Slumber My Darling

I’ve been so busy with paperwork and busywork and pricing and sorting that I haven’t really had or taken the time to actually consider why we are doing this giant yard sale very much.  Or, I am cognizant of its purpose—to bring Charlie home—but I haven’t really sat with his absence very much.  When someone asks me how many kids I have I say three, but it is still foreign to me.  

This afternoon, while sorting and pricing the mountain of items that were cascading out of my home and down my stoop into my yard, our babysitter showed up and offered to take the kids to the park.  So I was alone in the house.  Knowing I was beyond stressed and that my own home was making me itchy from all the disorder, I pulled up the Yo Yo Ma station on Pandora. 

Folks, Yo Yo Ma is the antidote to stress.  Or maybe it’s just the cello.  Something about its low aching timbre grips my soul.  It is simultaneously melancholy and joyful; it is the music of the human condition.  I mentioned this on facebook and peeps began sharing their mutual love of Yo Yo Ma and the cello.  And then my friend Angie sent me this link: 

Something inside me broke.  Or maybe the song just wiggled loose the right pebble in the wall I’d built up around the agony of waiting for Charlie thereby letting a flood of ache pool around me.  

I am writing this through tears.  Not misty tears, but full on I am now congested and puffy eyed and out of breath tears.  My son is not in my arms.  Someone else will put him down tonight.  Will they kiss his head and tell him he is loved?  Will they rock him to sleep if he lets out a cry?  Will they stroke his hair until it is shiny and stuck to his forehead? 

I am his mother and he is not near.  He is unaware that while he is crowded in a room with a dozen other sick and waiting little boys, his mother is crying out for him in a language he has never heard. 

My darling Charlie, though your surroundings do not show it, know this: you are no longer an orphan, but a son.  Though I am not near you now, I am coming for you.  Soon—but not soon enough.