how to assemble parts of a life when beginnings end & kids grow up

He unwinds the last screw and the crib side panel comes down along with the whole backside of my heart.

He disassembles his history, all of ours. Lays the crib sideboard up against the sunny yellow of the bedroom wall. I didn't know if the walls of the house would stand when he took down the last side rail.









This was his crib. The one Farmer Husband slept in when his mitt hands were but fisted delicate fingers, the one that carried all nine of his mother's babies through the night dreams, from her firstborn, Eric in 1956 when she was a Dutch immigrant and spoke English in this halting, thick accent, until her last, the ninth, Farmer, in 1973. Six sons and three daughters in that one crib, and when she last tucked Farmer babe under the blankets, her first born Eric already lay quiet in the country cemetery down the road. He had never seen that half ton truck coming down the road at sunset when he pulled out from their gravel road onto the highway, on his way to youth group.

I'm twenty-one and we live in the basement apartment of my parent's farmhouse, Farmer feeding my Dad's hogs, driving his tractors over the dirt, when those steady hands assemble that same crib again. We've been married seven fragile months. The crib had had a few quiet years, a napping place for grandchildren, Farmer's nieces and nephews, on Sunday afternoon visits. Now my sweaters bulge round with the promise.

I close our bedroom door and cry fear. He works the screwdriver. Carefully retrofits the crib to meet safety standards. I know I don't meet any of the standards. I'm too young, too bruised, too scared to bear down and expel a human being who'd open black eyes wide and look into mine and need me to pour out the milk, the love, the life until the end. I don't know how I'd do that. Farmer Husband never stops smiling, assembling that crib. He remembers the Grace always sufficient, the standard already met with the Nails, the plans to give you a future and a hope.









I am wrong. There's a Shepherd that gently leads those with young and when the black eyes opens and find mine, I pour out love, milky and teary, and no one had told me that heart would surge and merge like this but it is something that you can only know in the feeling, the pink flesh warm against yours.

I come home and lay our firstborn son in the same crib. We cry happiness.

Fifteen years, a crib holds up our roof. There were the four crib-less months we live with four children under six in a pop-up trailer while Farmer swings a hammer, pounding us up a house. Rolly-polly Levi snuggles between us each night, the wind batting the tent canvas. Come late summer, I lay the crib out in sunshine and I paint the spindles, drag the brush over the 1950's bunny rabbit smiling rosy. In a brand new house still smelling of fresh paint, we carry in the crib and begin again.

In ten years,we lay six swaddled ones of our own on that mattress. His mother had held each of them before she was laid to rest beside Eric in that country cemetery beside the sheep pasture. There is a Shepherd Who leads us Home.













More than a half century, the crib stands. And now the season ends? My season ends? Will I no longer promise-swell, no longer night rock, no longer stroke the heaven soft skin? Are all my babes forever behind me, and now I would wrinkle and wither and there are no more beginnings? No more Winnie-the-Pooh singing up the side of the crib, swinging under that balloon, no more leaning over the railing to watch the heavy slumber breathing, fresh fragrance rising and falling.

Are all our beginnings but memories now, yellowing photos in albums?

I wipe the eyes with the backside of my hand. He lays down the screwdriver. I cry fear, now for the empty and gone crib.

"It'll only be up in the attic, so if...." He lays his hand on my shoulder and I am steadied and I nod brave.

His baby cup and my baby cup, same pattern, hang on the wall over where the crib once stood, us born in the same hospital, same year, living five miles apart on the same road. I reach up and trace the rabbit pattern and the years that grew us up away from our mamas. White baby shoes that both our daughters wore hang beside our cups, the footprints of our firstborn son, smudged and framed there in black ink. These remain, ebenezers of the beginnings.

He carries out the last of the panels and our youngest, a mopsy towheaded four years old, follows him out, carrying the railing too, and I am left in the empty room. I feel disassembled. But I do witness it.

The walls stand.

For He has made the life of a mother to be the forever crib, shaped the parent heart to be the host for the child soul. It's the presence of the parent that becomes a child's place of safety and they can always lay down in our love.

The season of soul hospitality never ends.



Youngest Child comes bounding back into the room singing Winnie-the-Pooh, Winnie-the-Pooh, and I scoop her up and today we begin again and she laughs.

She rests in my arms.





Photos: the disassembling pf the half-century crib
Share your thoughts?
If you would like Holy Experience posts quietly tucked into your reader or your inbox for free...