The Essence of Life Lies in the Ordinary Miracle of Motherhood

The Boston Herald

Three of the children are out in the field with their father when I arrive.

It's a Kodak moment: The girls run with their arms outstretched through spring grass under a cloudless sky, their dog loping along beside them. Tabitha's hair flies behind her like a kite's tail. Xena runs double-speed to keep up. Shiloh, 2 1/2, walks and runs, stopping every few steps to hike up her long, cotton dress.

The only thing missing is music.

I get a lump in my throat because I love these children and they love me, and I'm touched by this because their presence in my life is a gift. They are family, real family, the kind I always wished for when I was a child. All my friends had huge families, aunts and uncles and cousins, who met for birthdays and holidays. My family was small: two parents, two grandmothers, one aunt and her family. I always wanted more.

Now I have what I wanted. It's strange how life works out. When my children were small, Jeannie, my husband's cousin, came to my house for the first time with her husband, Sal. She was newly married and just pregnant with her first child, and she tells me now how she watched me with my children all that day.

"I didn't even like kids when I was young," she said. "I didn't know what to do with them. I'd never been around them. I watched you, and I learned what to do.”

I like to believe this. I like to think that what I see in her children began with mine so many years ago. But the truth is Jeannie and I didn't see each other again until she had three children, until New Year's Day four years ago when she drove up with her family from their small farm in Austerlitz, N.Y., to visit her Aunt Peggy, my mother-in-law. We connected then, all of us, and we've been connected since.

Now, nine months pregnant, she appears at her back door as her children enfold me. She looks like a flower child. She wears a sundress, no shoes and holds in her hand a cup full of seeds

We kiss, then, all of us. Then Jessica, the 11-year-old, appears and there is more kissing. The children divide the candy I've brought, and Jeannie and I sit next to them on a rock in the sun and I watch with wonder as she calmly talks to them and plants seeds she's soaked the night before. It is the perfect metaphor - the good earth, the good mother. Life is all around her and within her. Now more life will spring from barren dirt. Life goes on everywhere.

She asked me at Christmas if I wanted to be with her when this baby was born. Sal would watch the kids. I would drive her to the hospital and stay with her in the delivery room. She was scheduled for a Caesarean section. I counted the days, called every week. I would say, "Do you still want me there? Are you sure?”

She was sure. And so I watch her plant seeds as she has contractions, and swab Shiloh's ear with hydrogen peroxide where she'd been bitten by black flies. The ordinariness of the day - she's about to give birth, but everything continues just as it always has - strikes me. Jeannie looks for something for Xena, digs a splinter out of Sal's foot, makes a list of what Sal should pack and what he should do the next day, folds clothes, eats spaghetti and chocolate cake and goes to bed.

Day dawns at 4:00 a.m. I wake to a rooster crowing and Sal and Jeannie laughing. We sit at the kitchen table and talk for a while. Then Jeannie walks upstairs, kisses her sleeping children good-bye, embraces Sal and we leave.

They call me into the delivery room after the procedure has begun. I sit on a stool and talk to Jeannie and hold her hand. It takes far longer than I expect. C-section sounds like a single stroke. It isn’t.

At 9:45 a.m. they tell me to stand. I look and I see a person I see life appear - black curly hair, a perfect, tiny face, small arms and legs, moving, kicking - in a space where there had been only emptiness. Seconds before there were eight people in the room. Now there are nine.

There are quiet tears and invisible genuflecting. I hold him and take him to Jeannie and lay him on her chest and I think, and I know - we all know for an instant - that this is the reason for life. It's the only reason - to nurture and protect and love one another, to treasure all that is given every time a child is born.