Ablaze
What keeps the light in your eyes?
I had the joy and privilege of seeing a new mom with her newborn recently. The baby was just two months old, and the first few weeks of his tiny life had been made harder for the family trio with some feeding issues. Those had resolved and his most recent weight check had found him at a robust 12 lbs, 8 oz. Significant gains for this little one and his adoring mama. For the first part of our conversation, he had been content in a little seat that gently kept him moving. She was able to hold our conversation, straighten up a few things in the room, and periodically talk to him. All seamlessly, all without much thought to the quick and frequent shifts among different things holding her attention—me, her cleaning, and her precious baby. When he started to cry, wanting her warmth and comfort, she changed her voice, soft, soothing, gentle, so full of love for this tiny being. She talked to him, telling him he had done such a good job, that she was coming to hold him, she knew he was tired, narrating his world for him as the tenderness and calming rhythm of her voice settled him. I wondered at this ordinary miracle of mothering. How in such a short time, she knew just how to match his needs, how to offer him comfort with words and tone and presence.
I was reminded of a video of the artist, Alanis Morissette, singing her song, Ablaze, while holding her four-year-old daughter. It was filmed during the pandemic, so she is in her home studio, balancing her daughter on her hip. While the video is no longer available, you can find still images from the video of her daughter adding her own flourishes, such as covering her famous mama’s mouth while she is singing, to the performance. The beauty of the way in which a mother incorporates her child into her life so effortlessly, so naturally is depicted here with such sweetness and love. She repeats her parental mission throughout the song:
When you reach out, I am here hell or high water
This nest is never going away
My mission is to keep the light in your eyes ablaze~Alanis Morrissette, Ablaze
While Alanis’s children are older than the two month old I got to spend some time with, they are all still single digits. With each year, your ability to intuit what it is that your child needs feels less and less. The needs of a teenage boy feel much harder to read than those of his younger self. But that desire to keep the light in his eyes ablaze has not dimmed in anyway. If anything, it has grown stronger, though the focus shifts somewhat to helping him figure out what it is that keeps that light brilliant and bright.
One of the many things this letting go has sparked is a look back, a summative evaluation if you will, of parenting. While I have always tried to be self-reflective about how I parent, particularly when things don’t seem to be going well, parenting is often a very present-focused endeavor. Seeing your child become a young adult and head off on his own presents you with the realization that the bulk of your teaching, instilling values, raising this child has ended. The blueprint of how he will respond and engage with life has been set. And while there are many contributors to that final draft, you, the parents or primary caregivers, are the lead architects.
Have I continued throughout my boys’ lives to match their needs? To offer them comfort and softness and gentleness when they face distress? Taught them how to soothe themselves, remember that sadness and hurt and loss can be lessened if you share it with those you love? Do they know that more than anything in life, I want them to be people who are kind, thoughtful, loving, and connected? That I hope they continue to build relationships with people who provide them with a space that allows them to keep growing and changing and being the person they want to be? People who see and understand them? Who laugh with them, adore and appreciate them? Can they find these relationship? Do they know what these things feel like? Have I done a good enough job ensuring that they know these things because they felt them from me? Do they feel loved, adored, cherished, understood, listened to, seen for who they understand themselves to be?
I think back to those early days of mothering, when the hardest things were having patience with a crying baby when you were sleep deprived and all the things you knew to try hadn’t worked and you hadn’t had a real adult conversation in days. I remember how long those days could feel, waiting for my husband to come home to take the baby and TALK WITH ME. How is it that those babies I held so close, whose ethereal scent I couldn’t get enough of, whose every cry and need I knew, are now young men that I ache to hold close, to know just a sliver of what they are thinking, wanting, wondering, holding? And yet, this is where I knew we were heading, where I have insisted we go. From keeping the light in their eyes ablaze with my love to hoping and praying that they have learned and will continue to learn what they need to keep it burning. Because what has lit up my life for the past 18 years is these three boys. A fire so bright, so hot, so full of love it could never dim. Ablaze.