Sixteen years ago, in the mess of life, in the most imperfect of circumstances, my son was born.
It began on Monday evening, and he was born on Wednesday morning. I twice thought I might die in the attempt. But he was born, and I was reborn. New being, new life, for us both.*
I remember thinking as I held him in those first few days that already, just by being born, he had made the first step on his journey to independence. It's common parlance to say I'm "having" a baby - but you don't exactly have a baby, not in the sense of ownership. A baby is an obligation, an invasion, a liberation, a substantiation, a validation, a consummation. But never, never a possession.
Learning to swallow food was a long struggle for him. I spent hours and hours of my life holding him in the crook of my arm, squeezing formula milk into his mouth one drop at a time, because his swallow reflex was weak. He got painfully thin; I worried that he wouldn't grow.
But now he is nearly six-foot-two, and his favourite joke is to pick me up and carry me to another room in the house, just to prove he can. He snatches me up and, for a moment, amid much laughter, it's me that is in the crook of his arm. And some days this boy who once struggled to swallow milk appears at my bedside in the morning with a cup of tea.
Little acts of kindness. Daily moments of joy. Great signs of promise.
*There is a profound theological analogy in giving birth in the sense that the parent is created by the child; a similar re-making can be traced in other relationships too, such as
adoption. Janet Soskice gives an elegant development of this idea in her book The Kindness of God.