A love beyond all telling
This will eventually become a story. In fact, I’ve just hit upon a title: “A love beyond all telling.” The priest said it during Mass and I was moved by it. What kind of a love would be beyond all telling?
The love of a man and woman is told a hundred and one ways, thus far. The permutations of what could possibly happen and not happen chronicled in millions and millions and millions of words. There is always conflict between people who are doing their best to be with each other. A dragon or evil stepmother are always convenient for the telling, and I must say these obstacles are much easier to solve. Kill the dragon with goodness! Kill the stepmother with kindness! Alas, it is not so easy in the real world. The best conflicts are self-inflicted. There is much in us innately that prevents us from loving as well as we could: pride, vanity, selfishness, bad grooming. And yet that love, that kind of love, with all of its vicissitudes, is still a love that can be told.
What, then, could this story be? Perhaps it is the love between a parent and a child, I surmise in my imagination. What could be more un-tell-able, or even un-chart-able (see, even at this point, I must make up words!), than the landscape of this love? Children come in various ways ideally desired, but not always. They come to couples in love, but children have no way of knowing that, so they can come in lust too. They can come planned (RH Bill, is that you?), or they can come as surprises. They can come no matter where their parents-to-be are in their own personal landscapes. You’re not yet ready?
Well, sorry. Here I come!
A child must always come through its mother and in that design lies a deep, deep mystery. Being “with child” changes a woman in ways that are beyond telling too. Sometimes I think the body must become heavy because it is training for the metaphysical heaviness of it all. It takes a long time to make a child perhaps the same amount of time to make a parent. Life is premised on the survival of that living thing. The body will sacrifice the mother to ensure that the child is at its best. It is such a special undertaking that the body is equipped to generate a brand new organ the placenta.
That design bonds mothers and children in physical ways but those of us who are both mother and daughter know that the navel is but a beginning point of connection. What is much harder is the time when the navel is disconnected. We are lulled into the belief that connection is instantaneous, natural, and yet, not always. Connection is an effort, a loving effort and perhaps the navel’s first painful lesson is how we need someone to be born; but can only rely on ourselves to live.
How do fathers connect without the benefit of bone on bone? In this story he learns to love by loving the woman who bears the child, at first. There will be wonderment at how strange it is to be able to sire a whole new being. He will love her for giving him that gift, that opportunity.
He will meet his creation in the strangest ways, always filtered by skin heartbeat, ultrasound, shapes of fingers, hands and feet, impressions on an enlarged tummy. He will speak to the growing infant through skin, too; hoping that the child’s cavernous home will amplify his voice and by that his joy be known. What does a father say at first? Gibberish, I am certain. How wonderful that we presume this is communication, communion, connection. We do not doubt that it is love.
The love between mother and child is epic but in this story in my head it is the father and child who enjoy the love that is beyond all telling. What great narratives do we have to help us navigate this plot? The Bible is filled with conflicted fathers and sons Abraham and Isaiah, Joseph’s brothers who were not as favored by their father, even David and his stepfather, Saul. Fathers are crazy in love, too. There is God and Christ of course, but too much has been told of them already.
In this story of mine, a father is in a doctor’s room and he is being told that his son is sick. He will be sick of something un-solvable and its name will be autism. His first reaction will be surprise at how calm he is. After all, what does that word mean? It is only a word and he knows his son is not a word. He will loll the word around his mouth and will decide (because he has a writer for a wife and has learned to love words) that he will call it “awe-tism” instead. He will decide to always be in awe of his son.
The doctors will give a safe but scary prognosis. He will not be a man but he will have a man’s body. He will not be able to go to regular school. He will be saddled with therapy the rest of his life. At some point, medications will have to be given to aid his moods, its ebbs and flows. The father will wander and think of days by the sea as the doctor drones. He thinks again to himself: “I will bring my son to the mountains, to the ocean, to know far more useless things such as the names of trees and the sounds of life.” He will be able to say “bird” and “song” his simplest requirements. He will be smiling and the doctor will think he is taking it well.
So far, so good, the father thinks, until he realizes that his son will never know the love of a woman, or the love of his own child and he will wish, but briefly, that it was he instead who had been afflicted by the fates. Something will rise from his tummy, he will think it is bile from fear, but it is not bitter. It will struggle to reach his palate and nothing the doctor can say will stop its ascent into his mouth. It will come out as breath and he will call the breath “hope.”
He had no idea that he could love this hugely, this massively enter this part of the universe where love was beyond all telling.
