Last night I held a baby in my arms for the first time in over a year. June is my great nephew, and is barely a year old. He had learned the gesture for “moon” in sign language and he was making a crescent moon with his thumb and index finger, and looking up at the sky for the Snow Moon.
His parents were getting ready to leave after a visit with us outdoors on a Sunday afternoon and evening. I had led June away so his parents could pack his things. He was moving across the driveway when he stumbled, and without thinking, I bent to catch him and picked him up.
It was a moment of unbelievable, unexpected sweetness. The spring-like evening, the moon, and him in my arms. In a rush, everything I’ve given up over the last year came over me. I know, from my childhood, how to push aside the sorrow of what I cannot change. In this past year of isolating from friends, seldom leaving the house, knowing hugs only from my partner (and knowing I was lucky to know hugs in any way at all) there was little I could do to change anything, so I just kept on keeping on.
In this year of isolation my garden has flourished – it’s never gotten this much attention. My spiritual life shifted, moving from community work to rich personal work. Relationships that were dragging me backwards blessedly faded without personal contact to sustain them. I have a much deeper appreciation for solitude, quiet and peace.
And holding him, it rushed over me that I’d have given up all those gains for just this – to hold a chubby toddler in my arms and watch him gaze up into the sky. I thought he’d be upset when his mother and father moved out of sight to load the car, but he just settled in, and the feeling of his body cuddled into mine stayed with me in my dreams and on my waking next morning.
Was it wise to pick him up and hold him? No. If I’d thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have let myself. I had my first vaccine just last week, and my date of “freedom” will be April 17th, still almost eight weeks away. But June stumbled and was about to face plant on the concrete, and without thinking, I scooped him up.
Because me catching him was about survival too – about protecting the young. And an affirmation of myself, a human being drawn to protect, and hold, and breathe in sweetness when I’m lucky enough to find it. This last year has held so little sweetness, and as I held him it almost overwhelmed me that I hadn’t let myself know how bereft I was, without that sweetness to inform my life.
I’ve given myself a stern talking to – no more risks like that until April 17th. And I plan to keep that resolution, at the same time I hold close to myself, again and again and again, how grateful I am to have held June in my arms.
