parents

Jorg’s parents have been here for three weeks now. They have been helping so much, cooking and cleaning and playing with Lukas. But it hasn’t all been easy. Relationships are hard. It is interesting to stand outside and witness another person’s family dynamics. They are not my own and so I am not as invested. But they are dynamics which ensnare a man that I love, a man whom I have chosen to build a family with. Therefore they exhaust and entangle me in different ways. As I watch the father of my little boy play the boy himself I see myself in his mother. I see myself as the mother. I see what a role parents play in the lives of their children and I feel this deep weight of responsibility and the soft pain that comes with loving someone that you know you will have to let go of someday.
This is what hit me tonight as I lay in bed beside Lukas waiting for him to surrender to sleep. Watching him thrash and kick and finally curl into me, his forehead touching mine, his leg wrapped across my body. He has been sick the last few days. We both have. We were all up two nights ago as Lukas gasped for breath, his heart racing, his fever creeping up to 103 causing us to dash out at four in the morning to the emergency room. I was so sick today that I lay on the couch letting Lukas watch you-tube video’s of tractor and airplanes while I attempted to steal a few moments of rest. I cancelled all my classes. I accepted that I am not only too sick but that really, missing one day may be exactly what my body and ultimately my work needs. Instead I cuddled Lukas all day. He wouldn’t let me put him down and I like being needed. Even when all my body wants is to turn off everything around me except the sky….and the sound of the leaves blowing off the trees outside my window, I still like being needed by him. I imagine that is how my parents or Jorg’s parents might feel. They want to feel needed. It must be such a process to let your child grow. Lukas turns two in five days. Part of me feels tempted to say that it has flown by but really, I know better. The months have flown by but the moments, the days and nights and all their many colors and corners, they have trickled and ticked at times. But still, my boy will be two years old. I still have some time before I have to let him go. But tonight as I lay in bed, both he and I exhausted from sickness. I feel his head touch mine, his tiny body curled in and I cry as I sing his bedtime songs. I lose my voice to the tears as I think of Jorg’s mommy, of my mommy, of the road that all mommy’s must go as they let go of their baby’s and how the love never goes away. How tender and precious these moments are.