Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone’s face that gave me time to breathe and settle in. I didn’t know that wounds and scars were what we find welcoming, because they are like ours. –Anne Lamott

It’s the beginning and end of the day when my patience wears thinnest, when exhaustion hasn’t lifted or has just descended and every deviation from routine feels like a warning bell ringing in my skull, a scream against sanity. It’s the beginning and end…and, of course, the time in between them too.

Yesterday morning was such a Monday morning, with its unforgiving abruptness, its insistency on showing up and shoving the weekend out of the way. A dirty pull-up, a premature sit-down, and soiled shorts turned a brief trip to the bathroom into a wardrobe change, which on Monday morning, or any morning, or at any time, can feel like Just. Too. Much. I bent into the shit, hit my head on the door, punched it and swore.

I hate this. I hate the words that erupt, the anger that consumes, the undignified nature of it all, and what comes after–the lies that whisper into my ear: You’ll never change. What kind of a mother can’t hold it together past 8 am? And the worst: You’re going to ruin them.

We got cleaned up. I loaded The Kid and Little Brother into the car. I turned off the radio. Through tears, I asked for his forgiveness, not knowing how much he understood, then spoke the words I know he does: I love you all the time.

From the backseat, he smiled. Grace resettled in my heart. The lies began to whimper and skulk away. They’re just so undignified next to the truth.

I dropped TK off and had a parking-lot conversation with another mom about this journey, the hard and beautiful of it all, the shorthand that our particular carpool line speaks: unexpected twists, hairpin turns, shadowy valleys and breathtaking peaks. The parking-lot conversations that are desert oases, Monday-morning miracles. LB and I headed south, driving then for an hour to meet a stranger who was already a friend–my second such relationship brokered over email and bolstered by twin worldviews, texts that are prayers relayed without ever seeing each other in person. We sat on her floor, LB punctuating our conversation with emphatic babbles as we discussed our boys’ brains; the diagnoses being worked under and being reconfigured; the things the doctors got wrong and the ways we weren’t enough and the grace that envelops it all.

Monday morning miracles.

We drove back in the rain. I thought about our visit to the geneticist last week, when he looked at the history and the images and our heads and our sons and talked about chromosomes, about how apart from the syndromes and the diseases there are also tiny deletions and duplications and coding errors–you know, mistakes, and that one of these could have led–probably did lead–to the bone tilt and the MRI changes and the speech delay, and to find out we’d have to take some blood and then the approach wouldn’t change but there might be an answer, a missing puzzle piece set in place. There’s still a bruise there, though, so we’ll get the blood drawn later. But for now, in the time between the recommendation and the needle, the tilt and the test, I think about how this? This is no mistake. This boy who sees light and patterns that I don’t until he shows me, who draws compassion out of people who thought they had lost theirs (I chief among them), who pats his brother on the head before bedtime–these aren’t errors in coding. Not when they’ve turned us into fighters, not when they’ll make him who he’s meant to be. Not when they were written into him by love. No matter how crazy love looks any given Monday morning.

People will make mistakes about him, but nothing about him is a mistake.

And so while I practice saying yes, while I sit with hands open (trying not to punch doors), I think about how I am being given a “yes” in return. How he is. How that’s what it means to be beloved, to be welcome. How it’s the in-between time, the space from being written into being and taken to our true home, that’s the trickiest; the place where it’s hardest to remember who we are. How our similar scars and brain scans and valleys and peaks roughen us up and fit us together, like puzzle pieces waiting to find out that this is where we fit the whole time. That loving, and being loved, it means welcoming each other home.