Happy Happy Joy Joy

On January 12, a temple worker bundled Muffin up into a white stroller and brought him to my mother, who stood outside the sealing room in the Salt Lake Temple where my husband and I waited with friends and family. He fussed in the hallway, undoubtedly confused by the very existence of a pure white stroller and the hordes of affectionate elderly strangers who refused to allow him to crawl on the furniture or chew and roll the temptingly tall shiny vases. As my mom took our little boy in her arms and approached the altar, Muffin immediately stopped crying and smiled happily around the room. While he normally makes a greased piglet appear sedate, Muffin did not squirm. He cooed at my husband, turned and cooed at me, offered the sealer a toothy grin, and plopped his pudgy be-dimpled paw down on our clasped hands without prompting, where it remained perfectly still until the ceremony linking us as an eternal family was complete. I could’ve grown another 30 or 40 hearts just to contain the mushy mom-love filling me with happy sappy adoration.

Our big day held plenty of funny little surprises–odd quantities of paperwork, an unexpectedly lengthy separation from our baby, a sealer who could easily earn a living impersonating Martin Scorcese but for the foul language, the quiet heroics of my best friend, who informed said sealer that he most certainly would wait for my mother to change into white so that she, and not some lovely but nonethless anonymous temple worker, could hold her only grandbaby at the altar. The largest surprise for me, however, involved realizing that the day concerned a family broader than my husband and our little boy. The day I married DH in this same temple over a decade ago entailed little fuss. Until we were sealed to Muffin, I had no idea what fawning brides usually receive. This January, the angelic temple workers couldn’t shower me with enough affection or excitement.

Maybe the absence of pre-wedding jitters simply made me more capable of noticing exactly how happy these people were at the prospect of another family joining hands over God’s alter and promising to keep those hands linked in their earthly journey back to heaven. They honestly felt our joy, and that shared rejoicing foregrounded a sense of familial scope broader than any bureaucratic nonsense. As friends, family, and unknown temple workers hugged, kissed, and congratulated us, the facing mirrors of eternity reflected their figures a hundred times back into the usually-veiled past and forward into an unknown future. For those brief moments, I honestly felt linked not just to my darling, miraculous little boy, but to everyone in that room. The sunshine amplifying the mirror’s reflection also shone 50-odd miles away, on our birthmother and her family. While they could not be with us in the temple, their sacrifice and kindness made the temple ceremony possible. I don’t understand the mathematics of eternity. I don’t know how, in the end that is really a beginning, every member of the human family becomes exactly that–family. I just believe it is true.

Our temple moment with Muffin gave me a tiny glimpse. He is ours, forever. But not just ours. He is also God’s, a soul unto himself and to his Eternal Parents, loved by the woman who gave him life and by the mom and dad who continue to sustain that life with every ounce of happiness and exhaustion we can muster. He must know how loved he is–just look at that beatific smile he’s wearing! In a way, the temple ceremony simply seemed to confirm what we already deeply felt: this is our child, meant to be. On a broader level it reminded me that love involves risk, trusting strangers and a strange universe, believing that the many, many things in the gospel and her church which I do not understand will, like the silly paperwork, eventually be dwarfed by the bonds of love. There’s more to the universe that I don’t understand than I do, but as much as I believe in seeking answers and striving to make both our church and secular worlds kinder and better, none of the frustration inherent to that mystery matters an ounce compared to transcendent experiences like those which have brought and bound us to our son. He is ours, and all of us are God’s.

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I've known this song most of my life, but I've found new meaning in it as a love song for the expanded family brought by adoption. Children suffer only from a poverty of love, never a surfeit. With their love they for an unborn child, Muffin's birth family found previously complete strangers and made possible the eternal circle that now holds me, my husband, and our son together in an eternal circle of love where biology had failed us. In a broader circle, both families are forever linked, held inside the bond where we have all become a sort of unconventional family, forever bound by the power of and love for a child.

Give Yourself to Love

Kind friends all gathered ’round,
there’s something I would say–
that what brings us together here
has blessed us all today.
Love has made a circle that holds us all inside,
where strangers are as family,
and loneliness can’t hide.
You must give yourself to love,
if love is what you’re after.
Open up your heart to tears and laughter
and give yourself to love, give yourself to love.

I’ve walked these mountains in the rain,
I’ve learned to love the wind.
I’ve been up before the sunrise
to watch the day begin.
I always [hoped] I’d find you,
though I never did know how:
like sunshine on a cloudy day
you stand before me now.

Love is born in fire,
it’s planted like a seed.
Love can’t give you everything,
but it gives you what you need.
Love comes when you’re ready,
love comes when you’re afraid.
It will be your greatest teacher,
and the best friend you have made.
So give yourself to love,
if love is what you’re after.
Open up your heart to
tears and laughter
and give yourself to love,
give yourself to love.

–Kate Wolf, one of my favorite folk singers