From as long as she can remember she has dreamed it. Dreamed the honey of summer afternoons, the timeless strolling, the strangers unable to resist asking if they can look at her baby and what she already sees as she pulls back the netting that shields him from the sun: their faces smiling, seeing her in him. Dreamed the hours, time out of mind, rocking the babe, cradled to sleep in the warmth of her breasts. Dreamed this above all, his face turning into her as he wakes, the cry of hunger appeased by the unimpeachable flow of milk drawn by his mouth sucking straight from the heart of his need for her. And as he takes his fill of her a great calm descends; consciousness lapses into a dreamless half-sleep. The room in her parents house where she sits rocking, the young husband in the Navy stationed so far away dissolve as if they never were. There is only the pure flowing of her being into him, the vessel equipped to bear the hopes and hungers that have waited so long for this moment. For now the miracle happens, the tiny fingers wrap around hers in the first caress, the watery eyes gaze into hers alone, the smile blooms, transfiguring a baby’s face into a mirror in which she feels her own quenchless vitality returning to the source, blossoming in what breathes for her alone. The eyes of her child, blue as depthless ocean, look into the heart of her, exorcising the other thing. Now there is only peace, a peace that as he sleeps in it becomes balm to her restless mind. This she tells herself is all she ever wanted; and soon the rest will come too, an end to the shame she carries like stations of the cross and soon too that approval her mother told her would come only when she too bore a child.
- W.D., The Last Catholic – Novel Submission
Reader:
Today is a picture perfect early autumn afternoon. The windows are wide open and there is a stillness abroad. To read this introductory paragraph under these conditions is a blessing, except…. This writer put a zinger in at the end. How easily the author lulled me with her description of the bonding process between mother and child. I’m convinced that I have not read a better description of this bonding. Yet, there is this zinger that makes me pause right here to write my reader’s comment. This is a successful “setting of the stage” for a good story by a really good story teller. This one is going home with me.
