Rainbow Moment

 “Okay, everybody!” I call. “Time for books!Everybody onMommy and Daddy’s bed!”

The evening draws long shadows outside the window, but we don’t notice. We pile on the rumpled sheets, stack the pillows against the wall so I have a comfortable resting place for my back and expanding belly. Sixty pounds of lanky, red-pajama-clad boy snuggle up against my left side. My little girl wants nothing to do with me. She won’t let me have the book, either. “Julianna, give me the book,” I say. She grunts her protest, but I wrap my arm around bare waist and draw her back against my right side. To my surprise, she molds herself against my body and sits still.

As I start reading, Nicholas barrels in. He wants Julianna’s spot, and won’t accept the uncomfortable lap as a substitute. When I tell him no, he retreats to the end of the bed to look at his books. He punctuates the narrative with “Weh!” (red) and “Ti-ty!” (chicky) and “Hah-ee!” (horsie).

Three pages in, the kicking begins. It’s strong tonight, harbingers of the movements that soon will express the baby’s longing to be free…and my desperate desire to oblige.  Too it always stops when someone tries to feel. But after another page and a half I begin to think Baby may be in an obliging mood tonight. “Did my stomach just jump?” I ask.

Alex’s eyes light up. He rearranges his body, places a hand in the wrong place on my belly. I gently shift it into position, and the baby rewards us with a strong kick. He grins, then warbles the high-pitched laugh you only get when you lose control of the fear of looking foolish.

Another page. Another kick. Another giggle.  “That was a big one,” Alex says.

And suddenly, something whispers: Remember this moment. Hold on to it. The shutter clicks, freezing the moment, burning the feel of it in my brain: the softness of my children’s bodies pressed against mine, one clad in red Batman pajamas, the other bearing the marks of her wholehearted effort, via CrayolaMarker whileMommy was teaching a voice lesson, to join the Blue Man Group…toddler legs, chubby and chewable, kicking at the end of the bed, baby fat spider-webbed with red and silver from the scrapbooking pens I unwisely left out this morning.

There are perfect moments in life— transcendent moments. You can’t predict, plan, or will them into being. They always catch you by surprise, at the unlikeliest intervals. We always want to capture them “on film,” so we can revisit them for decades to come. I think about those whose religion bars their image being captured, who view a photograph as an idol. As much as I love a well-taken photograph, as much as I adore scrapbooking, I must admit a picture can’t do justice to these moments. They never look as good as they feel. The externals are always too messy: little ones clad only in diapers, a bed that hasn’t been made in a week, a mommy sporting the most hideous nightgown ever conceived because it’s the only thing that fits by mid-pregnancy. Details inappropriate for projecting on the silver screen of your life.

No, what makes the moment magical is the feel of it. It catches on the memory like a glimmer of light splintered into dazzling color and flung into the great beyond, and a sliver of it pierces your mind, exposes a part that you never access in ordinary life…the part that lets you glimpse the world beyond. And I think, if this is what the mystics experienced, it’s no wonder it changed everything.