I am acutely aware that Noah did not ask to be born. If he ever is looking for someone to blame, Silvio and I are the most obvious targets. We brought him down from the heavens and are making him eat broccoli and wear underpants, two things he dislikes with all the fury of a three year old. This I think is the soft underbelly of being a parent.
Noah was born six weeks after my aunt took her own life. That time was an overwhelming feeling of heartbreak. Holding my newborn baby in the hospital, late into the night, among the strange beeps and whirs of hospital machines, everything foreign and strange, I couldn’t help but imagine my grandmother holding my aunt the same way. And my mother holding me. And my grandmother, my mother, two people I have always thought of as part of me, became entirely separate from me, nothing shared between us except this one experience. Just women, new mothers, like I was at that moment, cradling a new little soul, lovesick, and not knowing what will happen. When I visit my grandmother now, we don’t talk about my aunt, but we don’t have to. Sitting with her, talking about this and that, the pain is there between us, just under the surface, threatening to be an anchor, as we try to float along above it. Our only life raft being that we are next to one another, able to share the pain of it all.
I fill up the watering can and let Noah water the plants in the garden. “Water those flowers bubbah,” I encourage him, pointing to the flower bed, overflowing with pale pink lilies. Noah will consider this, and I will patiently wait to see what he does. Instead, he makes the choice to drag the watering can over to a tiny weed that’s meagerly trying to work its way out of the earth between the dirty bricks in the walkway. I will be about to stop him, or tell him that we don’t help weeds grow, we rip them out of the soil and throw them away. But I don’t. Instead, I fill up his now empty watering can and watch as he tends to each tiny weed he finds. Slowly over time, the weeds cover the path, abundant, giving our garden the appearance that it is wild, unattended to, no one to care for it. “Mama it grew,” Noah tells me proudly, standing in the middle of his weeds. Unaware that anything in the world might be undeserving of attention or love, or of any preconceived notions or judgments, anything at all, except his instinct to nurture the most fragile sign of life.
The weeds that cover our yard, tiny miracles. Signs of Noah.
Timshel 