I'm Holding Love in My Arms Tonight

I've written this post in my head dozens of times over the past ten weeks, my little boy.

The way the milk gathers on your lips and oozes on my shirt as I pull the bottle from your sucking lips as sleepy eyes give way to dreams unknown.

The way I cheer with true joy at each inch and ounce because I know how important your growth is to this body diagnosed with disease and serious prognosis.

The way my heart feels sad as you move from 0 to Number 1 diapers as I know that that phase is over never to be repeated again.

I'm holding love in my arms tonight.

Your laugh and smile are memorized in the caverns of my heart.
The nuances of your face filled with curiosity and expression amuse me to no end.
Your hands and feet kick and flail with life and a desire to move and to grow and to be MORE than this moment.

I see this little boy and I see the little man and I see the man I know you will be.

I'm holding love in my arms tonight.

Foster Daddy prays over you to have a different spirit.
My heart leaps with that prayer, and I pray deep too, that you will not be like the world, not go through a boys-will-be-boys phase, not be influenced by culture or generational curses.

I'm holding love in my arms tonight.

Your very existence in my world has rocked me to the core.
Jesus is challenging every fiber of my being to give and to love and to sacrifice more than I ever thought possible.

You, my sweet boy, are calling out the mother in me to depths and heights that beg to be plumbed, where words are no more.....just love.

I'm holding love in my arms tonight.

Tears stream down my face because in the eyes of the world and the law, I have no right to hold you and to love you and to long for you to be my very own.

But this love defies the laws and rules that this world has established.
Especially to this woman, this foster parent, this mom of yours, who had very clear guidelines of how she felt her family should be formed and prized pregnancy as the end all for womanhood and motherhood.

And then God placed you in my arms
In my heart.
In my blood.

You may not have grown sinews and bones inside of my mortal body, but you grew security and joy in the recesses of my heart long before I knew you were even being formed and shaped.

You came into this big, wide world on Valentine's Day.
Two months later, you landed without warning into my carefully constructed world.
Two months more and your path and mine may diverge again.

I'm holding love in my arms tonight.

I know not what the future holds.
I know not where I fit into your future.
I know not if I will see you grow from infancy to boyhood into a man.
I know not if you will ever see these words, much less know my name.

I only know that you have pulled love from my the deepest corners of my heart and life that I worried would never have life.

I'm holding love in my arms tonight.

You gave me the gift of motherhood that defies logic and critics and the way of the world.

In mothering you, I often felt, "I was born for this..."
In the face of saying goodbye I know I was born for this too.
Born to love you in a way that only a mother could....in the ups and downs, longing for your best, even as my heart squeezes through the grinder.... never to be the same again.

I love you.....
Not because you came from my earthly DNA
but because God wrote YOUR name, my boy, on MY heart before the foundations of the world.

And I will ALWAYS be YOUR mother...in the eyes of the One who placed you in my arms for this season....however long that may be.

I do not know what tomorrow may bring.

Pain and sorrow
or
hope fulfilled.

So....I'm holding love in my arms tonight.
And will hold you, Little Man, in my heart forever.

P.S. You can count on that.  Jesus made sure! ;-)