The Puritan Crier

When you wrote in a letter to my husband
that our first child was a “blessing in disguise,”
I walked miles through my neighborhood
pushing him in his stroller
until the soles of my feet
slapped the question on pavement:
“In disguise of what?”

He had copper curls spilling
over widely spaced blue eyes 
now grown green like my father’s.
A single gene changed his heart’s tilt
to the left on its axis 
and made his blood clot 
slow when skin shredded and bones broke.

You queried if my little family,
father, mother, and even
baby boy
needed to be born again
because the gene could not be fixed.
Had the syndrome stalled our trust
and adoration of Yahweh?

A Reformed reprobate, you called yourself
the Puritan Crier, and spread news of your
sin as proof that even the depraved
are saved in Christ’s
sacrifice on the cross.
But baby boy’s baptism was not enough
to prove his Catholic mother’s gospel of faith.

And though you never thought to address me,
this woman was the one who prayed 
Our Father and Glory Be for the child 
who arrived after physicians said he might not.
And whose husband felt the hand of God, 
a promise that his son would have life,
despite your own apostasy.

Brother by birth,
your genes and mine are synchronized,
but your heart tilts sinisterly
away from Mary
who heard God’s call
that the Lord is with us and
to be not afraid.

For in your attempts to foment
fear and foster conversion to the “Elect,”
revelations of self-loathing lap
at your loins and disguise still from you
my beautiful baby boy 
now eighteen and most assuredly
Christ’s blessing.

For Scott, who always had faith, and for my precious baby boy now grown.