Miracle

I returned to work today for the first time since Friday. It felt good to be back. It was the most human I've felt in almost a week.

All of our kids looked older somehow, as though they'd grown up over the few days I was gone, as though I hadn't been able to notice their growth until I stopped watching for it. Children are funny that way. One minute you're holding them in your arms, rocking them to sleep, and the next they're out on the playground, outlining the rules of the games for anyone willing to listen. Time really does move so very fast.

I was thinking exactly that as I gave him his afternoon bottle. I nuzzled my face into his little cheek. "I remember when you were just an idea," I whispered. And I did. I remembered clearly the day his mother told me she was pregnant, long before we knew he would be a boy, long before we knew what his name would be, long before we knew he would be so beautiful. I remember how excited she was, how excited we were for her, how honored I had been that I was the first person at the center she had told. I remember how just the idea of him brought so much joy.

And as he lay snugly in my arms, gulping down his milk, I thought about how that felt like both a lifetime ago and only a single moment ago, a single blink ago. I closed my eyes for a second and a new life arrived. I stopped paying attention and an entirely new world was created. I reveled at his tiny nose, at the perfectly deep pools of his eyes, at the way his diminutive five fingers gripped so tightly around one of my own. "You have brought so much joy" I thought, "you are a miracle."

I marvel at all of the little brothers and sisters whose arrivals I have been fortunate enough to greet. I am so grateful to watch the process. I am so grateful to have a job that revolves around this idea of birth, of new lives, of new beginnings. I am so grateful that so often there I am reborn, revived, renewed. I watch my little students take in the process as well. I listen to their excitements and concerns. I am enchanted by their pride, by their promises of unconditional love to people who have yet to come into existence. I am in love with their faith, their innocence, their trust in things that I have come to doubt. I am so grateful to have them as reminders of all that is not lost.

I think of how I was their age when my little brother came into existence. I think of the people who were involved, who shared in our joy, who loved me simply because I was a child, simply because that made me deserving of love. I can't remember them. I wish that I could. I wish that I could believe, in some small way, that someday when they grow older, these young souls will think of me, will remember the way I loved them, simply because they were children who deserved love. But I will understand if they don't. I will understand what I am slowly beginning to learn now, that these are not their lessons. They are mine.

Their lives have changed more over the past seventeen months than mine has. Their lives will inevitable change more over the next seventeen months than mine will. I am beginning to settle into definitions of myself while they are still creating galaxies inside their minds. But I am learning what it means to combine the two. I am learning how to take the ideas of pride, of trust, of unconditional love and mold them to fit the real world. I am learning how to intertwine my wisdom and responsibility with the child in me who likes to dance barefoot in the rain. I am learning, not how to separate, but how to balance the beauty and the sadness, the highs and the lows, the miracles and the realities. I am learning what it means to walk that fine line between genius and madness, between skepticism and pessimism, between foolishness and hope. I am learning a little thing called faith.

I look down at the tiny hairs on his cheeks. "Someone created you out of nothing," I think. "Someone knew, undoubtedly, that having you here would make things better. Someone loved you before you were even an idea. Someone believed, long before you were born, that you would be this miracle."

And they were right to have such faith.