Given up for You

Tonight I rocked a sleepy four year old boy in my arms and sang my favorite lullaby as I watched his eyes slowly lower. We're visiting my brother and his family in Canada. Long days in the sun and lots of playing with cousins have made for very tired, very happy children. The lullaby, All the Pretty Little Horses, is one that my mother sang to me as a child. And it is my special lullaby for Jackson. 

When the girls were young, I spent so much time singing to them that their memories are probably peppered with everything from hymns, to the Beatles, to Leonard Cohen's Alleluia. But for Jackson there is one special song. The melody is plaintive and longing. It was the first lullaby I sang to him a little over 4 years ago, standing beside his bassinet in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.  My body was sore from twelve hours of labor compounded by a middle of the night flight on a Lear jet from Juneau to Anchorage sitting on a hard bench seat, my baby encased in plastic and hooked up to tubes, an impossible eternity of inches away from me. I stood there, in the NICU with aching breasts, full of milk which I couldn't give to him, and empty arms which couldn't hold him and I listened to him cry. With no other way to offer him comfort, I put my face as close to his little ear as I possibly could and amid the beeping of machines and the professional bustle of nurses and doctors I sang my little boy a song: “Hush a-bye, don't you cry. Go to sleep my little baby. When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses.”

The spiritual practice of motherhood demands radical self-giving love.  Before Jackson's birth, I'd caught glimpses of it in sleepless nights with the girls, and in the whole body weariness that comes from schlepping around 2 toddlers and their things, but I'd never felt the wound of love so clearly as my days in the NICU with my newborn son.  But I did know I was not alone.  The Lord of Life who gave his very body and blood for the sake of his beloved ones was with me.  And though I couldn't do much, I could stand there and sing and know that love makes all the difference.  The words of Jesus sustained and grounded me: "this is my body, given up for you."  

In my days pre-children, my spirituality flourished in quiet time alone--praying, reading, journaling. Post-children, quiet time alone is in short supply and for a while I used to think my spirituality suffered. But I realize now it has only changed. It is lived through the physical ways I give of myself to my children.  From giving birth, to piggy back rides, to lullabies--this is my body, given up for you.