A Circular Love.
My Jack David is the little boy who teaches me a deep gentleness. Six years ago today this son of mine, this rainbow baby, entered my world in a stunning and powerful home-birth.
This is a birthday story for the child with a mind that melts me. It’s not just the vast amount of wildlife facts that he miraculously stores away somewhere, or the photographic memory, or the way he only has to be taught something once. It’s the way he regularly holds onto my teaching moments and brings them up years later. Like last night when I heard him tell his sister
“Frankie, did you know that it is good to cry? Mummy said I can’t ever lose my tears because it’ll hurt my heart. Don’t lose your tears Frankie. I haven’t.”
I sat in the room adjacent to him flabbergasted that he had remembered me telling him that. I looked at my husband across the table from me - equally stunned - and said
“He remembers everything. Even the importance of crying.”
He is walking into a more expansive field at the moment, an older and wiser Jack is emerging. Because of this, there are fresh tears falling often nowadays. Growing is hard. The sound of his crying has changed only recently; it is deeper, it comes from his heart and not just the animal of his body. This son of mine is connected to something that appears to be the roots of the earth’s oldest tree. When I stare at him, which is often, I see a worldview forming on the inside of him. I am not certain of what it is, perhaps it is not for me to know. Yet he has a truth behind his eyes that he is sure of. If ever it leaks out, it’s when I am cuddling him before bed. Little six year old truths wrapped in wonder, Jack is sure of what he knows. This fills me with equal parts worry and pride. I pray for him, that when his truths are inevitably knocked around one day, that the knock-around be swift. For me, a dismantled truth has been a thing of great creativity, albeit painful, I pray that he is protected from that pain. However, I am certain that only life and God knows what that will look like for him.
There is just something profound about this child and the way he sees the world. Of my three children, it is he who regularly talks about the baby we lost before him. He calls him Angel and just this year he asked if we could light a candle on Angel’s birthday. Ever since Jack was born, I have often wondered if their spirits crossed over the threshold when Angel was departing and Jack was preparing to land. I have often wondered if Angel left notes on the walls inside of me for Jack to read; notes that described the nuances of my sensitive soul. Perhaps this is why Jackey’s birth was so quick and merciful, or why he was the only child who didn’t tear me open when emerging. Perhaps those notes Angel scrawled on the fascia of my uterus read as a love letter. The truth is, Jack has cradled me just as much as I have cradled him. Not because I have ever asked him to, or even willed him to,
but because there is something in him
that knows something about me
that I do not
even know about myself.
This morning when he awoke to balloons and a new fishing rod, I watched him flit between opening presents and cuddling me and his father. Jack has always been light on his feet, on his tippy toes and non-comittal about landing on this earth. In fact, he has spent more time refusing to be fully here, instead preferring one foot in and out of this earthly realm. As I grasped his hand on the morning of his birthday and squeezed it tight, I wondered for the first time if his photographic memory was formed in my womb. I wondered if he is still able to remember the letters written about his mother. Perhaps when he read the love notes that Angel frantically carved into the bones of my pelvis, he found a way to commit them to memory. I imagined that the first letter he ever read - the one Angel wrote closest to my heart - was titled
This is how to love mum.
Over the course of this last year, I have watched him toy with the idea of finally landing, flat-footed and present. Within his gentleness lies such a powerful soul and I smile whenever I imagine the day he finally realises what he is made of. He has practiced moving in and out of that sure-footing and it has been a joy to witness. A life with Jack has been a life of pausing, of listening, of noticing the minute detail on the wing of a butterfly when everyone else would mindlessly trample on it. A life with Jack has been filled with awe and wonder on the most mundane days. A life with Jack has kept me close to the mystery of God. It has kept me surrendered to a faith that I have often wanted to discard out of deep frustration. Yet how can I discard what I know in my cells to be true when Jack whispers into my ear as I am cuddling him goodnight, “please pray for me, mummy?” Jack often invites me to lean in, to ask another question, to pick up my trowel and pickaxe and delicately dig until another layer is exposed. A life with Jack is one of constant discovery.
My rainbow baby is six today and I am filled with the deepest gratitude. I cannot help but love him over and over
and over and over.
It is a circular love.
