Every once in a while, I like to feature a guest post. It is good to look at joy from a different view than just mine.
This week Undaunted Joy features
. Rebecca and I met through a marvelous online class through Collegium Institute in 2021 on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. If you ever have a chance to take a class with them—DO! Frankly, I’d be lost without her. She’s been helping me edit the essays for Undaunted Joy, the book. Her keen eye, tender heart and insight has been a gift to me. We have not met in person but when we do, I will squeeze her so hard, it might hurt.You might know that I had quiet an overbite growing up (the picture above is me for illustration) so I really connect with Rebecca’s gorgeous prose poem. Grateful Presence Journal let us reprint it here.
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Jesus, My Son’s Buckteeth
The orthodontist wants to fix. Malocclusion: Dentist-speak for “bad fit.” And I already long for the familiar faces he pulls with his God-given teeth, my son, under his cowlicked hair. Hair that will darken, like mine, and fall out, like my brother’s. In time.
I watch him at Mass, mouth breathing through the Penitential Act: “Therefore I ask blessed Mary,” we pray. She’s first in line, in having God’s ear, before the angels even. But I’m busy remembering the way my boy used to fit his smooth, narrow body between my shoulders. Hug at my chest height and not think it weird. Wasn’t he just rooted here? To mother is to grieve goodness—vitamins and minerals, height and breadth—and distance.
Hands off, Pater, I want to yell. I am still this boy’s patria: Latin for “native land.” Mary might have said the same. Me, I count fourteen baby teeth, long-rooted and drying, I’ve slipped from under his pillow and keep in a jar. I shake them like relics, like dice. One day this will be all that remains of him, in a jar in a shoebox in a closet. Fourteen yellowing memento mori.
“Your job is to keep them alive,” his doctor said of baby him and his twin, as the man of science flagged mortality spikes on the chart labeled “American Male.” Ages two and sixteen, pointed up, sharp as spears. Maybe age thirty-three, too. Probably twenty-one. I mean, the house always wins.
Those early days and sleepless nights, when we counted their age by weeks and months—so tenuous, those times of croup and wheezing—keeping them alive seemed like the most I could do, and then the least. O NICU nurses. O Moms Groups, O Library Story-Time, O Coffee Shop with toy chest. Forgive the mess. Pardon the dust of this life I cling to.
O Mary, I am sorry you had only one, but I can’t spare (and I atone for holding them too tightly). You see, the other one is also perfectly imperfect, with slumped shoulders and scapulae like chicken wings to fly.
“Jesus, My Son’s Buckteeth” was originally published in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry 2023.
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Rebecca Moon Ruark is a Pushcart Prize-nominated, Catholic writer whose musings on the faith and parenthood have appeared at Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Vita Poetica Journal, the Dappled Things blog, and at her own blog, Rust Belt Girl. Rebecca received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the features editor for Parhelion Literary Magazine. A Mass cantor, she is at work on a novel about the healing power of song. She lives in Maryland with her family. Learn more at rebeccamoonruark.com
If you would like to write a guest post, send me your submission. Perhaps we can find a home for it! With over 1200 subscribers, I’d love to use this Substack to share other joyful voices.
Thank you for featuring my prose poem, Shemaiah. Our connection makes me so joyful!