Joy to the world! I know most of us associate this with the slumbering time of year in December, but I personally associate this day, May 14th, 1978 as the most anticipated, hoped for & celebrated transition I ever wanted as a girl & young woman; to mother.
My beautiful, beautiful boy Jon came into the world a bit after 7 am, EST in the small town of Concord, Massachusetts at Emerson Hospital.
And THIS morning, exactly 30 years later I am still a very proud Mama! Not only of one beautiful, beautiful boy now grown into incredible man, but later, 17 months later, again as a mother of an incredibly wonderful & beautiful girl. Separated in significance only by chronological time.
We will sing of my daughter's virtues a few more months from now. But for today I want to share with the world the PRIDE I feel for this blessed, prayed for & most greatly anticipated son of mine, Jon.
Jon springs from a long line of ancestors that stretch back into older Scandinavian & European countries. On the paternal side of his Mom's family tree is Sweden & Swedish roots which we have carried into the Promised Land here in America. My parents came together in fittingly a town called Middlebury, & began trail blazing a path for us, their heirs of a blended tradition. The best of Swedish tradition with the most pleasurable of the American-English roots.
And one of the traditions on the Swedish side of things in our family is to make a big deal about birthdays in general especially through age 21. We celebrate our beginnings with great joy & fun had by all, really no matter what!
And after that, the middle years climbing on to the next decade lose the more childish insistence on such childhood celebrations. Then it is a matter of simple courtesy & care to at least remember when we each came into middle earth for this lifetime.
But when it comes to our legendary penchant for fun, feasting, & partying hardy, we save the more lavish & elaborate birthday celebrations of the 0 years...30, 40, 50, and onward & upward. As the women age gracefully we tend to make items to hang on our walls to commemorate these significant milestones. My Swedish grandmother for instance, took up cross stitching in much later years & made a small tapestry of a husband & wife which hung in our dining room in the farmhouse for many years.
At these decade milestones, one of the traditions is to compose a piece of writing; a poem, a song or some other such thing to celebrate the life of the one we love. So in our finest Swedish origins, I celebrate this day by writing about blessed, beautiful, amazing son Jon.
Jon was & is everything & every bit the baby, the boy & now the man I ever could have hoped & prayed for. He was the recombinant DNA experiment of two very much in love expectant & PREPARED parents. I made sure of that.
I went to nursing school for starters. To study up. Later I made sure his Dad & I went to Prepared Chilldbirth classes, & studied the LeBoyer Gentle Birth methods then gaining popularity across our Nation, compliments of a visionary French obstetrician.
The final days when technology, according to statistical norms on a bell chart, said Jon was "late" by about a month, there were some rumblings about inducing his birth, completely nixed by yours truly because it was not natural, & I was having a natural childbirth!
It was the baby's decision, biochemically, which triggered his parachuting into the world, not mine. I respected this. As did those closest to me, my birth team. So when the contractions began, thirty years ago now, in the wee hours of this blessed morning, we were ready, with goody bag, our skills; both breathing & coaching, for his entrance this morning.
Now ladies who have never been through this vital & challenging rite of passage let me tell you, no matter WHAT anyone tells you, birthing a baby is LABOR. Serious, hard labor; but with a reward at the end unlike any other I can think of.
An incredible new human life!
Now this morning, as with each anniversary date of each birth of my children, I marvel anew at this amzing miraculous process. I relive that incredible wonder each May 14th & each early November anew. Gosh! I made this person inside ME??? WOW!
But all this pride, all this love, all of this bliss is tempered with the reality of the world we live in today. As I lay drowsily awake this morning, rolling around in these pleasant & cascading memories of this birth, these births, this birthday & the ones that marched along with each passing year, the hopes & dreams I had of handing over to them both the Greening of America vision, the peaceable kingdom I so passionately strived for all these years, I am sobered by the catastrophic losses we see today, thirty years later on the morning news. Thousands passing over to Spirit in wave upon wave; in India, China, places where repressive & totalitarian regimes are being pressed by our own Mother planet to rethink government. How it is run, who does it, & how governments are compelled to respond under such extreme conditions.
So much tragedy & human misery awaits us as we arise today.
And yet... again, the AMAZING power of a woman's strength & endurance also gets our attention. A glimmer of hope in all that rubble. A mother, miraculously rescued after 50 hours of being buried alive, a pregnant mother alive & gave birth to a healthy baby!
So we humans are made of incredibly enduring stuff too. Earth elements. Star elements. The very building blocks of the Universe teem with life within each & every one of us.
I have often been accused of loving my son so much that I must think he is the Second Coming or something! How crazy is that???
Well, yes & no. I think every Mom feels this incredible & natural maternal & FIERCE love for a child conceived in love. We aging hippies were all into that. We still are.
And if I do think he is the best thing since sliced bread, & have raised in him a consistent & deeply rooted knowing how utterly, utterly loved he & his sister are, with a sometimes inconsistent but enduring guidance to keep looking to the Savior, Jesus, the man who walked earlier on the planet to show us all another Way to live in peace as his example, I guess I am no different than most doting mothers & fathers who spring from the Judeo-Christian traditions.
All Jewish moms I've met love their first born sons as if they were the Second Coming. Isn't it better to be totally immersed in love than in neglect?
But for clarity, it takes a planet of mothers & fathers who feel this way for a Heavenly government to at last settle in for good on our Mother earth.
So today I say; Joy to the world!
Your are my Joy, Jon. Thank you so much, for coming into my life. I could never have become a Mom without you! Thank you & your sister for helping me learn to be one with every breath, & every step of these last thirty years.
My beautiful, beautiful boy Jon came into the world a bit after 7 am, EST in the small town of Concord, Massachusetts at Emerson Hospital.
And THIS morning, exactly 30 years later I am still a very proud Mama! Not only of one beautiful, beautiful boy now grown into incredible man, but later, 17 months later, again as a mother of an incredibly wonderful & beautiful girl. Separated in significance only by chronological time.
We will sing of my daughter's virtues a few more months from now. But for today I want to share with the world the PRIDE I feel for this blessed, prayed for & most greatly anticipated son of mine, Jon.
Jon springs from a long line of ancestors that stretch back into older Scandinavian & European countries. On the paternal side of his Mom's family tree is Sweden & Swedish roots which we have carried into the Promised Land here in America. My parents came together in fittingly a town called Middlebury, & began trail blazing a path for us, their heirs of a blended tradition. The best of Swedish tradition with the most pleasurable of the American-English roots.
And one of the traditions on the Swedish side of things in our family is to make a big deal about birthdays in general especially through age 21. We celebrate our beginnings with great joy & fun had by all, really no matter what!
And after that, the middle years climbing on to the next decade lose the more childish insistence on such childhood celebrations. Then it is a matter of simple courtesy & care to at least remember when we each came into middle earth for this lifetime.
But when it comes to our legendary penchant for fun, feasting, & partying hardy, we save the more lavish & elaborate birthday celebrations of the 0 years...30, 40, 50, and onward & upward. As the women age gracefully we tend to make items to hang on our walls to commemorate these significant milestones. My Swedish grandmother for instance, took up cross stitching in much later years & made a small tapestry of a husband & wife which hung in our dining room in the farmhouse for many years.
At these decade milestones, one of the traditions is to compose a piece of writing; a poem, a song or some other such thing to celebrate the life of the one we love. So in our finest Swedish origins, I celebrate this day by writing about blessed, beautiful, amazing son Jon.
Jon was & is everything & every bit the baby, the boy & now the man I ever could have hoped & prayed for. He was the recombinant DNA experiment of two very much in love expectant & PREPARED parents. I made sure of that.
I went to nursing school for starters. To study up. Later I made sure his Dad & I went to Prepared Chilldbirth classes, & studied the LeBoyer Gentle Birth methods then gaining popularity across our Nation, compliments of a visionary French obstetrician.
The final days when technology, according to statistical norms on a bell chart, said Jon was "late" by about a month, there were some rumblings about inducing his birth, completely nixed by yours truly because it was not natural, & I was having a natural childbirth!
It was the baby's decision, biochemically, which triggered his parachuting into the world, not mine. I respected this. As did those closest to me, my birth team. So when the contractions began, thirty years ago now, in the wee hours of this blessed morning, we were ready, with goody bag, our skills; both breathing & coaching, for his entrance this morning.
Now ladies who have never been through this vital & challenging rite of passage let me tell you, no matter WHAT anyone tells you, birthing a baby is LABOR. Serious, hard labor; but with a reward at the end unlike any other I can think of.
An incredible new human life!
Now this morning, as with each anniversary date of each birth of my children, I marvel anew at this amzing miraculous process. I relive that incredible wonder each May 14th & each early November anew. Gosh! I made this person inside ME??? WOW!
But all this pride, all this love, all of this bliss is tempered with the reality of the world we live in today. As I lay drowsily awake this morning, rolling around in these pleasant & cascading memories of this birth, these births, this birthday & the ones that marched along with each passing year, the hopes & dreams I had of handing over to them both the Greening of America vision, the peaceable kingdom I so passionately strived for all these years, I am sobered by the catastrophic losses we see today, thirty years later on the morning news. Thousands passing over to Spirit in wave upon wave; in India, China, places where repressive & totalitarian regimes are being pressed by our own Mother planet to rethink government. How it is run, who does it, & how governments are compelled to respond under such extreme conditions.
So much tragedy & human misery awaits us as we arise today.
And yet... again, the AMAZING power of a woman's strength & endurance also gets our attention. A glimmer of hope in all that rubble. A mother, miraculously rescued after 50 hours of being buried alive, a pregnant mother alive & gave birth to a healthy baby!
So we humans are made of incredibly enduring stuff too. Earth elements. Star elements. The very building blocks of the Universe teem with life within each & every one of us.
I have often been accused of loving my son so much that I must think he is the Second Coming or something! How crazy is that???
Well, yes & no. I think every Mom feels this incredible & natural maternal & FIERCE love for a child conceived in love. We aging hippies were all into that. We still are.
And if I do think he is the best thing since sliced bread, & have raised in him a consistent & deeply rooted knowing how utterly, utterly loved he & his sister are, with a sometimes inconsistent but enduring guidance to keep looking to the Savior, Jesus, the man who walked earlier on the planet to show us all another Way to live in peace as his example, I guess I am no different than most doting mothers & fathers who spring from the Judeo-Christian traditions.
All Jewish moms I've met love their first born sons as if they were the Second Coming. Isn't it better to be totally immersed in love than in neglect?
But for clarity, it takes a planet of mothers & fathers who feel this way for a Heavenly government to at last settle in for good on our Mother earth.
So today I say; Joy to the world!
Your are my Joy, Jon. Thank you so much, for coming into my life. I could never have become a Mom without you! Thank you & your sister for helping me learn to be one with every breath, & every step of these last thirty years.
