Hortus Deliciarum

An accident this morning.  I stepped left just as Ciaran tried to pass me in the hall.  Collision.

He is in a phase where any injury that he does to himself can be shaken off with an “I’m okay!” but any imagined slight and even the tiniest of bumps from another person brings out an impassioned howl for justice, accompanied by a quivering lip and wounded, betrayed eyes.  “MUMMY!  YOU HURT ME!!  OW!!!!”

“It was an accident, honey, I’m so sorry,” I murmur, picking him up and, surprisingly, he lies still, head tucked in against my neck, little bare bum (for we are also in the stage of pulling off pants entirely when using the potty and then not putting them on again) resting securely on my arm.  Yesterday at church I held a sixteen-month-old girl and her weight seemed slight, negligent in comparison to my son’s solidity.  Absent too from my brief cuddle with her was the cord, entirely invisible now but just as real for its physical lack, that I feel connecting my body and my son’s.

Sometimes I wonder, all absentminded, whether some part of that tiny original cell of mine that started him still lingers somewhere in his body.  In his brain, perhaps, as avid as mine was as a child to learn new things?  In his fingers, deft and desperate to be grown up right now, to do adult projects?  In his feet, restless and ever-moving, still only during snatched morning moments like this when all the joy, the shock, the confusion of holding him in my arms for the first time comes rolling back over me like a wave?  Is there something in him that is still uniquely me?

What I do know with every fiber in my being is that every cell in his body is an echo of that one of mine.  Changed, unmistakably different, but vibrating in time with my own body as I hold him close, kissing the crook of his neck as he rests that amazingly heavy head on my shoulder.  Does he feel it?  Does even the tiniest cellular memory remain of once being a part of my body, nurtured inside and kept safe until released into a world of activity, excitement, and unending scope for curiosity and imagination?

I feel it so frequently, that tether binding me to him, deep in my belly.  Part of it is a hunger to hold him close, to keep him safe and never let him go.  As he grows and asserts his independence, fearlessly plowing forward into every new challenge, it draws taut, sometimes filling me with pride and other times a stab of pain deep within as I realize that he needs me less and less every day.  I know that I am fighting a losing battle against time.

Maybe that’s why, although I know the clock is ticking and that I need to get ready for work, not to mention that my shoulders and neck are hurting with the tension headache I’ve had since five this morning, and I’m tired because he woke three or four times in the night, I don’t try to put him down.  I hold him close, even though he’s heavy and it hurts, because I know that someday in the not-so-distant future, he’ll be too heavy for me to lift.  He won’t want to cuddle in close to me on the sofa in those rare moments that he’s quiet enough to hold, and he’ll pull that cord so far that days, months, years may pass in which I will not see him at all, as he heads off into whatever adventures he decides to take on.

But we’re connected, his body and mine, by the memory of those ten months in which I sheltered his growing body, from cell to child.  He is mine, more deeply than he will be anyone else’s, ever.  Part of him will always be me and part of me will always be him, even if he grows up and sets off far away.  In the meantime, I hold him when I can, keep him as safe as I can, and try to think only of the now, the physical reality of him wrapped in my arms.