Becoming
More Than He Knows
SANTANDER,
“Mummy, will you take a picture of me in front of one of these ruins?” Santi asks.
He peruses each one until he settles on “the one with the funny writing on it”. Smiling for the camera, I know that the picture is important to him, somehow connecting him to a part of his identity he hasn’t fully explored yet.
A curiosity and a connection that has not come from me nor from anyone else in the family, but entirely from him.
As we enter Santander’s cathedral, its smell of damp brick and calmness enveloping us like a drug, I see a serenity instantly take hold of him. He gazes at the paintings of Jesus, transfixed by the man, and asks me the tricky question of ‘why they did that to him’.
I reach for the best answer I can find and ask, ‘shall we pray?’ a ritual we have together, each night, as I scratch his back in bed.
Taking a seat on a quiet pew, we hold hands and shut our eyes. I feel a deep stillness stir within me, peppered with the surround sound of hushed whispers and footsteps from visiting tourists.
Suddenly, puncturing the stillness, comes a loud sobbing.
I open my eyes to see Santi, not crying so much as weeping, floods of tears streaming from his eyes.
“Baby what’s up? Why are you sad?” I ask.
He remains silent, clinging to me tightly, so I let him cry, tears flowing, unable to be plumbed.
Eventually, he speaks.
We sit there for a while, holding hands and contemplating, each lost in our own thoughts.
Santi has been… challenging on this trip. That is, the trip has challenged him. The boy that likes schedules, precise departure times, familiar food and space to rail and rant when enraged (which can be often) has had none of that within the compressed walls of our campervan and such whistle-stop tour.
I guess I have challenged him; challenged him to push himself, to get out of his comfort zone, to be more independent… and truthfully, maybe he wasn’t ready for it?
“Mummy what if this bridge collapses when I walk on it?”
“Mummy, what if the ship sinks and we all die?”
“Mummy, what if, what if, what if???”
His little mind is filled with the potentiality of disaster all around him, but here, in the stillness of the cathedral he is calm, as if he knows on some intuitive level that within these ancient, honeyed brick walls, there is something far greater than himself; a remembrance that there is more to life than meets the eye, that there is more to him than meets the eye.
One day, this boy is going to discover that he is capable of so much more than he ever realised. I do hope I can help him get there.
