My middlemost is eight today.  He was four when his dad died suddenly.  A very special 4-year-old, who didn’t fully understand connecting to people and had trouble trusting…anyone.  When your trust circle is tiny, any losses are astronomical.   He lost one of three people he truly counted on that night and he didn’t really understand any of it.  Not that any of us understood either, but we knew the difference between alive and dead, here and gone. 

What has changed in four years?  I really wish I could say ‘so much’, but I’m not sure that would be true.  He has grown so much and matured in ways I have hoped and prayed for.  I see him learning and putting pieces together, but I don’t know that I will ever get to have the conversation with him about what happened to him that night.  Where he went in his mind?  How he felt?  What it was like to be my middlemost, in the middle of chaos?  I do think, if death came to our door again, he would be the survivor.  He is a survivor. 

My middlemost has taught me many things in his eight years.  Many of them terribly hard, frustrating, and exhausting.  Many of them profound and almost holy.  The lessons I have learned about expression and emotion alone are beyond what I could ever have understood without him. He is a logical thinker, whose emotions are often confused or manufactured and I am learning that feeling isn’t always expressed in my way. This was especially true when things were devastating.  His hurt was more confusion, his loss was more of a need for routine.  But I have learned that his loss, his logic, was no less life shattering, it was grief his way. 

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have raised him without the trauma, without the changes, without the shock of it all.  Would he be different?  Would I be different for him? 

Obviously, I can’t know the answers to the late night pondering. I do find comfort in believing a path where we lived out our days as a “typical”, “nuclear family” never existed.  I know we didn’t miss things, because they were not meant to be. 

I often think of life as a pathway with forks and what we see from our view at every fork, is two paths leading into differing wooded areas.  Sometimes they are choices and sometimes they are forces that sweep us in one direction, seemingly missing what was down the other path.  But when I think about what ‘free will’ looks like in reality, from God’s view, it’s all the same path.  There is a path and there is a fork…but from his view he can see there is only one path that continues beyond the fork.  Our lives are determined. Our path is written.  Yes, our choices matter, they change the way we drive on the path, how we live, trust, grow, and believe, but they don’t change the path.   

And in the comfort this viewpoint gives me, I reflect on my middlemost and the kid he is, the kid he was always meant to be.  And I love him more than I can fully express.  I love that he is the kid that doesn’t know what sarcasm is, that gets super excited about the idea of something even before it is exciting to the rest of us.  This kid that will ask 15 questions a minute in the rapid fire prestige of a master interrogator because he wants to understand.  He is the kid who will shovel mountains of snow, mow acres of grass, and pick up litter by the trash bag full.  He loves to work, to help, and to know how things function.  He is stubborn, occasionally manipulative, and stronger than he looks.   He doesn’t know why lies are not ok and he is simultaneously a stickler for justice “tattle tell” style.  He only wants to sit by me at dinner and would prefer that all meals are served by me and all drinks are poured by me.  He hates all food until he tries it and his favorite meal is burritos -ground beef, black beans, cheese, and sometimes sour cream.  He has a seat in the car he never wants to give up, and asks the same two questions every morning on the way to school. “Do we have school tomorrow? and Do we have to ride the bus home?”.  He waits expectingly every morning for a thumbs up after he shuts the van door before he skips off to another day.  He wears himself out completely everyday at school. And when he is really irritable he is on what I affectionately call his “last stand”.  It quickly digresses into a full blown sleep state which cannot be roused for anything.  You just have to hope he already ate and its not 5:30…which is super challenging in this post day light savings darkness! 

He will always be the kid that makes me cry for the simplest accomplishments and he will always be the one I give just a little extra love.  I can’t help it…he’s my middlemost.