The Miracle of Love

The Miracle of Love

It was one of those nights where I wished my daughter could put herself to bed.

I was bone-tired and eager to change into my pajamas, curl up beside my husband with a cup of tea and a book. And yet, my daughter’s extended arms and sweet, uplifted face as she declared, “I hold you,” cajoled my heart me as it always does, and I carried her sleeper-footed body into the nursery.

I shut off the main light, and the mint and cream room was warmly lit by the lamp. We snuggled together on the glider, and I picked out four books for us to read.

They weren’t even the books apparently crafted to bring mothers to tears: Guess How Much I Love You, God Gave Us You, On The Night You Were Born.

Instead, they were just light-hearted tales about puppies and rabbits having little adventures before they learn about sharing or not getting into neighbor’s vegetable patches before their mothers tuck them in with a blanket and chamomile tea.

However, as I awkwardly rose with my daughter clinging to me like a baby spider monkey and switched off the lamp, I could almost feel the atmosphere in the room change.

I resettled our conjoined, familiar bulk on the glider and cradled my daughter on my shoulder, patting her diapered bottom in the same way I have been doing for the past two years.

How many times, I wondered, have we sat here? My tired feet elevated on the stool and my fraying ponytail brushing my daughter’s cheek?

Twice a day (naptime and bedtime) for two whole years, and the intimacy of the moment still retained its magic.

Moreover, if anything, the passage of time only made me cling to her tighter–knowing, with every passing day, we were reaching the point where she would become too big to cuddle against me.

My daughter writhed in my arms, too large for my narrow shoulder. She struggled to get comfortable, and I sat her crosswise on my lap. I kissed the top of her head and began to pray over her, calling forth her destiny.

I remembered doing this as a newly born mother, when the words felt as new to me and as foreign as the newborn in my arms. Yet now, the words were underscored by my knowledge of my child. The two of us, in two years, have grown together, and in many ways, I have been forced to grow up.

She has been patient with me as I—petrified—struggled to sanitize her belly button, clip her tiny fingernails, swab her ears, and change her diaper that was smaller than the size of my hand.

I remember how I shook on the couch after my water broke—adrenaline cresting and refusing to recede—and how that shaking didn’t stop until I slowly found my equilibrium as her mother.

Such a precious, small person who I was supposed to keep alive?

The magnitude of the weight overwhelmed me.

But sitting on that glider with the weight of my sleepy toddler growing heavy in my arms, I found that I did not want to put her down; I did not want to release that weight of my little girl who is slowly but surely growing too large for me to cradle.

Finally, when I knew she was eager for her bed, I lowered my child into the crib, tucked the blanket around her chin that I had used to wrap her in the hospital, and pulled the nursery door behind me.

I stood there a moment, staring at the painted wood, and then turned. I walked across the living room where my husband was sitting and knelt beside him, resting my forehead on his shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m fine, she’s fine,” I whispered.

He paused. “Is it because she’s getting so big?”

I nodded against him, my tears splashing his shirt, and thought that this is the world’s greatest, most heart-wrenching miracle: We give ourselves wholly to our children, knowing we are going to be separated one day by kindergarten, by the natural, painful growth of teenage years, by college, by marriage, by distance, and—yes—even by what we mercifully pray is our first, parental death.

And yet we continue to hold our children close while we can–rocking on the glider in a moonlit room as we have rocked so many times before–not wanting to lose one more second of this priceless mosaic of life that one future day we will reverently recall as a shard of unsurpassable beauty.

Did you ever have a moment when you realized your child was soon going to outgrow you? How did it affect your relationship?