Twenty minutes into our hike at D. L. Bliss State Park, I feel an uninvited heaviness in the trail behind me. I stop and turn to Mo, who has turned his soul inward, taking shallow breaths. “What’s up, Mo?” I ask, already knowing, and hurrying to board up my own feelings against the coming wind.
“I miss my mom.”
I hug my son, who suddenly seems two all over again. “Then send some love the way I taught you,” I say. He makes a face. I make one back. “I’m serious, Mo. Close your eyes, gather up some love, crack your ribs open and send it. Watch it bend over the horizon and then trust that God will get it there. That is what I did for you when you were far away.”
He closes his eyes, crossing his hands over his heart, thumbs pressed together. He pauses, then lifts his winged-hands from his chest to the sky.
“Did you send it?” I ask.
“Yup. Bye, Mom,” he says, running to catch up to the girls who are in the trail ahead of us, chipping pieces off of a granite slab.
I am glad I saw Mary last week. I am glad she told me of her reoccurring nightmare and her adoptive mom’s inability to see past her own broken, hungry heart. Because after I’ve made dinner, listened to everyone’s stories about slivers and bullies, done the dishes and folded the laundry, I don’t much want to hear about how Mo misses his birth mom. But I am trying to remember that the sky has never once asked my permission to rain.
