An Exquisite Pain
Thursday, March 15th, 2007I’m not a mom. I’m not an aunt. I’m not a godmother or stepmother or an anything mother. I’m just not.
I’ve always thought that someday I might be. But so far, I haven’t mothered anything.
And until a few years back, I wasn’t even a “kid person.” That is, I wasn’t one of the women in the office gushing at babies with their returning-from-maternity-leave mothers. Wasn’t one of the gaggle of faces tilting toward and cooing at strollers on the sidewalk.
But then it happened. Not “it,” but a child. A child happened upon my uncomplicated twenty-something life. And I found a love I never knew existed.
The love for someone else’s child.
We met in a grey hallway where both his father and I worked and met. I turned the corner that morning and saw him hand-in-hand with the man I already loved, his dad. In that moment, I felt my breath catch in my throat, felt my heart pounding ever faster, felt myself hesitate just enough to register the full weight of what this meant before taking that first decisive step forward.
He was seven then, timid and precocious. A boy looking upward at his father for reassurance and encouragement.
And what followed? Three years of movies and baseball games, bike rides and vacations, car pools and Christmas morning, pumpkin carving and macaroni and cheese. A glimpse into a life with the most unexpected gift of all.
No matter what someone tells you about “baggage” or “having to raise someone else’s kid” or any other of those horrible things that people say; they’re terribly, terribly wrong. And I pity them for their incapacity to open their hearts to the love I have known.
Every child deserves and wants only to be loved.
And so, I go on loving this child from afar. Knowing that each day he grows taller and more sure. Knowing that he’ll keep excelling at basketball and the piano and those math tests.
Knowing the exquisite pain of loving a child I have no rights to.
This is just gorgeous. I’m an aunt, but I’ve never had any kind of maternal stirrings. I’ve loved from afar, but can’t imagine what it feels like when that love is for a child you’ve helped to raise.
Thank you for the insight, it’s given me a window to something important x
I couldn’t possibly make the claim that I’ve raised him. But I can say this: he has been in my life and I in his, and I am a better person for it.
I loved this post. I can relate- I have no kids but there is one in my life that I feel is more like mine than any I could imagine having.