resilience

He stands at the front door each afternoon and waits for her.

"Tessa...school bus!"

He says it again and again until he sees the big yellow bus pull up in front of our house, anxiously awaiting the arrival home of his big sister and the resumption of play and laughter and noise. His little heart seems to cling to these regularities, the assurance of a familiar schedule, when the people he loves come and go with predictability, and when those who leave always return to him again.

My son inspires me. He is a daily reminder of the great beauty and strength of the human spirit. He reminds me of our God-given capacity to withstand great heartache, fear, and trauma, and still live on. We can overcome, we can press forward, hopeful and resilient. We live with scars and also possess the ability to heal and recover, changed and refined by our hardships, and somehow, miraculously, wiser and kinder in spite of them, because of them. We need not be ashamed of them, for these things make us beautiful and unique.

My little boy has a strong spirit, a determined spirit. He is a fighter and will not easily give up. His capacity for love is fierce. He is a protector, a willful little guy who knows what he wants, how he feels, and is unafraid to show it and defend it. He feels things deeply, both grief and joy. His smile lights up an entire room.

Children accept things with an innocence that moves me. Their eyes perceive and understand the world with a simplicity that I often find disarming. I remember one day, last summer, shortly after we'd arrived home with Ren. The children and I were playing in the back yard on the swing set and a neighbor came over to meet us. Tess proudly introduced Ren to our neighbor friend. She said "This is Ren. He's my brother. He's from China!" She stated it matter-of-factly, as if it was the most natural arrangement in the world, as if she'd always known him and loved him and been bound to him by blood. No questions asked. She sees all the things that bind them together, not the things that make them different. We are family. Genetics, ethnicity, heritage, culture. These things are irrelevant. The biggest ties that bind are made of spiritual matter.

My son puts his little hand against the glass door, listening for the distant hum of the school bus as it turns onto our street. The first thing he says when we wakes in the morning is "Tessa? Lucy?," as he inquires after the whereabouts of his sisters. He drapes the full weight of his body over mine at night as we rock and sing, his arms and legs wrap around me like a koala. His head lies heavy on my shoulder and I can feel our chests sink into one another as we breath. When Chris is home on the weekends, Ren is his shadow, trailing his heels, a little man in the making, intrinsically tied to the physical, adventurous, and playful domain that his dad inhabits. My boy displays an ability to love courageously in places that have been previously hurt. I have watched him begin to rest and settle into us with time.

In a world full of ample reasons to remain cynical, untrusting, and isolated, my children are daily reminders that there is always another way, a better way. The resilience of the human spirit, its ability and trust and hope again, to overcome and live, is perhaps the most powerful thing of all.