My last baby turns two years old today. 

This kid is something else.  It’s not that he’s my favorite child – no mother has favorites – but he is somehow different from my other children, I think because I have been aware of his preciousness from before he was even conceived.

Of course, moms are always aware of the preciousness of their children.  That first moment when you meet your baby and realize that here is all your world and nothing else matters – until you have a second, perhaps.  I remember that feeling with Fred.  And when Beatrice came along, it was even more powerful because I had lost her would-be sibling in a miscarriage about a year before her birth.  So I was even more aware of the miracle that is a healthy pregnancy, a baby born, full term, alive and well. 

But Toby… Toby almost didn’t exist.  Ben and I both thought we were done with babies after Beatrice’s birth.  But then my father died.  And I swear that the moment he took his last breath was the moment that I began longing for Toby.  There was something about all that love I had for my father, all the love he had for me, still present, still living between us even as his body grew cold in the bed, that had to be put somewhere.

And there was so much grief, too.  So much grief.  My miscarriage and my father’s death were intimately connected in my heart and mind and soul and I could feel the lack of my third living baby creeping up to settle down alongside those two losses, too, and it felt unbearable to me.  How would I go on, burdened with so much emptiness?

But Ben wasn’t burdened as I was and, had it not been for a very good couples’ counselor and some practical advice from a wise friend, Toby would never have existed and I would have learned to carry the weight of his lack. 

As it was, though, Ben and I engaged in a true labor of love.  Looking back on it now, making the decision together to try for a third child was how I imagine Jacob’s tussle with the Almighty on the riverbank happened.  (I’ll leave you, dear reader, to decide which of us gets the role of Jacob and which gets to be God!)  Ben and I wrestled with each other – with our own and the other’s emotions and psyches and longings and fears – testing our willingness to sacrifice for the other, our capacity for compromise, our mutual love.  To date, it has been the most difficult period in our marriage to each other – and the time about which I am most proud, and most grateful to him for.  Not because I “won,” so to speak (though, given the little toddling outcome, I’m certainly glad I won!)  But because we learned how to struggle with each other.  And though we may have both come out limping a wee bit, we are more sure than ever before of our love for each other, of the solidity and reality of our partnership.  We know, beyond any doubt, that we can trust each other because, through it all, neither of us ever let the other person fall. 

And it’s these two things together – my grief over my father’s death and the tenacity of my marriage – that makes me recognize Toby’s preciousness.  For what else are these things but the signs of love?  And not just romantic love, not just romanticized love, but the all-powerful, benevolent beast of a thing that moves mountains and rolls away stones. 

And Toby is the product of that kind of love.  From before he was conceived, that love made his existence possible, dreamt him up and made him real.  And late late at night on the 27^th of June, I gave birth to that love incarnated. 

And now, two years later, I look at him and marvel.  I watch him play and throw and breathe.  I hear him laugh and talk to his siblings.  I smell his still-baby smell, feel his face snuggle against my neck, taste his kisses after a pancake-and-egg breakfast.  And I think, this is my dad’s last gift to me.  This is my husband’s love for me.  And my joy is complete. 

Happy birthday, Toby Joe.  May the whole world know the kind of hope and joy, God’s peace and love that you have brought to me.