Every now and then the crust of everyday life withdraws and you are left momentarily with the fundamental core of motherhood.  You never know when you are going to have one of those moments, because it is not necessarily when something of great magnitude is happening.  You may be changing a diaper, watching your children play in the backyard, helping with homework, doing or hearing something you have done or heard before.

I had one of those moments today at the county fair.   My almost-five-year-old son was on an airplane kiddy ride. About 8 miniature red baron type airplanes on long arms extended from a central pole.  As the pole turned and the airplanes went around in a circle, the long arms slowly raised and lowered the planes.  I watched my little boy run up to a grounded plane and climb inside.  He looked uncertain as the ride started, then slowly grinned.

This son of mine, of my three children, is the one most likely to drive me to drink.  This is the one who pushes every button his temperamental 8 year old sister has, just to see the show.   He is the child who tries to climb the display of Pepsi 12-packs at the grocery store, and hides from me behind massive packages of paper towels at Target.  He has more than once deliberately dumped an entire bottle of shampoo in the bathtub to make bubbles.   He will scream and throw himself on the floor, wrapping his arms around my feet in an effort to prevent me from moving until he gets his way.   His water glass empties, and his dinner plate becomes an ocean for an armada of lettuce leaves around a mashed potato island.  He has locked me out of the house, laughing as I ordered him to open the door, and said things I cringe to repeat.  Oh, I could go on and on.

But he is also the child most likely to spontaneously hug you and tell you he loves you.  He can be happily playing with toys, will look up for a moment, “I love you, Mommy”, and go right back to his play.  He even hugs his siblings and tells them he loves them, when he is not torturing them.  He is the child who thinks to thank me for small pleasures, like making more lemonade or washing his favorite shirt.  If he and his two year old brother get a Happy Meal for lunch, he asks for one for his sister, too, even though she eats lunch at school.  He remembers to console family members who have suffered a loss. He asks more questions about life, love, God, death, and heaven.  He is the child who told his Daddy that he would never forget him, not even when Daddy got old and died.  He is my middle child.

And as I watched this exacerbating, wonderful, contradictory little boy of mine fly up and down, I felt a tidal wave of love.  I stood in the hot relentless sun, squinting up at my airborne boy, treasuring his joy.  The noise from the midway slowly receded. Time stood still.  I stared at him as he flew, and concentrated hard to commit this exact moment to memory.  His grin, his dimple, how the breeze from the flying plane moved his hair, his wave each time he passed the spot where I was standing.   I will remember this as long as my mind is my mind.

When such special moments occur, I think of a passage from the Gospel of Luke.  Unlike Mary, Mother of God, I was born with a large helping of original sin and my son is no Messiah, he’s just an ordinary boy.  But Mary was a mother who loved her son, too.  And I remember that Mary, watching her child, “kept all these things in her heart.”   Of course the situations are far different, but somehow the words seem to fit.  Everything else slips away,  I am left with something intense and basic that I somehow must preserve, and I keep these things in my heart.