whole and healthy boys inside American culture proves more and more difficult, there could not have been a better hour to open ourselves up to love. While the country is shouting for men to elevate themselves above women and children and hoard power through whatever means necessary, the only answer is to love just as ruthlessly. As we are told to fear the unfamiliar and unknown, we instead open our arms to it. We welcome it and call it our own.
I watch my husband carry the diaper bag and the responsibility of some other man’s child without hesitation. He has ushered this newest babe into the deepest part of him, that sacred place of safety and celebration where all of our children live. These sweet boys look around our family, at the photos in multi-colored frames hung haphazardly on our kitchen wall, and they see what the world could be. What an obvious and yet remarkable thing it is to simply love each other.
American individualism would demand us to shrink and protect what is “ours,” but it is the willingness to expand that has provided exactly what our family needed. Turns out, love is actually infinite, and no amount of fear or suspicion or threats of scarcity can convince me otherwise.
I have seen love’s power in real time, arriving on the scene at the exact moment I was ready to throw in the towel. I have witnessed how saying “yes” to its unyielding force is the only next step worthy of our faith. In these days when we are hounded by lies and hate, I am so tangibly aware of the love that exists in this universe–in the crook of my arm as I peer into its very eyes, in the twelve-year-old hand grasping the stubby fingers of a baby who shows us every day that caring for one another, those born to us and those carried by mothers we may never know, is the only way we get through this. It is a sure road of resistance, and you don’t have to foster or adopt to walk it. You simply choose to extend love when they require your fear.
Back in January, when our little world was changing as was America at large, I sat in doubt over love’s timing, but only for a moment because what I know now is this: My family deserves better than the false show of manhood and isolationism paraded before us. Those frauds are not the fathers I hope for my boys to become, and so in our home, we will show them something different, something real. We will open ourselves up. We will expand when they tell us to shrink, and we will always, without end, lead with love, a weapon clearly missing from their arsenal, one that is never too late for us to wield.
Ashley, Woman of a Certain Grace