It is Tov

Just one breath ago I sat beside you in the back seat of our Expedition as we brought you home from the hospital.  At 6 pounds 9.4 ounces, you were tiny in that car seat.  A tiny wisp of perfection dressed in soft white and pink.  The mile and half to our house felt like it lasted 100 miles.  I felt completely vulnerable on that ride.  I also felt completely ill equipped to be your mom.  For two days you had cried almost non stop, and they had told me if I gave you a pacifier you would never fully learn to nurse well.  So in my absolute fear, I had stayed awake in a fog of exhaustion and emotion fearing I would do even the most basic mothering act incorrectly.  However, my first unsupervised parenting decision had been to give you a pacifier as soon as the nurse took her final inspection of our transportation (even as I did this one defiant act I wasn't sure that it might not be the one that sealed my failure as a mom).  She had smiled wide when she bid us farewell, “You have everything you need.  Congratulations.”  In that instant as your dad walked around the car to drive us home, I doubted she knew what she was talking about. There was no possibility I could having anything I actually needed, hadn't I just gone through a full out mental and emotional breakdown over a pacifier?!  Just 48 hours before we were just two young married people with a ton of optimism and dreams.  Now we were a family of three, parents; forever changed as our hearts were now beating in another human’s body; and I had just gone against the recommendations of the experts in my first solo parenting decision.  Nope.  No way we had all that needed, and yet there we were, riding into the great unknown, your life in our hands.  

Your daddy has always been a giant, with a huge heart and gigantic hands.  But they never seemed bigger to me that day than when he lifted your car seat out of the car and carried you upstairs into our new life.  I hope they haven’t gotten any smaller, because I am going to need them more than ever to hold me up when we say our goodbyes and drive away from your dorm.  Because that is where we have found ourselves this weekend, one breath and 18 years after we first brought you home.  We are watching you launch out into your life, your arc out from our family journey.  This is where our paths diverge.  We will return to the house, the home in which we have never been parents without you living with us, and you will walk forward into this beautiful life; the clean slate of possibility and discovery before you. 

Leading up to this day has been such an incredible adventure; one fraught with all the beautiful firsts and many tragic plot twists.  Building and rebuilding.   Prayers sung over you as you fell asleep, and prayers whispered through tears in the middle of the night.  Perhaps I should apologize my dearest oldest child.  You didn’t get the best parent versions of us; we were learning as we went, thankfully it sometimes felt easier than that very first pacifier decision.  Your life has been our classroom.  In all this time I would only give back one experience, as it was filled with despair.  For five anguishing minutes four years ago, in the dark of terror and chaos I believed you were dead.  Gone from me in this life.  You were lifeless and still beside me and I had touched you and said, “Goodbye baby, I love you.” Then I turned away from you and attempted to leave your side.  I would give back all  5 of those minutes, and I am forever grateful that as I turned you came back to me, crying out for me, "Mommy! Mommy!, you screamed out.  And even though we have struggled to rebuild your life since then, you have been with me, not left in the cold of the night in a shattered memory.  So surely leaving you this time won’t feel anything like that?  In fact, I have tried to convince myself that I should skip away from you with joy at this departure knowing that you are able to leave us; able to embrace your life.   (God knows that there have been weeks and months in which I questioned whether you would ever be able to get to this monumental moment as I have watched your struggles.)  And therein lies the rub. I do feel intense joy….butterflies in my stomach, hopeful anticipation (Kavah), extravagant joy.  Joy juxtaposed to intense longing and nostalgia and heartache.  How can such disparate feelings coexist in the same space?  This mystery is perplexing to me, and the sense of disorientation is like the broth in this crockpot filled with emotions.

I have not one single doubt in my mind that you are ready for this step.  Not merely because I see your ability, but mostly because I fully and completely see the hand of God upon your life.  I know He is able and faithful.  Not once has He ever been less than more than sufficient for our needs.  He has relentlessly loved and pursued you.  He keeps each of His promises and He has sealed your life to SHINE BRIGHT in this world so often marked by darkness.  Your very life is evidence of Him showing me treasures in the darkness, as my first treasure on the darkest night of my life was the return of my child’s life into my arms.  But beyond that, He has a purpose for you, and your radiance is directly flowing from the identity He has given you. You are beloved, knit together perfectly, and adored by Him.  No matter where you go in this life, I will never love you as much as He does, and that reality assures me that you are ready for all that comes next because He will always be nearer than your own breath. 

Tov is the Hebrew word for good.  But not like, “Yum, that dinner is good.”  Or “wow that tree produces amazingly good fruit.”  As I understand it, Tov is like a tree that bears fruit, which when planted will grow into another tree.  When that tree bears fruit that act is TOV.  My Tov is not just you, it is you growing from the virtues we have planted deep within you, and then producing good from your life.  In that context, my Tov begins when you leave my side and walk forward in life radiating light into this world.  The farther you go, the more you experience, your exercise of the lessons we’ve tried to teach is our Tov.  You are headed out to change the world, and for that to begin I will have to get into our big blue van and drive away. 

So that is what I’ll do.  Tears have and will flow.  My mask on this plane as I write is currently filled with tears and snot.  But my heart is filled with joy at the extravagance of God.  He saw fit to make me a mom when you were handed into my arms as the rising sun flooded a delivery room in Iowa City one spectacular spring day.  He smiled in those moments when I doubted if we really had all we needed as we drove away from the hospital. He gave your daddy long arms with giant hugs always ready to wrap me up in the love of God no matter how vulnerable I feel.  He created your mind into the stunning learner that you are, and you have been listening well these 18 years.  He has given you to us (twice), and He has allowed us the great honor of launching you out of our home now.   My prayer for you as you go is to always remember, “The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He DOES NOT faint or grow weary; His understanding is unsearchable.  He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases STRENGTH.  Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; BUT she who waits for the LORD shall renew her strength; she shall mount up with wings like an eagle; she shall run and not be weary; she shall walk and not faint.” 

 

Fly baby.  Fly.  For that is my TOV.