What Happened
My son was just eighteen and his girlfriend sixteen when they came to us and announced their pregnancy. They lived with us for the first year of our grandson‘s life, and then with family help and support, coped on their own. With the birth of their second son, things, already tenuous, started to deteriorate. The burdens of immaturity, lack of money, and unfulfilled dreams took their toll. Anger, resentment, and hopelessness seethed between them. My son turned to drugs and alcohol; his girlfriend to partying and drinking. My grandsons were three and seven months when they came to live with us fulltime.
How I Coped
At times during these past three years, I have felt like I was being swept away in the rapids, hoping not to be smashed into the rocks. It doesn't seem possible for such fear and such extraordinary blessedness to co-exist in my heart at the same time. I have been filled with uncertainty. I have battled guilt and shame. I have cried. I have laughed. I have panicked. I have felt so much love it has squeezed my entire body like a sponge.
I cut my working hours as a nurse at our local hospital to two days a week. These two days were at times the saving of my sanity. Sometimes I felt like a robot set to continuous play; hovering, leaping, singing on cue, filling sippy cups and dispensing cheerios, building castles out of blocks, changing diapers, reading stories, trying to do whatever they needed me to do to keep them whole, to keep them nourished, inside and outside. But, I have been witness to the sound and sight of souls, growing. Theirs and mine.
It has been a raw, delicate endeavour complicated by worry about their parents. As the boys grew with us, they brought with them the often invisible connection to the human beings who created them. Sometimes their parents have rushed in like a gypsy wind, bearing gifts and hugs. At other times they have born only grievances and recriminations. I can’t fully know my son and his ex-girlfriend’s burdens, or the sadness they bear. I can only know my own and that of my husband, my grandsons’ dearly loved Papa, who has responded with magnificence. I know each of us have experienced fragility and tremendous pain. I have coped by daily trying to be doggedly open to beauty, to keep seeing and tasting and breathing in gorgeousness whenever it graces me.
During this past year, with much counseling and hard work, my son and his ex-girlfriend have turned their lives around. Five months ago, my grandsons returned to live with their mother, spending weekdays with her and weekends with their father. We have them every other Saturday for the day and night, and see them frequently in between, too.
Each of us, my husband and I, our son and his ex-girlfriend, and our grandsons themselves, holds an accumulation of these past years, the tangy explosion of our reconfigured family creating itself, communicating its essential belonging. Three years of milestones passed. Some with more grace than others, but passed nonetheless. I believe I have gained a greater compassion for the people I encounter each day.
Lessons Learned
- I have discovered reserves of strength and humour and bravery that I didn’t know I possessed. I have become more fully aware of the infinite preciousness of children, and of how vulnerable they are, and how ultimately it is our job to send them away whole.
- Denial and courage are a complicated business, and there are many shades of each. Sometimes, courage takes the form of simply admitting that you’re afraid. In the end, perhaps the bravest thing we can do is simply to go on however we can, finding grace in mercy. How true it is that so often we grow ourselves in the dark.
Hardest Part
My grandsons’ return to the care of their parents was done gradually, but I feel a powerful grief which still lingers. I miss them. I feel myself folding endurance , like a blanket, around love.
Most Rewarding Part
Beautiful Darian and Mattias; giggles and splashes in the bathtub, sticky kisses, the scent of sweaty little necks, countless I love yous; a transfigured mosaic that gathers us into its blessedness.
