Vulnerability Captured

Children ooze vulnerability from their pores. Sometimes it tugs at my heart and elicits that motherly response to simply hold them to me as close as I can, as if my touch is a panacea for what ails them.

At birth, their wrinkled, jaundiced bodies covered in cords and sensors were the essence of vulnerability. It brought me to a place in my mind that was difficult to confront. It was easier to focus instead on the task at hand, which was to provide them with sustenance.

As they grow, there is a new challenge at every corner, and I take such pleasure in their focused concentration, and such distaste at their hasty frustration.

My dad is always reminding me that everything is new to my daughters. There are so many "firsts". This past weekend, walking through a field of rotting pumpkins, I overheard a conversation between him and Tristyn. While she was observing all the pumpkins, he asked her (in jest) if she had ever made a pumpkin pie? To which she replied earnestly, "No, grandpa!" and he joked with her saying, "You've never, in your whole three years, made a pumpkin pie??"

It made me think about all that lay ahead for her and her sister.

Not only experiences, but emotions and thoughts and disappointments, fears and thrills, joy and pain.

I can only cradle them in my arms when they are crying for so long. Eventually, they will need more than a kiss on a boo-boo to make it better. The mere sound of my voice may not always have the profound calming effect that it has on them now.

Maybe it's me that's vulnerable? Vulnerable to relinquish these creatures to the world, and let them experience it without holding my hand, or comforting them at every turn.

8 months