Five years ago today I allowed a delicate sliver of my heart to slip away from me. I released it and let it carry on outside my body and dwell beside the heart of a precious little baby boy named Landon Anthony Schmidt.
I could feel this tiny sliver of my heart continue to beat outside my body even though I knew this surreal emotion could potentially change everything I deemed to be true about the structure of my mind and soul. I was unaware that a miracle could be so strong that it could literally pull a piece of your heart out of your body, form it into a string of love and wrap it around the heart of another human being like an unbreakable knot of strength. It happened without even trying. A sliver of my heart no longer belonged to me, it would be taken forever by this new born soul and create a beat of it’s own. I could feel that sliver beam with anticipation and dance with wonderment for the unknown.
Giving away a sliver of my heart made me aware that I was no longer responsible just for me. Nothing is this world would ever be about ME again because nothing in the world mattered but HIM.
This sliver of my heart was to be permanently detached for all eternity from it’s home. Everywhere that little boy went, that piece of my heart tagged along. It cried when he cried, it laughed when he laughed. It almost burst the first time he walked and it nearly broke the first time he got a fever. That sliver of my heart sometimes felt like it had attached itself to an emotional roller coaster that heaved along the ups and downs without choice or control. But it protected the heart that was HIS. It felt like a sliver of armor at times. A blanket of love that draped itself around the tip of his heart like a shall. It would never leave him.
This sliver has now been with him for 5 years, although it is no longer just a sliver. It feels like he owns every fiber of my heart. Every ounce of love that my soul is capable of is inevitably consumed in the rhythmic breaths of his life. More and more of my heart has been given away with every passing moment. With every hug, every kiss, every “I love soooooo much mommy”, more and more slices of my heart slip into his. He has promised that he’ll let me kiss the back of his neck 100 times in a row FOREVER if I want to. He promises me that he’ll let me rock him back and forth FOREVER and hold him like a baby for as long as I can lift him. He says I can tuck him in until he’s 20 and he says he’ll always give me the last bite of his ice cream sandwich FOREVER because “he knows how you like the last bite when it’s all melty.” My heart swells up like a helium balloon and floats right outside of my chest and into his. Every day. I want to pause time, rewind moments, and just SNUGGLE for 5 years or so....
A sliver of my heart slipped into the palm of his hand that very moment he wrapped his little warm fingers around my pinky in that hospital bed and it will stay there whether he’s 5 or 50. He has me wrapped around his existence like a string and I wouldn’t want to be tied to anything else in the world but the beating heart of my brown eyed little boy.
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