This Holy Field

Earlier this week, we gathered under a white steepled tent. There to celebrate the 105 students who, that day, were graduating doctors. We were their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins, friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, and for a few, children. 

When my son processed with his classmates to their chairs, I rose from mine and walked to the front to capture a photo of him as he waited for the ceremony to begin. I snapped him before he knew I was there. Head down, studying the program. Then I called out his name — Aidan — and his head lifted, tipping back with a smile, while I took another shot.

I headed towards the back but wasn’t yet ready to sit down. I had worlds inside me and I needed a moment to visit them. 

There was the world when my son was maybe five years old, propped high on a cushion at the copper-topped kitchen table in the house he and his twin sister had learned to walk in, the house we left as they entered middle school.

He collected his tools and put on his safety glasses as I rigged up a desk lamp to shine brightly on his project: the excavation of an archaeological dig. With an intensity that some well-meaning teacher would later try to label hyper-focused ADD (no, thank you), he slowly, painstakingly chipped and brushed, chipped and brushed, until the hint of some treasure was revealed. More chipping, more brushing, then finally the tweezers could be used to extract a plastic bit of bone from the block of concrete. 

In this world, I am watching him do this work, marveling at his intensity, his seriousness. Marveling at the hands and eyes and attention effortlessly coming together in a razor sharp point as the clarity of his intent. And when a treasure is released, those same hands and eyes and attention scatter with a joy that fills the room, that fills my heart. And I marvel some more.

Here was a clue of how God, True Nature, call it what you will, was tilling and watering and tending to the acorn of Aidan’s soul. 

In other worlds, Aidan bursts from his bedroom with the things he has made. At first it was chain mail, swaths of body armor painstakingly built one tiny piece of metal at a time. Later, it was elaborate origami structures. Later still, there were images scraped with an exacto-knife, one microscopic layer at time, from paper that revealed landscapes and portraits visible only when held to light. 

Now in this world, he is about to begin five years of training in ophthalmology, in tinkering with the miniature bits and folds and layers of the eye. He will burst from operating rooms, having revealed more treasures.

When he crossed the stage, we screamed out. Every family did for their child. My eyes filled with tears as he took his diploma and shook the hand of the dean, as they smiled for the camera. But the tears didn’t stop; they kept coming as each name was called, each hand was taken, each smile was captured. The tent was a cathedral, and each student ascending to its altar was a human flower coming into perfect bloom, just then, just now, just there before us all. 

And here I was, in the middle of this holy place, in this field of flowers, swelling with pride for my son, for the sons and daughters of those who surrounded me, awe swept by the miracle of it, and underneath it all was the roiling grief of the shameful twisted weed of myself. 

After celebrating, I wanted to be quiet, so I found a podcast for Stephen to listen to as we made our way home. But just as we turned onto our street, I blurted out what I had been holding in. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but every time we celebrate our children, even as I burst with pride and love and awe, I feel a bottomless sadness for who I was, for who I might have been,” my cracking voice betraying me.

There. I said it. 

Moments later, in our bedroom, changing out of celebratory clothes, Stephen put his arms around me and said, “I know what you mean. I feel that way too sometimes. We weren’t loved well, Lynne. But we loved them well enough. And we are okay now.” 

Yes, I see the way God, True Nature, call it what you will, has tilled and watered and tended to Aidan’s soul. I see the same movement in the life of my daughter. If I am honest, I see it all around me. Everywhere. All the time. In the smallest of things. In the green leaves. In the orange newt. In the owl that hoots. In the helicopters spinning to the ground. In the drift of lilac. In looking out the window to find Stephen on his knees putting another plant into the ground. And I see it in the harder places, too. In despair. In loss. In fear. In places too many to name, because they are everywhere. 

But here now, in this moment, I am my own mother, and I visit all the worlds of my life and see, clear as day, all the ways that God, True Nature, call it what you will, has tilled me with aloneness, watered me with sadness, tending always to my slow-growing and late-blooming soul, tending me into what it would have me be in this sad and beautiful world, in this holy field of flowers and weeds.