I’m just going to come out and say it: part of the difficulty, for me, of The Kid’s bumpy recovery is that it stole my opportunity to wrap up this part of his story and send it packing. I was all set to make a triumphant return to social media, posting pictures of his upright head and smiling face, letting those who have supported us know that their thoughts and prayers prevailed and we would be living out the rest of our days in the kind of domestic bliss most people only pretend to have attained via Facebook status updates. I even wondered to myself if I would get spoiled, take things for granted, venture far from grace once everything was fixed.

I needn’t have worried.

When it all feels like one cosmic joke at your expense, when the weight of your expectations come crashing down and your sense of entitlement is both revealed and painfully disassembled, what are you left with? For me, the answer was: a lovely place setting for one at my own pity party. I felt bitter. Confused. Betrayed. So I felt very, very sorry for myself for a few days. I don’t doubt that I was (even more) difficult to live with, to be around, for those who have to tolerate me ad infinitum thanks to the bonds of matrimony and genetics. I resisted and cried and got angry.

I don’t regret a second of it.

Grace stood beside me at that pity party, passing on participating but willing to offer a lift, and waited until I was ready to look up again. To believe again. And then grace quietly loved me out of my state, eyes red and throat thick and heart bruised, and pointed me back in its intended direction.

I don’t regret it, because it was honest and I am flawed, and sometimes I have to be reminded of that to know the fullness of grace’s work.

Not that I’m over it, or that I’ll never venture to those depths again. On Wednesday, for instance, I hauled The Kid into his neurosurgeon’s office and waited with him in one of the many rooms we’ve frequented there, watching as he banged cabinets open and shut, silently cheering him on. That’s right, buddy. Leave your MARK. And when the doctor came in and brought a lack of answers with him, when he mentioned the possibility of the halo going back on, I wondered if anyone had ever slapped him in this room.

So yeah, there might be some residual anger.

But the strangest thing happened after that urge toward violence passed. And this was it: I didn’t cry. Not immediately, anyway, and when I revisit that possibility of Halo: The Sequel in my mind…well, first of all, I refuse to stay there long. And then, after I peel back the layers of rage and hysteria, I find the strangest sense of peace. Almost like it passes understanding. Because I know, more even than I know the most festive color theme for a pity party, that it’s going to be okay. And I feel that maybe I’m reaching that stage of enlightenment that Whitney sang about, that bend in the road of grace, in which it really is possible to transcend what is happening in loyalty to what could be. To go by more than just what I see.

Because, with faith in anything beyond myself, isn’t that sort of the point?

I’ve wanted an easy button in the midst of this slog. Instead, I have been the recipient of slow-cooked, incremental hope. Grace in the moments rather than big events. Like the fact that, despite TK’s rhythmic cries throughout the day, those days always end now with him sitting on my lap, his head on my chest, as books are read–something we couldn’t do with the halo. There are the moments in public, like this morning in Target, when sitting in the cart becomes too much for him right when they’re ringing us up and I have to pick him up, hold him close, sing into his ear, and not care what the people around us think. There are the episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on repeat and the forty minutes it takes to dry my hair because comfort breaks are needed and the renditions of “Hold On” sung to him from a prone position on the couch while he circles the dining room and I’m counting the seconds until TH gets home because we have officially run out of things to do.

“Grace sat with me until I could walk in it again,” reads a page of the book that arrived yesterday as a gift to me, just in time. I find that’s how most things I need are arriving these days–just in time. Like the Lent devotional I read this morning while TK had a few moments of peace with his blocks, the one that mentioned the bow. Formerly a weapon, now a symbol of hope, and it appeared among the clouds–with them, not after they had passed.