Joy

Today is our ten year anniversary.  People keep asking us what we’re going to do to celebrate.  The part that most people would consider a celebration is that we are going out for dinner tonight.  But the real celebration went like this:

• 3:30 am – Jeff took Marnie to the airport so she could return home to California.  Marnie was living here when Ezra was born, and I still miss having her around.
• 7:00 am –  Jeff got up with the boys to do breakfast, and I continued the never-ending purge by going through another shelf of books.
• 8:30 – Jeff and I bickered about the schedule and I spent some time deciding if I was going to escalate things and ruin our anniversary.
• 8:30 – I drove Ezra to the Amigos school where he works with a special educator on reading.
• 9:00 – I met with a young woman who failed out of college last year to help her come up with a new plan.
• 10:00 – Jeff picked up Ezra from the Amigos and took the boys to swim class.
• 11:00 – I met with N.’s new guidance counselor.  N. is starting high school and living with us during the week.  We spent two hours getting a schedule, trying out the school lunch, finding her classes in the mammoth building, and meeting her teachers.
• 12:00 – Maia, the governess, worked with the boys from twelve to five, while Jeff worked and I ran errands and worked.
• 5:00 – I met with Maia to discuss each boy’s progress and plan for the semester.
• In between, the seven people currently living here ate together, snuggled, read books, did homework and dishes, worked on scrapbooks, laughed, painted, and tried to keep everyone’s schedules straight.

It’s crazy here, yes, but our house and our hearts are full.  And that’s how we celebrate.

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Since it’s a big day, I thought I’d share an excerpt from the memoir I wrote about the year after my first husband and daughter died.  The book is not publishable, but I’m glad I wrote it.  On days like today, it’s good to look back and see what God has done. The excerpt is from the epilogue and might not make sense without the first 250 pages, but I hope you’ll like it anyway.

Happy Anniversary!

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Six-thirty am, thirty minutes before the sun would rise over the harbor and the dark Boston sky was giving way to daybreak.  My room on the tenth floor of Brigham and Women’s hospital was warm and quiet.  Six-thirty, time to bring the babies from the nursery to be with their parents.  The nurse walked in with Zachary, who was wailing.  He went to nurse immediately, bobbing his head to and fro as he eagerly sought to latch on. Jeff continued to sleep, lying next to us undisturbed by my shifting elbows and Zach’s impolite slurping.

After twenty minutes of our awkward attempts to latch on, him to my breast and me to the reality of his presence (How is it possible that he and I shared the same body only twenty-two hours earlier?), my sweet stranger-baby fell asleep. Jeff woke up and brought Zach to the bassinet to change and swaddle him.  Bent over the bassinet, Jeff ‘s mouth hung open and his tongue was pushing out his lower lip, a sure sign that he was undertaking something that required great powers of concentration, like Michael Jordan driving to the basket or a three-year-old drawing disproportioned daisies.

Looking at Jeff’s silhouette against the dawn sky as he cared for his son, I felt something I can only describe as awe, a powerful awareness of how very big this scene was, and how small.  Surely millions of women had witnessed such a scene.  It was simply a father changing his son’s diaper.  And just as surely I could scarcely believe that any woman could ever be the same after witnessing something so heartbreakingly beautiful.  A father changing his son’s diaper.

Two years after Scott died, I had returned to graduate school to pursue a doctorate studying the effects of bereavement on children’s development.  There, I met Jeff, a university chaplain.  We dated for a few weeks, decided to get married, and had our first child together a year later.

Jeff handed Zachary to me and crawled back into the single-width hospital bed.  We lay there silently, staring at Zach and each other. Eventually they both fell asleep.  I lay there with Zach on my chest and Jeff on my shoulder, surrounded by life.  Tears spilled down my face, adding to the mix of fluids and smells.  There was blood from my uterus and second c-section incision, two days of sweat, crusty breast milk on the corners of Zach’s mouth, and a bit of unwashed vernix left on Zach’s skin.  Still, his newborn smell was intoxicating.

I held him close and tried to take it all in.  I wanted to say something to myself – something powerful and wise to make sense of the last six years.  But my mind was unable to do anything more than register different senses.  What did this look like?  Smell like?  Feel like?

I watched my boys sleeping and I remembered the nights of anxiously watching Scott.  This time I wasn’t anxious.

I remembered the last time I was in the hospital holding a child I had just borne.  This time the child was warm.

I kept thinking about Joyce, the gentle grief counselor from the hospital all those years ago:

“You may never be as happy as you were.  But I can tell you that you can come through this experiencing more joy than you ever knew was possible.”

Here it is, I thought – joy.