Who Are my Messengers?

After my husband, my boys are the great blessing of my life. Their names are Benjamin and Theo. Benjamin is 3 and Theo is 5. To me, they are the most beautiful boys in the world. Benji was born golden. He has strawberry blond hair, straight as can be, blue blue eyes, and full lips. When Theo was born he looked like a Mexican (He is a Fernandez after all). He had a full head of black hair, and his eyes looked black, too. Now he looks like a little French schoolboy, or a boy from a Caravaggio painting, with a head of brown curls, a perfect boy's body, dark soulful eyes with impossibly long lashes, and eyebrows that look like they were painted on with a Chinese landscape painter's fine brush.  They are drawn from completely different palettes, and yet, if you shaved their heads, and looked at their profiles in black and white, they look like they could be nothing but brothers. 

I often wonder where they came from, and how they ended up with me. When I was pregnant with Benjamin I saw the movie Hotel Rwanda, about an incredible man who harbored Tutsis (or was it Hutus?) in his hotel, so they would not be slaughtered in that country's horrible genocide. It was a gruesome movie, but uplifting, too, to know that there was a man like this rich hotel owner who would risk everything to save people he did not know in his five star hotel. 

As I watched the movie I had this premonition that the baby I carried inside me would be a peace maker, who would contribute great kindness to the world. (He was conceived when I was in the middle of a strange, cultish breathing, dreaming, yogic seminar for a news story on a group called the Art of Living, so perhaps it is fitting that I had a woo woo premonition like this...) But as they grow up, I do sometimes feel that both of them have been here before.

With Benjamin the feeling is stronger. Theo feels new, fresh, so happy to be here. He wakes up singing. He is joy.

Benjamin arrived as if he had already gone through something terrible before. In preschool self-portraiture exercises he paints himself black, even after he looks in the mirror. I like to think this life is his easy life. Before, he suffered. This time around he gets to be a white, rich, American male, with enough food to eat and parents and a brother who love him and adore him and will hug him as much as he needs.  He still likes to always be touching someone, even when he is sleeping.  He is holding onto us so we won't slip away.

They say that if people have lived a past life it can remain with them until they are three or four. Then it starts to fade. So last night as we lay snuggling in bed, after the lights were out, I asked him: "What would I do without you?" And he said, "You'd be working." (How did he know that?) "But does Mommy want to be with you?" "Yes." I asked him: "Were you here before?" He said: "Yes." 

I said, "Where? Africa? America? Mexico?" He said, "With you. But not with Theo and Daddy. Just you." 

I wonder if he was. Was he my son? I told Jonathan. He said Benji probably was my boy in a past life. Maybe he saved my life last time, and this time I have to take care of him.

I don't know. 

All I know is they are my traveling companions for this life, and I could not have picked three better people to go on this adventure with.