Tears.
My boy cried tears today—the first time in the almost four
years he’s been home with us. We were at the doctor’s office, waiting to see
the pediatrician, and I could tell he was anxious about what was ahead—the
unknown person and the unknown place that awaited him.
We sat together on the scratchy plaid fabric of the waiting
room couch, him glancing anxiously over his right shoulder, then his left, then
his right again, me rubbing my hand up and down his back, singing songs in his
ear to comfort him.
He signed “home” and “car” over and over again, my boy whose
words are spoken through his hands. “Home, mama, home. Please. Car.”
I tried to reassure him that this was a “no hurt” visit—that
the doctor is his “friend.” I talked back to him with my hands and my voice—and
the most calm my mama voice could muster.
I turned my head away from him, glancing at two women
sitting across from us who were having a conversation. When I glanced back at
my boy, there were tears streaming down his cheeks. He was wiping them away
furiously, this silent stream, pooling in soft circles wiped away by his chubby
fingers. He squinted his eyes and the tears flowed even more furiously.
Quietly, announcing with a wet seriousness that this boy was scared.
These were the first scared tears I’d seen on my boy’s
face—this boy who was abandoned at three days old in China, who spent his first
18 months in a poor, neglectful orphanage, was finally learning to feel
emotion.
My heart felt this kind of conflicted mess of sadness and
joy for him—sadness in the way any mama holds her baby’s emotions close,
wanting to protect him, scare away the monsters hiding under his bed.
But joy because this boy is finally learning to feel—to
emote—to join the communion of the human family in all its conflicted emotions
with depth and meaning and purpose.
This boy is my teacher—this wise spiritual guide who has
shaped and taught me more than anyone or anything else in my life. This boy
with his big heart, his developmental delays, his absence of spoken language.
It seems that every day I learn something new about myself by loving and caring
for him.
The mystery is profound to me, kind of like his tears.
