I don’t know why I thought of this today. Maybe because as I walked past my son’s room this morning it hit me, ping (really, I guess the word is pang), how empty his room will be when he leaves for college. Standing there, with my hand on the door, I had a sudden flashback. How when he was very little I made up a song to get him to sleep. It’s a little embarrassing but among the lines were these:
“…know this is true, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I’m going to love you your whole life through. Sometimes you’ll say I love you too much, sometimes you’ll say I don’t love you enough. But no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I’m going to love you your whole life through…”
(Full disclosure here: part of the reason I wrote my own lullabies for my kids was because I really can’t sing. Really. So, I figured, if a song and the tune are mine, I never have to worry whether I’m singing it right or how off key I might be…)
Sometimes when my son (or a few years later, his little sister) was tired, or cranky, or had a scraped knee, he’d give me one of those leg squeezes that toddlers give you when you’re holding them on your hip and they want you to move in a certain direction. And he’d point and say, “rocking chair!” I was happy to rock in “rocking chair” because sometimes I got tired and cranky too. And I’d sing our own personal Top 10 hit lullaby, “Know This is True.” It was a kind of mom and babe meditation.
But, back to my story. My son didn’t chat a lot when he was a young toddler, though he had plenty of words. He was just… circumspect. When he started really talking he spoke in thinking-out-loud sentences. I remember once, we were in “rocking chair” and near where we then lived workmen were bulldozing a small forest for a new neighborhood. And my son put his hand on my lips and said, quietly, “Mommy I don’t like the sound the trees make when they hit the ground.”
He always seemed to be listening to the world around him, as if reading a book that no one else could see. One day we were in “rocking chair” and I was singing my made up song, “...know this is true…” and he put his fingers on my lips.
“Mommy, how come it’s ‘NO this is true?’ Is it YES true you’re going to love me, or NO true?”
I stopped rocking. It took me a minute to understand what he was thinking in his little toddler brain. And then I got it. He didn’t understand that I was saying the word “know” instead of the word “No.” And he wanted a little clarification. No true, or yes true?
I brought his face up to mine. “YES true,” I remember saying. “YES true, I’m going to love you. YES true, your whole life through.”
I stood there this morning with my hand on the door of my 18-year-old son’s room, as that memory went through me in a hold-your-breath-and-you’re-back-there-again-in-the- rocking-chair whoosh. I think it came back to me, really, because of what I’ve been blogging about this week. Bless, bless, bless. Gratitude.
YES true. That’s how we love the people we love. YES true, your whole life through. How many people can you bless, bless, bless today (in the grocery store, on the beltway) and say YES true to in your own living room?
