you’re welcome, little friend

We welcomed a mud monster into the shower last night.

When one has a child who has discovered the miraculous marriage of water + garden dirt, one does not allow said child to take a bath.  No, said child must stand beneath gushing streams of water.  For at least 20 minutes.

Said child was thrilled to be taking a shower.

While Miss Thang was shaking her booty (I realized my slip when Little Friend queried, “Mama, what is ‘booty’?”)…While Miss Thang was shaking her bottom midstream, I turned to Big Friend and asked, “Could you ever have imagined when we brought home that four-pound baby that we would be this entranced with her?”

Much of Little Friend’s arrival was unwelcome.  The unstoppable onslaught of pre-eclampsia was unwelcome.  The emergency c-section six weeks before the due date on the calendar was unwelcome.  The complete overhaul of life, thanks to the constraints of c-section recovery and frustrations with breast feeding and isolation of keeping a preemie alive, was unwelcome.

There was that night when I sat in my living room and wept in grief over the life that I had lost when Little Friend stepped over the threshold of our home.   If I’m honest, I would have packaged up that bundle of baby squall and sent her right then and there back to wherever babies come from.  But no stork appeared to whisk her away.  So she stayed.

And grew up into a mud monster singing “ABCDEFZ.  Now I know ABCs.  Next time sing with you” in a now mud-caked shower.

I’m taken back to Easter this year when I stood on a beach newly kissed by morning sun.  Over the sucking roar of surf, hundreds of voices lifted in unison with the fiery Baptist preacher standing at a makeshift podium: “God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good.”  It’s good to remember this litany in the bad times.  Even then, when we want to stamp “return to sender” on our brand new baby and send her back with the nearest available stork, even then, God is good.

It’s just possible that sometimes the most unwelcome events in life effect the most welcome changes in us.

It’s happened to me.

Now, hearing a little “Sankee, Mama” trilled in my direction as I hand over the soap and washcloth, my response takes on a whole new world of meaning: “You’re welcome, Little Friend.  You’re welcome.”