Recently, in some of my blog posts, I realize I’ve been hard on my boys. My burping, farting, fooling around boys. I’ve ranted about them to you, cried over them to you, but I’m not sure I’ve ever told you just how much I love my boys. Just watching them be boys puts a smile on my face most of the time. When I’m not horrified. Sometimes my boys horrify me.

Like a few days ago when I found them with their Opa butchering a buck in our front yard. They tied the poor thing up in one of my lovely maple trees lining our sidewalk so they could skin it. Granted we need the meat, our freezer is nearly empty, and the boys eat like a small army now, but the front yard to skin your deer?

Really, boys?!

Actually, really Opa?!

It’s the men raising these boys I should probably address, though I learned years ago Opa is his own man. I grew up watching my daddy skin deer. And all kinds of other critters too in the yard. This is just Opa. And my boys are just my boys. This is my normal. My life. And most of the time, I love it.

The truth is sometimes in the middle of the night, I walk into my boys’ bedroom– our youngest four boys sleep in a set of double bunk beds in the same room– and I stare at their precious, little faces before I tuck blankets under their chins. I stand there in the glow of their night lamp and marvel that I am their mom. That they came out of my fragile, little body one at a time.

I’m often asked this question. “So you had seven kids one at a time?”

One at a time is always stressed. Like seven can’t happen one at a time for a woman.

I’m always tempted to say, “No, I gave birth like an old sow pig. The whole litter squealing out of me one morning in the barn and I’ve never been the same.” But I never say this. Quietly, humbly, I say, “One at a time,” remembering how each pregnancy tested my body and tested my faith and forced me to die to myself a little bit more each day. Sometimes a lot more each day.

Not one of my pregnancies was easy. All involved bed rest. And medication to quiet contractions. I’ve had a torn placenta, a premature baby, a possible Down syndrome diagnosis. With our fourth baby, I spent five months in bed, only allowed to use the bathroom, and went to the hospital twice to stop premature labor. I could tell you so much more about the battles to give birth to these seven babies, but I won’t.

All I can say is our babies were a miracle. To me, each one felt like a miracle from God.

Your babies are a miracle, too. You may not know this, but growing a baby in your womb is not some simple little act of nature. It’s not like growing a tomato plant in your garden for a few short, summer months. Pregnancy takes real sacrifice. Sometimes a winter of sacrifice stretching your body. Stretching your heart. And it’s just the beginning of stretching your life out for someone else to fit there. Your body will never be the same and neither will you. That little human being with tiny, grasping hands and a hungry, little mouth latched onto you every few hours. And you learn what it really means to be a prisoner of love. A prisoner of hope tethered to this living, breathing little human being you have big plans for. Oh, such grand plans. Perhaps your baby will grow up big and strong like his daddy and wear a flight suit and protect a nation.

This hits me the other day in church when the pastor reads right out of the Bible, “You are a prisoner of hope.” Zechariah 9:12. And I’m thinking of our oldest son right then, and my spirit swells with this terrible longing, this deep, roiling desire because I hope with all my heart our son returns to what he knows.

Jesus.

When Luke was little, he wanted to be a soldier like his daddy. Little Luke used to sing this song that I sometimes still sing in my head and in my heart for him. “I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery, but I’m in the Lord’s army. Yes, Sir!”  Luke would do these movements with the song he learned at his Baptist preschool, like he was riding, shooting, saluting. I can still see it so clearly in my memory.

“You don’t think I pray,” Luke said to me the other day.

“Do you pray?” I asked.

“Yes, I pray,” he answered in exasperation.

“What do you pray for?”

“I pray that I don’t suck in football.”

“I pray that too,” I told Luke with tears in my eyes.

I’ve spent so much time on my knees for my boys. When I was a young mom, my mother-in-law told me a story about her great aunt who’d recently passed away at a ripe old age. A devout little woman who prayed all through the war that Jesus would bring her three sons home in one piece to her. She’d walk on her knees to the church, she lived right across the street from the church, a dusty San Antonio street on her knees pleading with Jesus for her sons’ safety. This during World War I and they all came home to hug their praying mama.

I get a lot of hugs from my boys. These flying into your arms, rough kind of, beat you up hugs. I’ve had my boys literally knock me down with a hug. Lay me out on the floor by the force of their eager, all consuming, little boy affection.

“You need to enjoy this, Paula, he’s your last one,” Scott said to me the other day when Cruz wouldn’t leave me alone. When sitting on the porch swing with me, Cruz tangled his fingers into my hair and pressed his nose to mine, and yanked my attention away from his daddy by yanking my hair. To Cruz, he was caressing my hair, but it felt like yanking to me. Then four-year-old Cruz grabbed the chains of the porch swing and flung us around, banging the whole swing around, thinking I would really enjoy this wild ride.

I didn’t enjoy it. Not one bit. I just wanted to sit gently on the swing and spend a little quiet time with my husband, but here we were bucking like a mechanical bull. You don’t see this in porch swing magazines. In Pinterest pictures of porch swings. Porch swings are meant to be a peaceful affair. Not with my boys. The bigger ones aren’t even allowed on the porch swing anymore except for Luke. He swings so politely now.

But Cruz was born to humble me, this I know. He was my last pregnancy at 43 years old, surprisingly, my easiest pregnancy, and now this sturdy little boy wears me out every day and fifty isn’t far away. I will have a second grader when I turn fifty. But today in my 47th year, Cruz still sits on my lap every night and rubs my belly. Presses his sticky, little cheek to my belly, maybe pretending he’s still nursing, though I weaned him at a year old because our daughter was getting married and we needed to shop for a wedding dress and Scott made me wean him because he said I needed to focus on Cami before she left our house. Plus, Cruz had started biting. He bit me so hard, I got an infection and had to get on antibiotics and was really sick for awhile.

Still, I hated weaning Cruz so soon, but I wouldn’t have missed seeing that dress on our oldest for anything in the world in that dressing room down in Sacramento. Nothing compares to a moment like this when a mother’s eyes meet her daughter’s eyes and the daughter says, “Is this one okay?” And you nod your head and tears blur your eyes because you know this dress is more than okay. It’s the dress your daughter will wear when her daddy gives her away.

And I know.

I know.

Cruz is getting too big for this belly thing we do at night now. I probably need to put a stop to this before he starts kindergarten, but it’s so sweet. It just melts my heart when Cruz presses his little face against my belly and love too big for words overwhelms this tired, old mommy.

A mommy’s love is sometimes just too big. Too much. Too nerve-wracking.

Loving my boys the way I do is nerve-wracking. “I’m too high-strung,” I told Scott this past weekend when he made me stay home from the tide pools at the ocean this time.

“Yes, you are too high-strung,” Scott agreed. “The boys and I are going to have fun. You can stay here and pray for us to be safe.”

For a minute, I was mad at Scott. I like going to the tide pools. The girls and I used to poke around the tide pools looking for starfish when they were small. Not small starfish. When our daughters were small. But now the boys hit the tide pools like men from Discovery’s Deadliest Catch, challenging the waves. The rocks. Everything. Why do boys have to challenge everything? Even tide pools?

Days later, it is evening tide, and we are home from the ocean. I sit on the porch swing with Scott, savoring the sunset. In a few short minutes, here they all come. Five boys on the back porch with us now with the sun painting the horizon a real pretty pink. It’s the only pink in my life these days. Me and my boys and their dad laugh and talk and tell funny, family stories.

We do this on our back porch, and sometimes a football magically appears, and is tossed between our chairs, and then before I know it, we are on the lawn playing football at dusk, and the boys want me on their team.

Who wants a 47 year old mom on their team? But my boys do.

Maybe because a few years ago, I bought us all Nerf guns for Christmas and we played capture the flag in the yard on Christmas day. Scott was one captain and my future son-in-law Drew was the other captain. This back before the boys realized I’d been raised by Opa, the sure-shot who butchers deer in the front yard. Drew got stuck with Cami and Lacy and me and we played boys against the girls with Drew coaching us and guarding the flag while Cami, Lacy, and I went to war against the boys and the daddy.

Early in the game, the first round if I remember correctly, three boys came at me at once and I shot the first one square in the forehead, the second one dead in the chest, and the third boy took two shots to bring down as they ran full speed at me trying to get to our flag. Not one of their Nerf bullets hit me. Even Drew was impressed with my shooting skills, and he’s hard to impress. We girls won. That day I became Super Nerf Mom in my boys’ eyes.

God must have known I needed to earn this respect from my boys because overall, I’m a softy. Scott is the hammer in our house. I’m the lap you sit on when you need some lovin’ or need some prayer or need your hair combed. Our third son, Joey was born with this wildly, curly hair. I would spray it with detangler and run a comb though it every night with him on my lap. One day, Oma came to the door having just gotten a perm. Two-year-old Joey took one look at Oma, and ran for the bathroom. He returned with the detangler spray and a comb, his precious little face so worried over Oma’s hair. It was the last perm Oma ever got.

I really could go on forever about my boys. I’m sure all you mommies out there could go on too. There’s nothing like raising boys. It really is hair-raising. And heart rending.

Like the day I shook Luke awake in his crib because he’d slept more than a couple of hours, which he never did, and I wasn’t sure he was breathing. My heart was pounding like crazy, ripping in half at the thought that my baby boy might not wake up. A friend had just lost her baby to SIDS, and I was so scared I could lose my child this way, too.

“What are you doing?” Scott asked.

Luke let out a wail that was music to my ears as I scooped him out of his crib and buried my nose in his soft little neck. “He’s okay,” I said, dizzy with relief.

“Are you crazy?” Scott asked in unbelief. “We were sleeping! The baby was sleeping!”

“You were sleeping,” I accused. “I was wide awake worrying about our son. He never sleeps that long.” As if worry could save baby Luke from SIDS. Could protect him from all harm. I worried up a storm back then. The day I traded worry for prayer changed my life.

And my boys have changed my life. “It’s like I live in an army barracks now,” I told the man helping enroll us in Obamacare yesterday. He was listing all our unmarried children, Lacy, and then boy after boy, and then he looked at me with wide eyes when he was done. “We’ve enrolled a lot of families, and only one other time have I put down this many names.”

“I know. I can’t believe I gave birth to all of them,” I told him. When I sit through something like, listing their birth dates, their names, their social security numbers, it always surprises me. That all these boys are mine.