The Second Childbirth

This is my boy.  My firstborn.  This is what he’s like……the dreamer of big dreams, always looking forward on the horizon for the next big adventure.  I suspect that wanderlust transferred to him through the blood that coarsed through the umbilical cord.  I so get this about him. He used to say, “I’ll be the uncle that comes back from Africa with elephant tusks and tells big stories.”  As it turns out, that is exactly what will happen.

He’s been to Africa once.  For a year.  And came back telling big stories.  He found himself helping to birth a child in a remote village in Uganda.  He stood before people who could not speak his language and told them about God while a man stood beside him translating his words.  He spent hours learning the craft of video production and all things beyond what his mama could understand.  He came back changed and hungry for more.  But God brought him home to grow him some more.  To make him ready to go back.  Because I knew he would.

In barely a weeks’ time I will stand at the airport window and watch his plane point to Cape Town.  And it will feel like giving birth all over again.  Only this time, without the epidural or the sterile environment and helpful nurses to clean up the mess of life and giving it.  I will stand in the middle of friends.  I will stand in the middle of strangers, others saying hello and goodbye, and it will hurt and make my bones creak as they resist grabbing on and not letting go.  And I will cry tears that make me tired and take stock of the tear down the front of my gut.  I will wave at him brave and say hello and good bye all in one breath; to the boy I carried and  to the man who walks away strong in front of me.

This business of loving people, of giving birth to them, of saying hello and goodbye?  It is a beautiful wound.  It is the business of living.  I take it in with a deep shaky breath.  And I will stare hard at the glint of the sun on my boys’ plane.