Daffodils in the Morning

 

Someone brought daffodils. 

I would say they were my favorite flowers, if the rest of the flowers weren't each as amazing in their own way.  But these were closed tight, their heads covered with a tissue-thin, brown casing that might have disguised them as spent blooms, if it weren't for the bulge of fresh, smooth yellow that peeked out from the parchment cracks.  Guy had put them in the bathroom on the counter.  It is one of the places I get to regularly these days. 

I tried to sleep that night, but when my eyes closed it seemed like somewhere a crack opened and behind it the tears I had been holding found their way out.  The day had been wearying, with contractions and pain and uncertainty.  Guy held me sweetly until I fell asleep.

The next morning I made my way to the bathroom and stopped at the door.  Those daffodils had opened in the night.  There, glowing and ready for the day, they had no idea they weren't holding their heads up to the sun.  I smiled.  It was a new day.

*****



The day that Guy and I went to get the procedure done to remove the blood clot from my leg, the clot that had impossibly disappeared (though with God nothing is impossible, right?), we sat in the empty waiting room at 7AM and held hands.

"Pray with me?" I asked Guy, and in the quiet, I whispered a prayer.  At some point, as I prayed for the doctor, the nurses, and especially our baby, I was filled with a warming light that made the walls of my heart seem to expand until they reached my skin, and everything in me was at rest.  It was so much like the day, when pregnant with Jonah, we had been told Jonah might be outside of my uterus requiring he be killed to save my life.  On that day that felt too horrible to bear, on the way to the hospital, I had been filled with that same amazing peace and calm.  And, too, so much like the day when I had prayed to know if I should marry Guy.  Peace.  Utter, unwavering, doubt extinguishing peace.

In that waiting room, our heads close, all the fear dissipated and it was like someone had pushed a fast forward button, showing me the end of a movie, not enough to know what would happen, but just enough to know that whatever happened, it was happy and good.  I thought it meant that the surgery would go well.  I thought it meant the baby would tolerate the process and be okay.  I never would have imagined that there was to be no procedure, the baby would not be put in any risk, and that in a few minutes my doctor would be standing in front of me smiling and taking off his face mask, patting me on the head. 

I didn't need to know the end, to know things were going to be alright somehow. 

Some days are going to be hard.  Really hard.  And even having the faith that things will be alright doesn't mean they will be easy, or that grief and loss may not still touch our lives.  Sometimes I am in a place of open daffodils in the morning, and sometimes I am in the place of tears at night.  And I can feel faith in both places.