Not What I Prayed

That’s what I thought would happen to me, too. I had never expected to get stuck on the outside looking in. Where was my baby? Not here, I knew. My parents knew. My nieces and nephews knew, and when they asked when I would have a baby, my heart would constrict. “When Hashem wants,” I’d say. “You can daven.”

Maybe those innocent children davened, I don’t know. I certainly prayed. Day in, day out, trying and strengthening and trying again. On every special day, at every auspicious time, in every effective way, I begged for a child. Tefillos that envelop your being. Avodah that puts everything on the line, because for this I daven, for this I try. For this baby I pray.

For a baby who grows and develops and gets those endless colds and teething pains. And Terrible Twos and then a haircut, when suddenly he’s a boy, with scraped knees from riding his bike and that challenging work of learning to keep his hands to himself. And you turn around and he’s a bochur, growing through messy teenagerhood, before he becomes a proud young man. That was the child I prayed for.

But that was not the child I got. I remember the day he was born, when I looked into his small, almond-shaped eyes and thought, for this one I prayed! But it was not so many days later that I knew he wasn’t exactly what I’d asked for. The first complications didn’t throw me, for I had not expected my life to be easy. I had not envisioned that his birth would herald a happily-ever-after. But then came the second issue, and the third, and multiple hospitalizations and surgeries and endless therapies… and my child who just wouldn’t, couldn’t, grow and develop like any other.