At the Intersection of the Other
On Wednesday, Cecilia will turn fifteen months old. Her tiny feet are still turned inwards, monkey-like, and her fragile ankles struggles to support the weight of her growing body. She works her little heart out every day while practicing standing, taking steps, shifting her weight, balancing, turning, and clasping onto my arms and fingers to safeguard against falling. What came so intuitively to Lizzy at nine months of age is still a daily struggle for her little sister, and I continue to hold my breath, stifle my fears, consult her physical therapist, and wait for the day that Cecilia will begin to walk.
On our morning bike rides, Cecilia sits in her big sister’s bike seat, now more hers than it ever was Lizzy’s, and chirrups and hums to the shifting breezes as we pedal up and down the hilly suburbs. Again and again, her little body curls forward against the straps keeping her in place, and the helmet slips down over her blue eyes, obscuring the limited vision that she has. Again and again, I stop the bike to help her sit up straight and reorient her helmet to free her eyes. As though in grateful anticipation, she places each chubby fist on the side handles of her seat, grasping tightly and smile on her face, as though waiting for a roller coaster ride to begin. She chirps a request that we start moving again, and I smile to cover the feel of my heart melting and stroke her impossibly soft cheek, telling her we’re about to “go-go.”
Last week, she let me know that she felt it was only appropriate for me to punctuate our reading of If Animals Kissed Goodnight by showering her face and neck with kisses at regular intervals. With careful deliberation, she used my shirt as an anchor to adjust her position in my lap so that she could face me to better receive the kisses which, to her, so adequately demonstrated the theme of the book. Her tiny fingers explored the pulsing veins on the side of my neck, hands stroking and cupping the curve of my jaw, fingers dipping gently into the hollow at the base of my throat. And when I had uttered the last line of the story, she hurriedly began to shift herself in the opposite direction to better see her favorite book, which I always saved for last. Unable to contain her excitement, she began bouncing and giggling on my lap, her throaty gurgles bubbling up as though from a spring. She grabbed the edges of the book, mesmerized by the LED lights that shine out through the pages, progressively increasingly in number as night falls, and Little Bear points out more and more stars.
Sometimes, she shifts restlessly in her sleep, searching, and finding me, curls tightly against me, throwing her chubby legs across my hip in thoughtless possession. I curl my body around her, encompassing her, enfolding her, feeling her soft breath against the fine hairs on my chest and cradling the back of her head in a single palm. I rest my forehead against hers, and we both fall back asleep, head to head, our breath regulating to a primordial rhythm only we can hear. Upon waking, she sniffs empathically, waiting for the sound of my bleary-eyed, sniffing reply. We giggle and sniff for a few minutes, before she opens her bird mouth and reaches for my cheeks, drawing my nose carefully into her mouth. With teeth like clam shells, she grazes the tip of my nose, so gentle that I hold my breath before exclaiming, “You can’t bite the Mama nose!” and launching uncontrollably into the tickling and rib-biting that I know will make her breathless with laughter.
As the days pass, I cannot help but consider how startlingly different Cecilia is from Lizzy and how different my experience of motherhood has become. I cannot help but imagine what it would have been like to mother two such inescapably unique individuals had Lizzy survived to become the big sister I dreamed she would be. Although I am the mother of two daughters, I have never been granted the experience of actively mothering two daughters. Every time I lay Cecilia down on her changing table, I cannot help but remember Lizzy lying there, eyes fixated on the ultrasound photos above her, pointing and asking “Sis-ter?”
There is no end to grief. There is only the attempt to learn from what you had, what you lost, and that which remains. The love which I feel for Cecilia is so different in nature, in character, in taste and expression from the love that I had for Lizzy. And yet both must be classified as love, that finite and insufficient term which acts as an umbrella for all manner of emotions.
It seems to me that in the activity of love, the only thing that matters is the freedom of the other to respond or not to respond. It is, in fact, the very reciprocity of love that makes it simultaneously so compelling and so elusive. There is no forcing the other to return your love; to do so would be to violate the very essence of love. And so it is in the experience of love that we come face to face with our own limitations.
In my last post, I spoke at length of my need for control, for some sort of guarantee that Cecilia will remain alive despite her disease. I spoke of my fear of the coming winter, of the harsh reality that I have never known what it is to parent a child past the age of two. None of these things have changed for me. I still fear Cecilia’s death, and I still attempt to do all within my power to exert whatever control over maintaining her life that I possibly can.
. . . and yet there is the way she wraps her tiny self around me when I lift her in my arms. My response to this is as immediate and thoughtless as breath; I fold my arms tightly around her and hold her as though my life depended on it. But it was she who initiated this hug: a hug that simply would not have happened in that moment, at that time, if she had not willed it. For me, it is nearly effortless to reciprocate the love of a toddler. And it is in the reciprocity of loving her that I find in myself some level of rest.
It is true that I cannot control whether or not Cecilia survives this winter, her childhood, or the next twenty years. It is also true that I cannot control whether or not Cecilia loves me. The love that she shows me constantly throughout the day is totally gratuitous; I cannot force it, guide it, or even summon it. It is, very naturally and perfectly, engendered only by my loving her. And it serves as a constant–although sometimes unwelcome–reminder that it is in my very inability to control or force her to love me that makes her love such a profound gift.
Why then, should I not apply this concept to her life? Her life is also a profound gift, whether or not it ends in nine months or fifty years. Her very being is also gratuitous; I didn’t earn it or deserve it. She was, perfectly, given to me. I named her Cecilia Amaris because she is that very thing in Hebrew that means given by God. Thus is every second she draws breath a gift. Thus was every second of Lizzy’s most precious life a gift. Thus, at the intersection of the other, does my control sunder, dissolve, and give way, sobbingly, to wonder.
Maybe Cecilia will die soon. It is this very maybe that forces me to submit with wonder and gratitude to every minute that I get to spend with her. Every time that she takes another step or grips the side of bike seat, smile spreading like moonlight, she is showing me the wonder of her other-ness. Every time that she turns to embrace me in the middle of a story or folds her miraculously breathing little self against me at night, she is showing me how there is little distinction there is between where she stops and I begin.
And yet she is that very thing–totally other than what I am. She, eternally beyond my ability to shape or mold according to my opinions or delusions of control, has, without knowing, become the entire reason why I choose to live. And in the wonder of receiving and reciprocating her love, I find that what constitutes “I” no longer matters and in what constitutes “she”, I encounter the limitations of my being.
Perhaps these limitations must be present in order for love to be love. It would logically follow that in order for life to be life, our inability to control death must remain forefront in our minds. And if this surrender is what is required in order for me to live, then it becomes a moral imperative that I find my way to that surrender, in order that Cecilia might live. Live, that is, without my fear of her death interrupting and amputating each moment that we have together. Each moment that we have only because we have been given it. To lose sight of this is to fail at loving Cecilia. And to fail at loving Cecilia is to fail Lizzy. And failing Lizzy is simply not an option.
So can I force myself to this surrender, this open-palmed offering of all my illusions of control? Honestly, I don’t know. All I know is that I have to try. And maybe, in the end, just this act of trying is the only thing that has ever truly defined motherhood.