A Peek at the Landscape

It was that sound that put me on alert: the pushed, monotone vocalization of a person with limited verbal skills. I used to tense up with discomfort at those sounds. Now, I tense up for a different reason: I know that these encounters offer me a glimpse of my future, and the knowledge makes my heart pound. Still, I don’t want to stare, so it took until about the Gloria before I saw him—nine or ten years old, directly across the aisle, sitting beside his father playing with a floppy little stuffed dog.

It was a book signing day, a day destined to provide great distraction—and yet the presence of that boy and his father quieted my mind, and without children to demand my attention, stillness settled deep within my soul. And then, midway through the homily, I glanced over again. They sat face to face, the boy on his dad’s lap, hands on his lean cheeks, and they were nuzzling noses.

I started crying. These moments of beauty, these stolen glimpses, mean something so much more to me than they once did. In the middle of infertility, the tears would have been full of a victim’s grief, of frustrated dreams and an empty, raw wasteland of pain. In the first months of Julianna’s life, my tears were filled with fear, with a terror of the crags and precipices of the mountain looming ahead, crowded with monsters

Bu now…now, they are tears of joy, an acknowledgment that the landscape of my life, far from the wasteland or insurmountable peak I once feared, is lush and fertile, brimming over with all that is good and beautiful and holy.

And for that, this Thanksgiving week, I am profoundly grateful.