Penance and Recompense

Petit Prince is getting quite adept at his walker – he almost doesn’t sit down at all, but likes the security of having the seat there should he lose his balance.  All the mothers who are way more concerned about germs and mud and dangerous construction articles in my yard than I am are careful to instruct me that Petit Prince will never learn to walk as long as I keep putting him in the walker.  But you know, even someone as lazy and laid back as I am can get tired of a baby that is constantly covered from head to toe in mud from crawling around outdoors, and even I can get fatigued from steering him away from the boards with rusty nails that he has access to when he crawls, but not when he’s in the walker.

So.  I was doing something – I don’t remember what – but it was not important, when I looked around and noticed the two older kids but not the baby.  Where’s Petit Prince?  I looked in all the safe places first (as in, in our actual property) before thinking of the wide open gate that the workers had left open.  He was nowhere to be found so I ran to our front gate just as a jogger came in and said, “Is that your baby in the middle of the street?!!!”

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God”  And sure enough, there was the Prince in the middle of the street in his walker, and I must say moving at a speed I could never imagine was possible.  At that moment there was a car coming at him from the other direction.  Luckily our neighbor (a crusty older gent who loves cars, and whom I never imagined as a guardian angel to my son) was running after him, had picked him up walker and all, and removed him from harm’s way.

I wish I could say this was the first time I lost a child, but alas it is the second.  The first time was when Young Knight was two and a half and decided to go see the cows.  These cows.

We went to Belle-Famille‘s house in the country, not far from Chartres, an old farmhouse which is part of a hamlet and is so old that you have to duck to go through the doorways since the people were that much shorter when it was built.  It also has a well from the middle ages, all of which is beside the point.

So we went there and took the country road down to see the nearby cows.  There’s not much else to do there.  On the day we were cleaning the house and packing up to go, the kids were playing with the neighbor’s kids who were the same age.  The father was there watching over them, and although I didn’t explicitly ask him to watch my kids along with his, I just assumed he would.  After some time had passed, I looked out the window and didn’t notice Young Knight.  So I ran out, “Have you seen him?”  “No, I went in to go to the bathroom and when I came back out he wasn’t here.  I just assumed he had gone inside with you.”  “How long ago was that?” “Oh, about 20 minutes or so.”

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”  I looked upstairs in the little farmhouse hoping he had fallen asleep without my knowing it.  Nope.  I looked in the way back in the dangerous sunken little shelter back there.  Nope.  I started to run down the busy national road that ran just outside of the hamlet, but my knees faltered.  I couldn’t continue.  If he had gone that way ……


And then I heard a shout.  Sir Renaissance had the idea that maybe he had gone to see the cows.  He walked down the path a bit, followed the road as it curved, and waaaay down he saw a small figure coming towards him in the middle of the road (a not-well-traveled county road), in tears, sunburned, poopy diaper.

With Petit Prince I didn’t have time to panic as he was saved as quickly as he was lost. But the first time it happened, I felt for a full fifteen minutes the absolute cold fear of perhaps never seeing my child again.  But the after-effect of both instances was the same.  I felt the need to negotiate with God and impress upon him how much I knew I had been careless with my son, how absolutely grateful I was to have him returned to me unharmed.  And I was afraid to stop doing penance in my mind for fear that the next time the scenario would be different if I didn’t impress upon Him that I was sorry for my lapse.

About ten years ago when I was living in Manhattan, an event occurred that changed how I viewed God.  This is probably controversial, so let’s just say that this is how I personally viewed and appreciated the event and am not trying to convince anyone else to have the same view.  I was coming out of the subway in the winter-time and I was grumbling against God.  I mean that literally.  I was grumbling against Him about all the things I had to do, and why didn’t He make my life easier, and what was His problem anyway?  Okay, I might not have expressed it that obviously, but that was the general gist of my thoughts.

All of the sudden, someone whacked me in the head with a piece of ice.  I was shocked.  I looked around to see who did it, but there was no one there.  And then another piece of ice fell not far from me.  I looked up, and that was when I noticed that ice was falling from a roof and bouncing off the bottom of the building, which curved outwards.

I continued on my way to work, crying that God had hit me in the head, because that’s definitely what it felt like.  I felt like I had just gotten a sharp spanking for being an ungrateful brat.  I cried most of that morning (I had a lump on my head too), but the emotions soon made way for some clarity about the event.  I eventually started to feel this intense gratitude that God cared enough about me to rebuke me.  See what I mean about being controversial?  I know there are people who don’t think God would do that and I don’t want to mess with anyone else’s faith, but honestly for me, I saw it that way. And I would honestly prefer to have God pay attention to me even if it’s to discipline me, than let me go my merry way continuing to be an ungrateful brat.

Because when it really counts, when I lose my sons because I’m not watching them carefully, I don’t get discipline.  I get mercy.  Both of my boys were returned to me safely, and whether or not I did penance doesn’t change the fact.

Fortunately, given all my imperfections as a mother, I’m not the only one watching out for them.

* This post originally appeared in my former blog, Perfect Welcome, and may contain some modifications or discrepancies in the names or comments.

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