I’ve got it. The love of one boy, at least. I’ve always been his lifeline, though it’s a role I didn’t particularly seek. To vie for the love of Amos has never been close to a competition I had pondered. My other children adored their mama too, but Daddy was always a close second, actually first with our daughter. My mother has always been my oldest son’s favorite, but Amos? He’s been mine from the start.

When your boy has extra special needs, you grow fierce. Love that grows wings has a way of changing you. Your heart grows soft, your eyes turn wishful, your mind remembers the old days and embraces the new ones. This boy’s love is far from what I had expected with his impernding birth. I thought my fourth child would be the type to shirk his mama, follow his siblings, and venture into the new world.

Amos is as far from the child I expected as I could imagine, but beauty comes in the unimaginable. To be gifted a boy’s love has trumped the joy I once knew as a mother; it comes from the expected sunset. The velocity of colors and depth of light beckons me to a love that I didn’t know would be mine. It is though and the days I weep, I am stricken with love even more. The reciprocity of real life and an attainment that has quite fallen into what was a constrained heart, now overflowing with life as I never knew.