S Woolley Kimball 🇵🇸🇮🇱🇨🇭

My firstborn is 50. He was ten days overdue. Nine pounds. July 12, 1976—the hottest summer I can remember, a record-breaking heat wave in Provo. I had gained sixty pounds and was so uncomfortable that my husband and his track teammate, Ted, took me golfing, convinced all that walking might start labor. That was a long day! Nothing. Then this round-faced, chubby baby finally arrived, announcing himself with a fierce cry that seemed to say, I’ve already had enough. He cried all the time. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t sleep. I was a brand-new mother. I thought surely I was doing everything wrong. Life has not been kind to him. Alcohol stole half his life. His marriage ended. His sons carry wounds that have left little room for forgiveness. He’s drifted in and out of homelessness, struggled to hold a job, and carries enough regret and shame to break any man. And yet… There is still something deeply good in him. Tenderness has somehow survived where so much else has been lost. I have seen kindness in him that makes no logical sense given all the wreckage. Why he is still here, after all these years and all the ways he has brushed against death, is a mystery known only to his Savior. Motherhood can often bring obsession with fixing what is broken. Sometimes it is simply refusing to stop loving. I am eternally his mother. What a sacred stewardship that has been—to walk beside one soul through grief and hope, failure and mercy, believing that God’s story is never finished simply because ours has become too painful to read. Happy 50th birthday, my son. I have loved you from your first cry. I will love you until my last breath. And beyond that, I trust the Savior to carry what you and I cannot. Happy birthday.