Living What God Has Written

In a rare still moment, she laid her head on my chest. At two years old, she is almost always exploring and making messes and running and jumping. I swayed in the exam room, singing “Jesus Loves Me” over and over again while I held her close and listened to her labored breathing. We were supposed to be at church, where she is always having the best day of her life, playing in the church nursery with all of her best buds and the best toys and the best teachers. If she could live there, she would, bedding down at night inside the pop up crawling tunnels that patient teachers sometimes snap together for the toddlers, gorging herself on the neverending supply of Goldfish crackers. She would only miss me on nights when it thunders, because on those nights she needs a little extra emotional support, and I am, of course, her emotional support human. But today, in that doctor’s office, she wasn’t feeling her independence. She was worn out from the work it was taking to try to fill her lungs, and she laid on me like a wheezing rag doll, and I sang.

Sometimes in moments like these, I feel a sense of amazement. What was I doing here, at 46 years old, swaying with this precious person that I didn’t know existed for the first several months of her life? How is it that God orchestrated such an interesting and unexpected story that intertwined our two lives, that made me her mother? Even when the doctor walked in the room a few moments later, I could see the surprise on his face as he tried to determine how we two had come to be a pair. I don’t explain much anymore the way I used to, even though when I see surprised expressions like that, I always feel the urge to say, “I know! Me, too!”

Sometimes when you’re parenting a two year old, that two year old seems to make a career out of coming up with ideas that will nearly give you heart failure. I often tell friends that she is extremely creative and can think of the most novel ways to hatch a dangerous or messy plan. Maybe half of the time when you’re raising a toddler, you’re not feeling particularly amazed by the process. You’re just trying to survive it. But every once in awhile, just enough to make you come back for more the next day, God gives you a brief moment of sheer amazement. A moment when you simply can’t believe that you have been blessed with this privilege. That this child looks for you the way a sunflower turns to the sunlight. That when it really counts, when she hears that clap of thunder or she is a tiny wheezing rag doll, the only thing in the world that will make that right is you. What an honor. An exhausting honor. But an honor.

She is fitfully sleeping as I type this. I expect it will be a long night of swaying and singing, of patting and reassuring, of lying in bed alert, listening for a little blonde-haired two year old who may need her mama. And I suppose, when I finally go to sleep and am inevitably wakened four minutes later by a little voice calling “I awnt Mama!” I will think back to that moment in the doctor’s office when God reminded me how amazing it is that this is the page that I’m currently on in the story that He’s written.

Maybe the next time a nurse or doctor or stranger at the grocery store turns to us with that surprised, puzzled face, I’ll say, “I think the facial expression you’re looking for is amazement.” God really has written a page-turner here. Plots twists abound. And I’m amazed.