Unspoken Need

The boy I watched over yesterday is one year old. He can speak a few words and can sign others. His small hands make gestures to say things such as “dog”, “hungry”, “more” and “finished”. His large, clear blue eyes say even more.

I am his nanny every Tuesday while his Mom is at work. I have watched him in the nursery at church since he was born so he is used to me and knows me, which is always good. His usual morning routine is breakfast, play time, a short nap, more play and then lunch. When it was time for him to wake up from his morning nap, I opened the door of his room quietly and said his name. He stirred, rolled over and blinked. I didn’t turn on the light just yet. I didn’t want it to hurt his eyes as he came out of sleep. I didn’t go and stand beside his crib either: I felt that it would be better if he could look over at me as he woke up, rather than seeing me looming over him. After all, though we have known each other for a long time, me being here on Tuesdays is still fairly new. Coming out of sleep, he would most likely expect to see his Mom. I didn’t want to startle him, so I sat down on an ottoman near the center of the room and softly called to him again.

The little boy sat up and rubbed his face with the back of his dimpled hands. He looked at me and gave a small smile, which I returned. He stood up and I went to him and picked him up out of his crib. Like most boys, he is nearly always active and busy. Playing and getting into things and trying to take things apart. Yet when I lifted him up out of his crib he didn’t try to get down and out of my arms so that he could go play. He didn’t twist around and point to a toy or make the sign for food as he usually does. Instead, he rested his head on my shoulder. His body relaxed. I held him securely, gently patting his back with one hand. I expected that at any moment he would have enough of the cuddling and want to get on to other things, but he didn’t. He remained thus, his head resting trustingly on my shoulder, perfectly content. I held him and rocked back and forth from one foot to the other, side to side, side to side. I was standing in front of a mirror and when I turned I could just see his large blue eyes, open and alert even while he body was perfectly relaxed. He wanted to be held just like that. So I held him and rocked him and patted his back.

The Mom and Dad of this little boy love him like there’s no tomorrow. He has an abundance of love and good things. But his Dad has been deployed to Iraq. He has been gone for several weeks and will be gone for several more months. The little boy’s mother is pregnant. I wonder if the little boy notices that his Mom has to hold him differently because of her growing belly. I’m sure that he does. I’m sure he senses some change that he cannot place. It doesn’t affect his mother’s love for him in any way. She still loves him as before but there is something that is changing, something that is pushing at the edges of the life he knows and feels secure in. Mostly though, he cannot understand why his father doesn’t come home at night. Why he only gets to hear his father’s voice occasionally on the phone or see an image of him on a screen. He is too young to comprehend why these things are happening but he knows that the changes are there. He can feel them, and maybe that makes it all the more confusing.

I’m not sure how long his head rested on my shoulder. All I knew, all I could sense beyond any words or signs, was that the most important thing I could do at that moment was to hold the little boy safely and securely in my arms as though nothing else in the world mattered and I had endless time and simple, pure affection to give to him. There could be no rush for anything else. Nothing else mattered to that boy in that moment. There was nothing else he needed except my solid shoulder beneath his check and my arms wrapped around him in reassuring security. I turned and kissed him on the head, then rested my cheek against his wispy blond hair. Suddenly the lyrics of a song came to me; a slow, sweet jazz-style tune that had been haunting me for the last few days:
“Hold me / Hold me / And never, ever, ever let me go.”*

The little boy will surely always have people who love him. Soon he will have a younger brother or sister. His father will return and his family will be complete once more. As I kissed him once more on the top of the head, I thought that, without a single word, this was the best I could do to reassure him of those things. That what he did not understand now would make sense one day. That through any uncertainty - for people always seem to forget how uncertain it can be to be a child, ever innocent and helpless to the will of others – that he was loved, that things would be okay, and that when he needed it there would be arms to hold and comfort, caress and reassure, oblivious to any passing of time, just as we all crave and need with words, signs, or unspoken requests that hum through the air like the lyrics of a sad and tender song.

*"Never Let Me Go", a song from and written for the movie of the same name.