By Rebecca Smyth
@rebsmyth

When my second son, Asher, came howling into the world, I’m pretty sure the midwives were already talking about who he looked like before his body had even finished exiting my own. Every health professional, family member, and elderly lady in the supermarket comments on who he’s like. They study mine and my husband’s faces and gush “oh, he’s his daddy’s double.” And I have to confess, as I reached out to hold him for the first time, somewhere in between total euphoria and feeling like someone had set the bottom half of my body on fire, my very first thought was: that is a Smyth nose right there.

But no one ever discussed who my firstborn looked like. I was 18 years old when Reuben was born. They'd heard ‘the dad’ wasn’t in the picture, and they could see he didn’t look like me, and so the conversation was over before it had begun. He resembles my brother as a baby, I wanted to tell them. But no one asked. He’s got my sense of humor, I opted for instead, knowing full well babies laugh at everything. Ironically, these days he is looking more and more like me as his face becomes slender and his chubby cheeks diminish into the same oval shape I see in the mirror.  

Reuben, now 8 years old, regularly thanks God for bringing a daddy into his life when he was four. His memory of Just Us is foggy, and he mostly reminisces about sleeping in my bed (these days there is much less room and he is much more leggy). He is wholeheartedly and relentlessly convinced that my husband, Paddy, is his daddy. He knows he didn’t have a dad before that, and he knows Paddy is about to begin the process of adopting him. He knows mums can raise babies alone, but he doesn’t know mums can’t make babies alone. He doesn’t realize there was a dad before Just Us. He simply thinks families come in different shapes and sizes and for a while, that was enough.

But before my husband can adopt him, I have to tell him why there was Just Us.

***

Reuben and I are sitting on a small patch of grass in the rare Northern Irish sun, passing ice-cream between us and picking at blades of grass. The ice-cream shop is a short walk from where we live, in a built up, working class area of social housing. This shop, with it’s array of extravagant flavors and endless options, isn’t our usual go-to. This particular ice-cream excursion is reserved for difficult conversations, it seems. The unusual, sweltering heat has me wishing we were looking out over the sea. Instead, we are gazing out over a grey car park, pretending to ignore the unknown day-drinker to our right, and the towering block of flats awaiting demolition to our left.

Reuben passes the ice-cream to me. He tells me about his latest Lego masterpiece, and I’m about to tell him he has a birth father.

“Lord, give me the words.” I beg. 

I slurp the ice-cream and pass it back to him, picturing the pain I’m about to pass along with it. As usual, I feel responsible. It was me who got pregnant, and it was me who birthed him into this messy situation. He didn’t ask for that, or for the repercussions haunting us years later. Our depressing surroundings taunt me along with the inner voice ringing in my ears. 

You failed him. 

Reuben hasn’t noticed my eyes glaze over, and my heart thumps in my ears as I try to grapple with the script I’ve prepared and rehearsed with my God, my husband and my friends. I am overwhelmed by the realization there are no words in all of the English language that will make this any easier. Words aren’t usually a problem for me, my own mother will tell you, but this one pocket of my life always leaves me feeling winded.  

He’ll blame you, the voice pipes up again.

My husband, Paddy, is at home with 10-week-old Asher, who I’ve left for the first time. My shirt is drenched in milk to prove it. I keep glancing at my phone, half-knowing time is against us, and half-hoping Paddy will text and say, “Come back, honey. You don’t have to do it.” But he doesn’t. Because I do. I’m the only one who can have this conversation. 

When we first looked into the process of Paddy adopting Reuben, the cost was far beyond our means, and we decided to leave it and keep praying. Park it and pray, I kept saying, but it wasn’t parked for long before a miracle—the exact amount of money we needed—arrived in our bank account.

Any day now, we are about to open up our lives to weekly visits from a social worker, and the thought of any involvement with Social Services, even the positive kind, makes the former teen mum in me want to curl up in a ball like a hedgehog and create a protective wall of spikes between us. Instead, I am here, trying to prepare my precious boy and help him understand how our family came to be. Rather, how he came to be. 

“I wonder what Daddy and Asher are doing. I bet Asher is screaming,” Reuben accurately surmises, suddenly sounding so grown up, more like my equal.

As certain marks of his childhood have changed and faded, so have mine. As a mother, I know better but I wish I knew less. I wish I could forget the many mistakes I made, in the name of survival, during the years of Just Us. I wonder if I could have done more to keep ‘the dad’ in the picture, to keep it from being Just Us in the first place. Our current life is a dream come true, but will he grow up to resent me? What if the choices I made, or didn’t make, are going to give him some hefty mental health issues some day? How do I make sure he doesn’t think he was an ‘accident’? A mistake? Abandoned?

Why is this part of his story, God?

Reuben interrupts my prayers, “What’s your favorite thing about the Morvenegan Volcan (see—Millennium Falcon from Stars Wars) I made?'' A question which always feels like a test to make sure I’ve listened during the guided tours of his Lego constructions. 

“Uhhh … I love the chef’s kitchen. It’ll come in useful when they’re hungry after a mission.” He nods and takes another lick of ice-cream, satisfied with my answer and equally satisfied with his own architectural creativity.  

I inhale. “Reubs, you know how the social worker is coming soon to help daddy adopt you? To help make him your daddy forever … ”

“Yeah, the judge is going to make a mini-law. I’ll get a certificate like a Build-a-Bear birth certificate, won’t I? Will we go to Nando’s after, to celebrate?” This kid loves a celebration.

“Yes, and you know how you and daddy are special because you chose each other…” 

And then without telling him how babies are made when the mum and dad are teenagers themselves, I explain how God uses part of a man and part of a woman to make a baby. Through gritted teeth, I tell Reuben that the man God used to make him didn’t know how to be a daddy. He listens in silence as, choosing every word carefully, I recount the early portion of his life. 

“That’s why God brought someone who did know how to be your daddy. And you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to both of us,” I finish, waiting for the air to refill my lungs. 

Silence.

I feel the tears edging my eyelids, wishing he was older so I could say so much more, and wishing he was younger so I didn’t have to say anything at all. He stands up and pats the grass off his shorts and I search his face. He has those eyes.

More silence. 

He finally leans over and gives me a hug.

“It must have been hard for you when it was Just Us.” 

He runs off to get his ball and that’s it. 

I realize what I see in his eyes is compassion. 

The tears spill over onto my cheeks. In this moment where he feels nothing but pure compassion for me, I wonder where he found this empathy beyond his years, when just this morning he couldn’t fathom why he can’t ‘bop’ a 10-week-old on the head with a balloon. His compassion undoes me.

I think of all the conversations I had with Paddy when we were Just Friends. I’d put Reuben to bed and jump into my own, ready to text him all night. I’d get a lot of laughs at university telling stories of mine and Reuben’s antics and I often felt like a novelty act to the other young students. I needed to play the role in case they worked out that I wasn’t the ‘Strong Independent Woman Smashing the Stereotype’ I pretended to be. Paddy would listen to my tales as well, but he would often respond with a different, gentle confirmation: “it must be hard.” His compassion undid me. I knew I could lay it all bare with him and he wouldn’t walk away. Obviously, I was ready to marry him within five minutes of knowing him, and when our wedding day eventually came around, I knew he had always looked at me as though I was wearing white. 

I wonder if this compassion Reuben shows me is another miracle, or a product of nurture over nature. Or both. I guess it’s natural to become like the person you spend the most time with, but I now know who my firstborn really looks like. And if both of these men can show me this unnerving compassion, maybe I can show some of it to myself. You did your best.   

***

Weeks later, the heat continues and we eventually make it to 'our beach’ on the edge of Belfast Lough which flows from the city out into the Irish Sea. When I say ‘beach’, I really mean a small patch of dirty sand where we build castles and choose not to notice the rusted bikes and condom wrappers the sea has coughed up overnight. As I sit down on a rock to nurse Asher and make a passing comment about how uncomfortable I am, Reuben stops digging in the sand and without missing a beat asks, “Is there anything I can do to help?” 

Without thinking I respond, as though it’s a reflex,  “No, it’s okay, thanks anyway.”

He goes back to digging and I get deja vu. We’ve just had the exact same exchange, word for word that I’ve had with Paddy multiple times. It’s a routine we’ve developed without realizing; a repetitive dance in the pandemonium of newborn life. And even though there probably isn’t much he can do in that particular moment, he asks anyway. Always. And without realizing, Reuben has inherited the same dance from his dad. 

As we’re walking back to the car, we recognize the runner heading our way. 

“Sorry. Can’t stop. I’m on the clock,” he pants, looking at Asher, “Congratulations! He’s so like Paddy!” Off he runs.

And I smile at Reuben. To me you look the most like him.

Guest essay written by Rebecca Smyth. Rebecca lives just outside Belfast, Northern Ireland and she has been a mother her whole adult life. She says it’s taken her an embarrassingly long time to realize that writing is her way of seeing God in her life and she hopes that maybe, through her words, you might see Him in yours too. For the last few years she has worked in a women’s ministry role at her church, but right now she’s ‘just’ a mum. In this season, she’s happiest on a slow Saturday morning, while her husband makes the coffee and she wades through lego to snuggle her boys. Bonus points if there’s pastries. Oh, and a book. Always a book. You can find her on Instagram or at her blog.