On the way to her tonsillectomy, we laugh, her and I, talk of what flavor of ice cream she’d most like afterwards, when it’s all finished and she’s home, what books I might read aloud to her, and when it’d be best to pull up the old quilts and watch the screen version of Anne of Green Gables.
I tell her that with us living in a house with green clapboard siding, under two gothic gables, that makes me too an Anne of Green Gables and I wink and she laughs --crazy thought, me, her mother, too old.
Afterwards, when she is wheeled out of post-op and into hospital ward, the same one where I filled out pre-admit papers for her birth ten long years ago, she stirs, long and willowy now. She winces, slowly licks raspberry popsicle and I read her Story Girl, stroke her hair, hold the bed pan as she greens.
I hold her arm on the way to the parking lot and she leans. I leave a bell by her bedside that first night, by the bouquet of flowers, stroke her arm and tell her to ring for me if she needs me. And then, come the black, I spoon behind and cradle all the length of her when she cries soundlessly through every searing swallow. When we curl up to watch Anne of Green Gables and Matthew convinces Anne to stay, she can’t talk but leans hard against my shoulder, smiles and I squeeze her hand. Days, we touch like this.
Strange for her and I who had fallen into this space of her tall and me distant and we never rocked anymore, like when she was fresh and the nights flamed divine, her and I curled.
Some days the space between stretches, an elastic, and I wonder how to get then and her back. Hard shells wrap around normal time.
"Isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time," offers Allan Bloom.
Yet after a week of ice cream and read alouds under old patchwork, parent and child, old, we bond, skin to skin, and I grow young and tender. I begin to feel it, a feeling I had thought forever gone.
I had thought when the honeymoon ended, the babymoons faded, the hope of that vulnerability and sacred time was gone: how a heart could split, kindle, brush up against God.
“Mama? You rub my back?” She rasps in the dark and I find her.
The carapace snaps and I crack open.
And this is what I rub up against: that it’s not actually the babe or first love that enlivens the deadened. It’s this, this human act of touching. I touch this girl of mine, child gone too long, and I trace it down: I am most alive when touching another one who is alive.
Our skins touch, currents shooting through, and the black void where a heart beats, the cavity of aloneness, is bridged, arched by skin. And on the underside of me, I feel along and discover that hallowed time, that time of soul transparency, when the moments flow sacred and your heart no longer pounds but whispers, is always possible. Because touch is always possible. It’s that inversion that happens when you fall in love, when you hold your babe: Touch is what peels life back to the heart’s soft skin. Too long I’ve been gone.
Why does time pry us apart?
It must and it mustn’t.
Without touching family, those who live and move and have their being around me, I lessen, shrivel, wither.
"By ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity,” writes Wendell Berry. “[B]y ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity."
When we don’t touch, that is what we are: by ourselves. When we don’t touch, we self-amputate. We are meant to be hinged to the Body. Embracing -- parent and child, brother and sister, husband and wife --- it softens the hard muscles of a hammering, beating heart.
Touch the pulse of a home by how much they touch. I wince… and reach out.
She rolls my way and I caress her cheek and her hoarse whisper falls softly.
“Thanks, Mama. Felt good.”
Felt right, Child, felt right.
Us under gables, we are kindred, and so we hold on.
Lord God, how much does our family touch? Touched by Christ, may I touch.
Related: The Importance of Touch
Photos: Hope and Shalom, kindred spirits, walking the field in front of the house
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