On Birthings and Lessons and Holy Wisdom

One by one, day by day, the moments, the stories, the questions, the lessons appeared.

In the murky first light of dawn, when inky night is blotted at the edge with aubergine before it burns into tangerine, I'd tiptoe down the stairs of my old shingled house, not far from where Lake Michigan laps the shore. I'd click on the desk lamp in the room where I write — a room that once served as one-car garage, then maid's chamber, and now my book-lined typing hole — and I'd sit before the blank screen. By the time I cozied my bum against the hard plank of the chair, I'd surveyed the landscape of my yesterday and felt the zing of whatever moments had most captured my attention, my imagination, my heart. I knew which frame of the passing picture show begged to be plumbed. Nearly every day, there was some fragment of time — words shared, heart pummeled, triumph hard-won — that beckoned to be held up to the light. To be recorded. Questioned. Sifted through. Mined for any lasting lesson.

Sometimes I felt like a butterfly catcher — only my net was woven with words, and what I set out to capture, what I all but jammed in an old glass jelly jar for safekeeping, was as ephemeral as any swallowtail riding the south-erlies: shimmering, brushing past my nose one instant; gone the next.

One by one, day by day, I was flailing at fleeting moments from the script of motherhood — nothing more complicated, nothing less complex than one heart hard up against another, one life literally in the hands of the other, a bond set from the start on a trajectory toward separation — in all its messy, primal, confounding, heartrending permutations. The one biological equation, genetic and soulful inheritance, from which there can be no escape. And therein lie its magnificence and its tug and its pull. And its possibility of infinite wisdom.

From the start, the moments that enveloped me most, the ones out of which the deepest inklings were born, were the moments that felt bigger, much bigger, than me. These were the moments that pulsed with questions that ultimately ask, how do we love? How, truly, do we love? How do we press against the bounds of what we thought our hearts could do and discover, blessedly, the capacity for more?

It was out of those moments and those few timeless questions — asked and examined from countless angles, across the arc of time — that I realized I'd stumbled onto a most essential curriculum.

To mother a child — by birth or by heart, by accident or happenstance or long-held dream — is to encounter love in ways never before beheld. In ways that stretch you, sometimes break you, build you up, and mightily and often demand the best that you can be. Lessons learned in motherhood's ineluctable front lines serve as a paradigm for loving far beyond our lifeblood. To learn to mother — to learn from mothering — is to learn to love in the ways of Jesus and Gandhi and Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. and even Louisa May Alcott's Marmee. It is to love as instructed in the Gospel, the Torah, the Qur'an, and every holy book ever inscribed: love as you would be loved.

I'd been a mother for more than a decade when I sat down to capture most of the moments gathered in these pages, ones that unfolded in my old house, in the hours I spent with or thinking about my two boys who happen to have been born eight years apart — a span dictated by years of heartbreak, by loss upon loss, years underpinned by long and bottomless stretches of doubt, and a fairly certain hunch that prayers and dreams "for just one more" might never come true. I'd been a journalist for a quarter century, and before that a pediatric nurse. A pediatric oncology nurse, to be precise. Which means I'd spent a good many years entwined with life and death. With paying attention. With asking and pondering sometimes impossible questions. And being left, too often, without the faintest answer.

It was in the alchemy of those hushed early-morning hours, before the staccato of the day quickened to prestissimo, when those three threads of me — mother, journalist, once and always a nurse — combined in ways I'd not anticipated: I was extracting moments of motherhood to ask the toughest questions, lay bare essential truths, and seize whatever shards of illumination I might have stumbled upon.

Always, my aim, my hope, my prayer, was to stitch tatters back into whole. To untangle. To mend what was broken, rubbed raw. Or to try, anyway.

Along the course of motherhood, I've studied hard the love lessons offered. In those first-light seminars of one, I attended the task with fingers to keyboard. I knew, because I'd practiced the craft in the pages of every day's news, that applying a journalist's steady eye, hard grasp, on the moment, the puzzle, the mystery, the conundrum at hand, it just might lead to epiphany.

I was intent on teaching myself how to love — unconditionally and without waver — in ways I'd longed to love and be loved.

Often, I wasn't too far into my maternal meanderings until I'd find myself tottering, breathless, lost — having arrived at some precipice, propelled by my own wobbly footed perambulations or my knack for getting snarled in cords of my own invention. So I did the one wise thing I know when nothing but abyss lay before me: I unreeled my prayer, set petitions to the wind, counting on those pleas to find the ears, the heart, the soul of Holy Tender God.

I prayed my way home, time after time.

And in the whisperings that stirred my soul and set me on my way, I did learn a thing or two. Learned what it means to love and love deeply. Learned how much it sometimes hurts. Learned just how brave I might be — if pushed, and if my kid's life (or heart or soul) depends on it.

Because I tend to live ad maximum as the ancient Romans would have put it, I've leeched every drop of heart and soul from my adventures in mothering. And my lifelong inclination for putting words to nearly everything that matters has left me with pages and pages of field notes from the trenches.

It was only in poring over those pages — a collection of life lessons that mostly span the decade that began when our older son, Will, was just thirteen, in his last year of grade school, and our younger one, Teddy, was five and new to kindergarten — that I figured out that what I'd culled was a realtime curriculum for loving.

It's one that holds more questions, certainly, than answers. I think aloud. I pray. I fumble and stumble and sometimes skin my knees. I light candles and stir porridge on the stove. I lie awake night after night. And I leap from my bedsheets, determined to muscle on again.

I've wept....