Son of My Right Hand

"Hello!" he answered the phone with enthusiasm as is his way when his children call.

"Hi, Dad! Happy Birthday!" I responded, eager to describe the birthday gift I was about to give him for this, the 54th anniversary of his birth.

"Dad, I will never be able to give a more fantastic gift than the one I'm giving you today. I just had the baby! You have a new grandson! His name is Benjamin." The words exited quickly, bursting from my excitement.

"Well, that's just great!" Normally full of words, today he was at a loss. He choked up. I choked up.

A very precious moment. My first baby, my first son, was born on my dad's birthday.

Tom and I were in our mid-twenties when we married. We were ready to get on with this family thing, as we'd wandered around in our singleness until it had become a tremendous bore. Years spent being lonely in the midst of dozens of loved ones. We craved the adventure of our own unit, our own home, our own kingdom. We wanted each other and longed for little princes and princesses to fill our castle.
Ben wasted no time in entering the scene. Created in love, born to love, the embodiment of love, no baby was ever adored more. His birth awakened the maternal instincts in me immediately. Immediately! He was early, three weeks so. Purple and requiring great doses of oxygen he was placed into an isolet to aid his breathing.

Hours after his welcomed joining of the bright-light, noisy, outside-the-womb world a brusque nurse stepped harshly into my sterile hospital room and announced to me that it was uncertain whether he would live through the night.

"Oh, he's going to be fine," I assured her nonchalantly, sighing in new-mommy contentment. She looked as if she might call the psych ward as she glared and vigorously shook her head at me. I KNEW Ben was meant for great things. My heart knew he was safe.

And he was.

Stupid nurse.

With joy we brought our little prince home, placed him in the cozy bassinet which had been prepared weeks earlier for his arrival. He slept. I stroked his fuzzy head, placed my hand on his narrow chest to feel the lift and settling of his tiny lungs, and I cried. I cried and cried and cried. Love, in the form of salty tears.
Tom stood next to me and cried, too. Adopted at birth, Tom had never known any of his natural family at this point in his life. Ben was the very first, his arrival having lucidly, artfully played the deepest, most primal heartstring in his awestruck father's soul. A moment on holy ground, the silence that blared out LOVE, our family had begun with this quietly sleeping infant upon whose form our eyes remained fixed.

God was gracious to give us Ben as a first child, to allow us to enter the waters of parenthood gently, slowly, easily, without the icy shock of a 'difficult baby.' He slept well, ate well, and grew well.

Ben has a string of achievements and talents which I could list here, but there is something that touches my tender-motherliness much more than his outstanding abilities. His heart, his sensitive, kind heart, full of awareness and compassion. His is the heart that is learning, the heart believing in itself, the heart listening when confronted, the heart instantly responding when there is sadness or need in others. The adventurous heart, the daring heart, the creative heart, which, though full of large ideas and goals, keeps room for the seemingly small, the still, the quiet, the whispers of life that produce wisdom.

Happy Birthday, Ben! You remain the Son of My Right Hand, the joy of my joy, my first encounter with the powerful emotions and mother mountain-lion protective instincts that are motherhood.

Thanks for who you are!

I love you.