one wish

Yesterday was my birthday.  Months ago, Jack signed up for a woodworking class, six days in Port Townsend, Washington, learning to make a Chippendale chair using only handheld woodworking tools.  The class started this morning, thus our two-day road trip through Idaho, Oregon, and Washington to settle in here for the week.

Initially, Jack thought he would just fly to Washington for his class.  Then we thought about him flying with many heavy woodworking tools in his luggage.  Not too practical, lugging trunks full of finely crafted metal tools. 

Next we thought about him driving his truck to the class with his bags full of planes and saws and scrapers and such.  Fourteen hour drive by himself?  Yes, he's a big boy and fully capable of that drive, but still it didn't seem like the best of ideas.

Jack suggested next that I could drive with him, catch a flight home, then next weekend board a flight back to Washington in order to make the drive home with him.  But seriously, where's the fun in that? 

So we're here.  Or rather, he's off to class and I'm hanging out in the hotel today, making plans for the next few days.  I'm sure it will be a nice break from work and the stresses of life in general.

There's just this one thing.  If I could have one birthday wish--not one of those wishes where you agree to give up everything else, but just a simple wish of what I'd want if I could have anything in the universe right now--it would be so easy to identify that wish.  I'd wish for my kid to be healthy.  I'd wish all of his organs could do their job like any other nearly 34-year-old's organs.  I'd wish for healing and return to normal pumping, beating, filtering, filling, emptying, flowing, maintaining.  I'm not asking for those functions as they exist in a young healthy child.  I'd be delighted if they could be those of a person in his thirties.  I ache for that for him.

And if I can't have that wish, I'd wish that I was whisked home right now, or rather sitting with him at the hospital where I can do nothing but offer the comfort of being his mom, nearby, sitting, waiting for return to his normal.