Distant cousins, same hearts

     I don't know my distant-cousin Dawnee. We've never met. She's a little older than I am, because she has kids in their 30's. Her pop is my grandpa's cousin, and much like him, though at about 25 years younger he's of the same life-era as my mother. Gets a a little convoluted, I know. Still, we are family. We've never met, and yet she and her husband and their whole family have been on my heart lately. 

    See, Dawnee's daughter Anna just recently passed away, in her early thirties. The whole family turned out for Anna Time, remembering and grieving together. Sometimes I think she would just rather crawl under the bed and stay there. I know how she feels, to a degree. 

     I haven't lost any of my kids, although Randall's skirmishes with the Nefarious Blood Disorder have been frightening, and still are. Today I though of Dawnee missing her daughter...

...and I started sobbing on the freeway. Big racking sobs. 

   We are the mommas! We want to be there for our children, to help them through, to give them what they need. We give up our figures, our nights, our weekends, our vehicles,to help them grow and flourish. Sometimes it's a band-aid, sometimes a cookie, sometimes a cheer from the sidelines, sometimes a deposit in a bank account. We are their backup from the time they emerge in the bright world blinking and squalling baby protests at being unceremoniously disturbed to the time they move into a dorm room or walk down the aisle and beyond. They are part of us. We are part of  them, even if they are of different gender and live their own lives. Mothers in tune with their kids understand them, respect them, find ways to support them without being intrusive or distant.

    Daddies are backup, but also coaches as well. They pick them up when they fall off the bike without training wheels, teach them to drive, pour a perfect beer, conduct business with dignity and integrity, and face failure with a 'better luck next time' resolve.' Not so mushy but just as vital. Some of us mommas have to be the coach, too, when the dad chooses to step aside, or when he has to be away as a soldier or in support of soldiers, but we never really pass muster. 

     I looked down at Randall's closed eyes yesterday and told the nurse, who remarked on his long lashes, that when he was a baby his eyes were the same size, big huge brown eyes -- and his lashes went down his cheeks like a doll when he slept.   

     We mommas never forget those baby faces, that baby grin, and we see traces of those in our adult children when they tip their heads a certain way, or make a familiar gesture that we've seen since toddlerhood. We know them better than anyone in the world.

    I'm guessing my cousin Dawnee wishes she could have fixed Anna. Guessing that she wishes she could go back about six months, or a year, or five, and reroute the days and nights of weeks that have led her to this place where she aches beyond feeling. We are the providers of meals and playtime and fresh laundry and fixers of shoelaces and toys and broken junior-high hearts and baseball gloves and prom dress hems and all the other crises that come about as our kids grow up. We ask God to fix our sick kids so we don't have to give them up, but rather keep them near and dear to us. 

     I don't know Dawnee. I don't know her faith or how she faces things or how she is coping. I do know she's hurting, and wishes she could make it better, somehow, and I'm guessing that even if she hears and knows and believes her baby girl is with Jesus in a world without pain, she wishes she could have seen her at her wedding, held her grandbabies, grown older with her daughter. 

   Dawnee, I feel your pain. I know your shared faith in a loving God who gave you your daughter and then took her Home to wait for you. And I know that your mother-heart has a crack in it that will heal over, but not ever feel the same.

   We are the mommas. Not mothers, who simply raise children and send them on their way, although that is part of us as well. We are the mommas.