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Do mothers have a sixth sense? I don’t know. I remember padding into my parents’ bedroom in the wee hours, and no matter how softly I laid my feet on the carpet or tried not to breathe–it turning into a challenge at some point–my mom would gasp awake. Everything okay?

Maybe she passed it on to me. A couple of nights ago, my eyes opened with a deep breath. I listened to the silence of a house asleep, the sounds of my sons breathing in the next room. And then, the sheets moving. Was my son groaning? I don’t remember.

It was a baby tooth of his, the one I’d haul him to the dentist for the next day. “I can’t get comfortable,” my son sleep-garbled. I offered him pain reliever, lay down beside him with my hand on his back, on those new muscles from school sports. (He used to fit inside my body.) He tossed some more, breathed deeply, then regularly.

I have realized that this slice of night is never a good time to take my thoughts seriously. As if they had been hiding beneath the bed, worries began to loom in my sleep-addled brain, their shadows casting large. I heard my own breathing accelerate. My mental dot-matrix printer suddenly churned out long, black lists of fear.

But then, an image, as I lay there beside my sleeping son, his side warm against mine. What if God’s own hand were on my shoulder, there in the dark?

The mountains, I know, still stood guard outside, their torn-construction-paper blue against the sky of a full moon. I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

I knew he didn’t sleep in the next room over, but had been there, as if keeping vigil in my rocking chair–only closer; only within. I knew he hadn’t been surprised by the sudden clutch of fear in my heart. I knew he knew right where to put his hand on my soul, a steady, penetrating presence. I knew that though I am limited to time and space in the care of my kids, these pieces of my heart walking around–I am never alone.

Surely God is like a mother, stirring at the slightest rustlings of the soul. Surely he created our own hands as images of his own perfect ones, so we can feel his on our back when as we press down our pain or fear, even as we slip into subconscious. Surely we know comfort from his perfect compassion, swaddling us like a blanket when the room rises ebony around us.

Even if we’re holding our breath.

 

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