The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. –G.K. Chesterton

“Yo, J.C., you takin’ any requests?” asked Daryl Dixon, who had gone from being a one-episode blip to a character poised to earn the hero mantle. Because sometimes the hero is the guy with a dead squirrel in his back pocket and a necklace made of zombie ears. Often the best characters are the messiest, most broken ones. And always, the best path is the one that isn’t predictable or straight.

Friday morning, I began the blood-pressure-raising, sweat-ring-producing task of navigating Atlanta downtown traffic to attend a dental convention. And every part of that is just as fun as it sounds. Meanwhile, The Husband underwent a CAT scan and headed home for a breakfast sandwich. An hour later, inside a hotel ballroom where I was sitting on the floor for a lecture to which I had arrived late, I received TH’s text. He would be undergoing an appendectomy later that day. I headed back to the parking deck and home to shed m’business pants, then to his room in the ER, and we began the process of waiting for surgery. Fifteen months ago, he did the same with me. At the end of that procedure, we had The Kid. At the end of this one, we were minus one appendix but plus one chance to improve my attitude from last week’s “woe is me” response to TH’s basketball injury. That recovery of his took a day. This will be at least a week. Well played, JC.

The lecture I left, apropos of something, was about the effect of dentistry on the spine. Techniques to better manage the load placed on the back when one bends over constantly while staring at tiny objects (insert crass joke here). I’m thankful to be in a marriage that shares the load of daily living; but sometimes–like when your spouse is lying on an operating table, and shortly thereafter–the weight becomes unevenly distributed. “When they said in sickness and in health, I really didn’t see this kind of shit coming,” a friend jokingly told me, and neither TH nor I saw what was coming after I got off the table over a year ago and we carried TK into our well-ordered life. Headed downtown, covered by three navigating systems (car’s GPS, phone’s GPS, and TH on speaker), I doubt I’d have made the trip had I known I’d be turning right back around. It’s a good thing we can’t always see ahead where the road forks.

There are the moments when you’re lost because you haven’t found what you’re meant for yet, like those Sundays spent following the rules when I was growing up, or those years in New York before I met him, or the seconds I wandered the ER hallway with TH once again directing me by phone while I proclaimed, “I WILL find you!” in my best Daniel-Day Lewis voice. And there are the moments when you’re lost because you are waiting for clarity or the results or assurance, like the hour I spent in the waiting room until a kindly doctor in a tie and fedora came out and held my hand in both of his and said it all went perfectly. Or the time tomorrow, when TK will be getting a CAT scan of his own that will provide more material for the biography of his gloriously imperfect neck, and TH and I will pretend to read or check our email or whatever it is you do when what you’re really doing is being reduced to whatever you believe most and crying out for help. There are operations that bring new life out of you and operations that excise what is unnecessary, and the recovery through what is left behind after both takes time and is full of grace.

This time, after this operation, I was the one waiting in the room while he was in recovery, and when they brought him back to me, all I could think was that he looked just like TK did after his surgery. And that who I am now is the person who takes care of both of them, except for the times when I need them to take care of me, and that’s how load-sharing goes in our house. Then I thought about all it took to get me here, to this hospital room late on a Friday night, all the moments of lostness that have been and that are to come; tomorrow, for example. What I’ve learned from my own navigating has only sent me in circles, circles where I’ve felt like an impostor because I was one, holding my head up and putting on a show of perfection and acting all whole, like I was a masterpiece of my own creation. Then came the tripping and falling and looking up and seeing that there was a hand waiting to lead me the whole time, a road I was meant for full of twists and turns and scratchy underbrush, and while I may not carry around dead squirrels yet I sure as hell have plenty of scars from the trip. There’s no perfection on this road, at least not mine, but there is recognition: recognition of something bigger through moments of feeling lost; recognition of a plan that takes my load from me and redeems everything behind me; recognition of people with faces and scars like mine who walk redemption’s messy road with me.