“To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.  Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.”

— Maya Angelou

Heather often asks our son if he wants infinite kisses.  On just a couple of occasions, he has said yes.

More times, he grins and says, “No thank you,” while already bracing for the barrage.  Jakey gets his contradictorily brief dose of infinite kisses and giggles madly the entire time they fall on his neck and collarbone and face.

People have said she is a natural parent.  She would not agree.   That’s part of what makes it true.   I have no use for a label like natural and instead would observe the following:

To love someone this much takes time.

It grows and changes likes rings expanding a young tree’s girth.  The tree develops and just in this way love thickens and proliferates.  The change is not always linear and to imply there are not dips or doubts is foolish.  Challenges are plenty.

The journalist Ron Suskind spoke at the Lewis & Clark commencement ceremony yesterday.  After complimenting those families with the sense to sit in the shade, he quoted Shakespeare from As You Like It:

“Sweet are the uses of adversity.”

In the play, Duke Senior adopted this stance involuntarily once he found himself thrust into a rough existence in the Forest of Arden.  This is a little like parenting.  Whether you chose it or it chose you, you are best served when you revel in the benefits of adversity.

And oh there is adversity.

Yesterday morning Heather was scrolling through old photos on a since-retired smartphone.  She showed me one from April 2013.  Jakey was about a month old and screaming.  His mouth was a vast O taking up much of his face like The Scream by the painter Edvard Munch.  She said she was spinning in a circle trying to calm him as she took the shot and that’s why the background was blurry.  Sometimes we would take a picture during those early fits—plenty of opportunities the first two months, pretty much any time he was awake.  It’s hard to say if the pictures were for posterity or a real-time reminder that, though it was excruciating, we were making it.  All three of us were getting through it together.

His gaping O-Face of terror is in the past.  Merely a recorded image of Jakey-that-was and our lives during that loud, exhausting, transformative April.

The best parts of Heather’s parenting are tough to label. The exchanged look between mother and son, between wife and husband. The true and heart-wrenching pain she feels when she and Jakey are apart.  Not guilt the way some moms describe feeling like they ought to be with their kids when they are doing something else.

Instead she feels sad for herself.  She has told people, “I just enjoy being with him so much.  I want to hang out with him all the time.”

In spite of this, no one has accused my wife of coming across overly sentimental.  That’s really more my department.  For example, I will regularly lament how fast Jakey is developing and growing up.  She will shrug and say, “It’s better than the alternative.”

Touché.

And of course it’s not all good—sometimes it is downright bad, a major strain for all involved.  There are moments when we both long for naptime or even a few minutes of quiet on the toilet.  Then we take a deep breath and realize it’s okay to laugh at the ridiculousness.

Or…

You can tag out.  We play parenting like a team sport.  Half the time the partner tagging in doesn’t even need to be told.  You sense it in body language or hear it in their voice.

“What’s that in your mouth?  Spit that out…  Open your mouth.”

She will go right in there, too.  It reminds me of the time my college roommate reached down the gullet of the neighbor’s basset hound who had nabbed some of his barbecued chicken.  It’s safety.  You just have to react.

On balance, she lives for that kid.  It’s mostly not reaching into his mouth for stuff he shouldn’t swallow or pulling him off the cat when he wants to hug the poor animal.

Without meaning to, her mothering drives me to try to be the best father possible.  Her parenting bar is set high.  Yet, she would not think this the case—so often those who are superlative are also modest.  Her job is monumental and her execution astounding.

“A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”

—Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Heather kisses bumps and scrapes, but she also teaches Jakey how to brush dirt off on his pants or rub loose the little bits of gravel that embed in his hands when he gets going too fast and catches a toe on the road out front.

She prepares him for the important things in life.  This week they are working on his hotter/colder skills as he tries to find things he has misplaced around the house.  A foam football: “Colder Jakey, colder.  Turn around.  Warmer…  Warmer…  You’re getting close, you’re hot, you’re burning up!”

Just as importantly, he has a firm understanding of how to deliver an elbow drop.  Textbook form.  I thank our lucky stars he has not, as of the time of publication, executed any elbow drops on his little friends at daycare.  But, should the time come…

Heather corrects his grip on the wiffle ball bat and also on his plastic rake when he swings it around like a bat.  She teaches him proper etiquette in asking for more milk, more cashews, more dried cherries.  And she sometimes answers the same question over and over and over again.  Sometimes not.

Often at night we take one last look at our sleeping boy on the baby monitor and one of us comments on what a wonder he is.  The other parent inevitably affirms it is so.

As a mother, Heather is also a wonder.

It is so.