Re-Creation

Today my baby turns 27. Yep, the last one out of the shoot is now 27 years old. How on earth did that happen? What was I doing while it did? This occurs about a month prior to the expected birth of granddaughter number two. So as I reflect on that new life just coming into the world, I also look back and remember how I felt on this day so many years ago.

I remember that this was a child I wanted and planned for. I remember wondering from month to month whether she would be a boy or a girl, changing my mind with each new ‘sign’ that seemed to point toward one or the other. I was so young – just 23 – and my life was firmly wrapped around the first child. Would I be able to make a space for this one? Would I love her as much, be able to give her as much of myself?

The answer is yes to both questions, as it turns out. Somehow our hearts expand miraculously to encompass as many people as we need to love. I believe God designed it that way, knowing that our lives would expand and contract, grow, mutate, and include, as the needs arose. How many times I’ve been made over in my life by some incident, accident, person, or thought. How many times I’ve seen those same makeovers in my daughters as they encountered new paradigm shifts in their realities. It fills me with a greater faith to observe our lives in this manner. Like Creation itself, each of us is a smaller, unique version of Creation that expands and contracts and remakes itself as the need arises. Each of us has been given that capacity and I cannot see it as anything less than amazing and miraculous.

It’s funny that I should be led to these musings today, this day of my daughter’s birth. We spoke this morning for, as my cell phone glaringly accused me, two hours and fifty-nine minutes. I’d say that was exceptional, but really with my girls it’s not all that out of the ordinary. What made this conversation somewhat more extraordinary is that I had the opportunity to be face-to-face (via the phone) with one of those expansion moments for my daughter. As the clock ticked over to give her another official digit on her age, she actually expanded and grew into a bigger version of herself right there in front of me.

Oh, it was just a little expansion – nothing earth-shattering. But you know, one of the joys of parenthood is always getting to watch your children grow. People think that stops somewhere in their late teens. It doesn’t stop there. I am witness to those growth moments so often. Because my children no longer tug on my coat tail or need me to feed them, help with homework, do their laundry, etc., I am actually more tuned in to those moments now than when they were ‘growing up’, whatever that means.

Today it is the younger daughter’s birthday, last week it was the older daughter’s need to just connect for a while (also about three hours as it happens – we’re a very talkative clan!) Every day, every place, nothing special. And yet, so amazing and wonderful to observe that I cannot speak of it without feeling those tinglings that tickle along the spine and make the heart jump just a little. What an incredible gift God has given me. What a long time it took me to see the breadth and depth of that gift. I suppose that’s my own expansion at work, eh?

Next month, the new little one arrives to our collective joy and anticipation. As Clint Black put it in a beautiful lullaby to his daughter, she’s a ‘new little branch on the family tree’. We will envelope and nurture her. We will nurse her through the hurts, and cheer her through the triumphs. My daughter will increasingly sense the presence of God all around her through these children, and I will again be witness to that scene, from a slightly different perspective, until there is no more of me here on earth to do so. Talk about sitting in a place of deepest humility! Here I sit. And here I rejoice. For what better things could I say about my life at the end of it than that I was witness to the Creation in microcosm, that God allowed me that view, handed me that precious gift when I was not only unworthy but pretty much incapable of handling it (and who among us is, in our early twenties)? My cup overflows…