You won't find this recorded in your birthday book your fourth year, though it was the biggest thing that happened to you. It was the week of Thanksgiving, ten days before your fifth birthday, that you finally said you were ready to tell us what was wrong. After a day of explosive rage. After you burst into tears in the hallway following yet another time out and wailed, "I feel sad!", first leaning into my bewildered embrace and then yanking away. After you kept demanding water, saying your tummy hurt, that you were so thirsty, punching whoever was within range of your little fist, unable to keep still. We were so proud that you found the courage to speak.
He was a daredevil nine-year-old who had been living with us for two and a half months. His nerf gun and football skills and cool kid mannerisms made your eyes shine. You couldn't wait for him to return home from school in the afternoon to play racecar games on his computer for you, or include you in a wild neighborhood game of catch, tag, or hide 'n seek.
Your dad and I had begun to notice how your energy would increasingly surge into combativeness when he was around, how you veered between adoration and hostility in his presence. We supposed you were merely adopting his kinesics, imitating your turbulent hero. Hindsight is heartbreaking.
The night we moved your abuser and his family out of our attic and into a hotel, you and your dad and little brother went upstairs to play good guys versus bad guys. You led the charge into their quarters, calling, "The most bad guys live in here!"
Aunt Emily tried some play therapy with you. She shared with us that in your pretend world your dad and I are superheroes who always know when something bad is happening. This was supposed to console us, and it did a little, but it also underscored my failure to realize that, in the small but numerous attention gaps that punctuated our home life, something very bad was happening to you. Even your superhero dad, who does 150 pushups five days a week, did not know you needed rescuing.
Thanksgiving was the following day. Your Poppy and aunt with five of your cousins drove to our afflicted area of Minneapolis to visit. After dinner we decided on a trip to the nearest park. It was bitter cold. Two underdressed kids, snickering unhappily, were stuffing a third child--mute and stiff--into a trashcan when we arrived. My niece told me she found vomit in the grass at the top of the hill. "I didn't touch it," she added. You fell hard from the top of the play equipment onto your back on the woodchips, sealing the end of a miserable outing. "Of course it had to be him, " your Dad shook his head, carrying you in his strong arms to the van.
But the fact is, my dear, you were better equipped to handle this than almost any child I could have picked at random in our neighborhood. Better equipped than your abuser, who almost certainly was himself abused at a similarly tender age. Better equipped than the many other children within his circles, boys like him with absent or imprisoned fathers and working moms who barely manage to keep their children housed and fed. In a neighborhood of diseased family animals, ours was sleek and healthy, able to sustain this wound.
It was the beginning of Advent. For the first time I experienced how jarring and even offensive the lamppost wreathes and joymongering billboards could feel to a heart still venom-shocked by an evil thing.
We marked your birthday with family members who understood that you were struggling with incoherent rage, who looked you kindly in the eye and played card games with you and made you feel seen and loved. You began to fall asleep every night wearing headphones, your birthday Walkman filling your mind with Jesus songs.
We hung Christmas lights, set up the Jesse Tree with its felt ornaments. On the fourth day of Advent I found myself holding up the ram ornament and retelling to you and your siblings the story of Abraham's call to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah. My memory flashed back to the moment in Aldi several months before when I was bagging my groceries and asking God if I should invite this homeless family into my home. A shout rang out behind me, raising the hair on my forearms : "DO NOT neglect to show hospitality to the strangers!" I thought it was the voice of God directly answering my question, His mouthpiece a preaching weekday shopper with dreads and sunglasses.
As I cast my mind back on that moment, my heart twisted with Abraham's bewilderment, for had not following that Voice meant laying our beloved firstborn son on the altar of our obedience? And yet in my bafflement I kept holding onto the soft symbol, telling the rest of the supernatural story. And there was your childish face, sticky with jam, sleep in your eyes, listening to how God so loved the world.
I have been reciting Psalm 103 constantly in my heart since you told us about it. At first, sick with doubt and anger, muttering the words inwardly as one desperate for warmth would rub two dry sticks together. And here is the miracle, my love: those dead words have sparked to life. They have kindled this burden of sorrow on the altar of my heart. The fire is overwhelming the darkness of doubt and bathing in warmth the bone-ache of anguish. It sends praise incense wafting heavenward.
He heals all your diseases. Your rages are less frequent, happy moments are multiplying. You are reclaiming calm. When your helper inquires during a therapy session if you ever feel angry or sad, you say, beaming and flapping your hands in the air, "Right now I feel really happy." Oh, He renews my youth like the eagle's.
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannnot heal.
Merry Christmas, my firstborn son, the son that I love.
Happy New Year.
