Receive and Release

The benevolence of the evening sun gifts my humble living room with gold as the afternoon prepares to draw its curtains for the night. A delicate string of tissue paper garlands receive some gold for their own as they hang effortlessly, elegantly across the corner.

Eyes on the golden-lighted pompoms, I find my mind wandering to the day when I put them there. They had been strung up for a birthday party, those pompoms had been. A party to celebrate a little boy...who wasn’t there. My eyes deliberate on the baby footprints framed on the wall.

It has been exactly 18 months, and still, never a day goes by that I don’t think of my baby boy. Eighteen months since I kissed him goodbye, and yet it feels as though he still lives on in my heart. One of my friends expressed her surprise when I happened to tell her I think of Seth so continually. She had thought the loss was past, the child largely forgotten. But no...

How could I forget?

Like the sunshine sharing its glory this evening, my small child shared some of his God-given glory with me, and I received it. It became a part of me as much as he had been once a part of me. And even now, they say, some of his little body’s cells inhabit my body. I can’t explain how the bond went so deep, but we shared a lot together in those short months... Scientists tell us moms that maybe the feeling of our children being a sort of inseparable part of us isn’t that far from reality:

“In pregnancy, women are shape-shifters, their bellies waxing like the moon. After delivery, they hold another kind of magic: microchimerism, a condition in which women harbor cells that originated in their children even decades after birth...These fetal cells migrate all over a mother’s body, becoming part of the heart, the brain, and blood—and fascinating scientist and artists alike.” (Source: The Atlantic. Also see this.)

The wonder of those words hasn't left me since I first read them. Strung as I am between my birth and eternity, there are things I will always wonder over. How could cells from my baby continue to live on within me? How can my children claim such a big part in my heart? “How can someone so small hold my heart so tightly?”

The tiny life of Seth Malakai Rudolph inhabited my body, a creation only perhaps a dozen people got to see, yet I received that God-given-glory deeply. 

The delicate pompoms have now surrendered their gold into the hands of the quiet evening, and I too choose to release myself to my Creator. My questions, my ache, my wondering heart. To release my son, yet again. I am awed at the beauty of my God’s imagination. His interesting ways. His unique gifts. I delight to have had the chance to be mother to that little person. By God’s strength through grace I am free to receive and release.