Random Reflections on a Friday Morning

July 11. Nathaniel is two-months old today.

The other day I was going through our computer, sifting through the pictures and video clips we had taken of Nathaniel. How much he’s grown. Even though very little time has passed, it’s amazing how easy you forget just how small he was (especially before the baby fat came in—he’s gone from 6 lbs 14 oz to 13 lbs now… he’s got two chins and no neck).

One of the baby care books that I read had said that Week 6 was when it would become easier. So I remember that in that first month, I was anticipating for Week 6 to come. What made it easier, besides longer stretches of sleep during the night (still not long enough though!), was that in Week 6, Nathaniel began to smile and talk. Tears filled my eyes, when one day, lying on the change table, Nathaniel began to talk to me, making noises in response to the questions I regularly posed in my high-pitched voice.

“Do you think you’re the cutest baby in the world?” I asked him, as I stared into his big eyes and bright smile.

He let out a baby grunt, “huh.” Which I translated as, “Yes.”

Then came the aah’s and the coo’s after every question I asked him.

Such beautiful music to a Mother’s ears.

Two days ago, I woke up with a sore throat and a stuffy nose. I was also trying to get over my third blocked duct in the past two months—which caused me to develop a fever. My initial fear was that Nathaniel would catch my sickness, and I instantly prayed to God that He would shelter my son from my germs. The other difficult task was taking care of Nathaniel when I had barely enough energy to feed myself. His crying was giving me a headache—so much so that I resorted to laying him on the crib for 40 minutes, where he cried non-stop. When the guilt kicked in, I went into his room and picked him up again, and his crying instantly stopped, but he was still breathing hard and whimpering, as if still reliving his feeling of abandonment in the crib.

It moved me when I considered Nathaniel’s absolute trust and dependence on me, even when it was me who had laid him on the crib in the first place. All those times I set him down, left the room, so that I could cook, vacuum, or do whatever household chores I needed to do—he would cry and cry and cry, but would just as easily stop when I came to his side.

I love the setup in our master bedroom. I’ve got three bookshelves against the walls, lined with hundred of books. A writing desk positioned against the far wall, by the window, which overlooks the backyard and a forest. For my birthday, Lee had bought me a rocking chair (at my request), which sits next to my writing desk, which makes feeding Nathaniel all the more comfortable. I’ve got all sorts of books laid out next to me, depending on what “reading mood” I’m in—the Bible, an anthology of short stories, Anne Steele’s collection of hymns (for the thesis I have to begin writing soon), and my journal. I started reading Frederick Buechner’s Telling Secrets two days ago, and finished it this morning (I was able to because Nathaniel fell sleep in my arms after feeding). It was upon reading his memoir that gave me an inclination to blog again. His recounting of his personal journey of dealing with his father’s suicide when he was a child and his daughter’s anorexia when he was a Father stirred many thoughts.

For one, Death. I remember during those first few weeks of taking care of Nathaniel, I would stare at him with so much intensity that I began to fear what might happen to him as he got older. To what extent I would protect him, never let him out of my sight. Then I thought about the Holly Jones and the Cecilia Zhangs, and the two friends from my past high school church fellowship that never made it past their twenties. I was deeply saddened—so much so that I began to pray for their parents, for their healing. I imagine that time itself may lessen the pain, but I can’t imagine the pain ever disappearing. And just as Buechner had touched upon it in his memoir, such fears and experiences of suffering inevitably lead the Christian back to God’s sovereignty. As he puts it:

As I understand it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is. For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable… I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me in the sense that I was not destroyed by it but came out of it with scars that I bear this day, to be sure, but also somehow the wiser and the stronger for it. Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way. As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow form the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it. (pp. 31-32)

Then I began to think about my own parents. My mom’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago, and my dad’s birthday is in two weeks. But it isn’t their birthdays that make me feel like time is passing by too quickly—it’s mine. I turned thirty last month. The sound of “thirty,” I realize, has an awful ring to it, at least to me. I quietly said “thirty-one” to myself the other day, and even that number didn’t sound as bad as “thirty.” Upon thinking about my age, I thought about Nathaniel, when he turns twenty one day (God willing), and suddenly my life flashed before my eyes. I began to picture myself at fifty, then I began to think about my parents’ age when I turned fifty… and then I grew sad again, grappling with the fact that, one day, just as Buechner had lost his parents, that one day, I would lose mine.

Of course, this thought has come to me before—but always—the thought is so horrible that I don’t dwell on it for long. One thing I do think about, however, is how or what, in this life, I could do, to prevent any regrets when that day comes. Spend more time with them. Engage in deeper discussions. Reminisce on the past. Stir up buried memories, unspoken ones, honest ones (one of the themes in Buechner’s memoir). Is it even possible to prevent regrets? With death—given that we are human and therefore fallible—are regrets inescapable?

The thing is—my parents are faithful Christians—and so—when the day comes—I know it will not be the end. Yet even so—I nonetheless feel sadness. Sometimes, I wonder whether my inability to let go of those who have passed away who have put their faith in Jesus Christ is a reflection of how small my faith still is—as if, even during such times when Heaven should be ever so close to my heart, that it is not enough to assuage such devastating loss. God forgive me. I do believe. I do.

Motherhood has altered TIME completely. How it’s spent, that is. While in seminary, the majority of my time was spent relishing in the lectures in my classes, listening to sermons in chapel, conversing with my classmates, passing quiet evenings with my husband—and of course, studying and writing papers.

While Nathaniel is taking up all my time now, and I have to live with the fact that the dark circles under my eyes aren’t going to go away any time soon—there is much more opportunity to enjoy leisure reading, watching movies (most recently, August Rush and Atonement, which I really enjoyed), and seeing family and friends. At the same time, with these little “windows” here and there to choose what I want to do, I realize it is also very tempting and very easy to “waste” those windows (i.e., watching useless programs on television during the day.) After two months, I reminded myself that I better make wiser decisions regarding what to do with my time—because you never know when that time might be gone. With a baby, your schedule is unpredictable.

Some people have asked me how different my life is now compared to before. What is more tiring—seminary or baby? I have to say—while the deadlines in school are stressful—the conditions are at least controllable. With a baby, you cannot control the variables. You are at the mercy of the baby’s schedule (I love you, Nathaniel)—even when you try to impose a schedule—you can only do so much (so far, at two months of age).

But God is good. There are days when taking care of Nathaniel are really difficult, the worse was, of course, this week, when I was sick. But there are also good days, though they are few, when there is minimal crying, and a lot more sleeping, smiling, talking, and other unexpected surprises (i.e. Nathaniel staring cross-eyed at a stuffed animal, Nathaniel looking at himself in the mirror and smiling as if he knows what he’s looking at—“Man, that’s a good-looking baby,” he must be thinking— Nathaniel falling asleep on his own for an extended period without the aid of rocking or nursing). I believe that these moments are manifestations of God’s grace—His way of reminding me in my tiredness and frustration and fear of inadequate mothering of the beauty of raising one of His own.

We believe in God—such as it is, we have faith—because certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost. The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we don’t stop form time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God too.

Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets, pp. 35-36