“I love you because you’re you.”

I’ve been saying it for four years now, first to The Kid and now to both him and Little Brother. And damn if it hasn’t been tested, to the point that makes me wonder just how much of my love has been conditional, spinning on the axis of my own convenience and self-interest, waxing and waning based on the successes and disappointments of others.

I have not loved well.

There were so many rules before: before failure, before New York, before grace, before marriage, before kids. How’s this for a random sampling: Always eat your vegetables. Cups go in the dishwasher. No kids in the bed. Dirty socks into the hamper. But you know, it’s hard to make a nonverbal kid say please and thank you. I remember when we couldn’t even get him to sign it.

Now, every night at varying times, I hear the thud of his tiny feet as they hit his carpet, the patter of them as they run across the hall, and his quick breathing, often paired with a giggle, as he climbs onto our bed.

There was a time when I wondered if he’d ever be able to climb our bed, summit that peak that, like so many others, seemed insurmountable. It’s hard to tell a kid who keeps crushing his impossibles to back away from them. What I’m not saying is that we often have a kid between us. What I’m saying is that we often have our kid between us. And the difference between the two is the difference between Me then and now; between rules and grace; between conditional and unconditional. What it looks like at our house, anyway. And I’m learning to be okay with that. (Not with the socks, though. That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer.)

I remember talking to a fellow mom a few years ago, before our shit hit the fan and I thought TK was just being recalcitrant, about parenting. She didn’t eff around, I tell you: fruit was considered a dessert. She Tiger Mom-ed her way all over this terrain, I mean Baby-Wised the shit out of it. I felt so inferior: I was going to be that mom! I read that book multiple times before my son even came out! And here I couldn’t even get my kid to touch an orange food, let alone a green one, and don’t even get me started on nap awakenings. My failures seemed to be stacking up at a much faster rate than any successes.

This was around the time the scans started coming back. Around the time life–and grace–shattered what our milestones and “normal” would look like. That different was the name of our game. At first, it felt like a horrible joke. But more and more, it feels like utter freedom.

Because it turns out that as attractive as black-and-white can be, my soul longs for a more spacious residence. A more forgiving one. Yeah, I sleep-trained my kids, but guess what? They don’t stay trained forever. Shit happens, and it often feels like it happens almost every night. I need something more than rules, and the keeping of them, to keep me alive. To bring me to life.

This past Sunday The Husband and I kept the pre-K class at our church, which meant we got to watch TK in action alongside his spiritual colleagues. I was both excited and nervous: when it comes to this boy, I feel everything so deeply–even more, it seems, than if it were happening to me. What if he were the outcast? What if his feelings were hurt? I approached the day with even more than my usual anxiety, which is to say, DEFCON 5.

And I watched him. To be honest, a dozen or so three-to-five year-olds running around a room is a bit like last call at a bar: people running into each other, stealing things from each other, laughing then crying, just a lot of nonsense. All the while, my boy kept mostly to himself, often playing next to or near another kid, sometimes watching other kids tearing around, often pulling me to the CD player to tell me which number was on the screen. He was beautiful, being himself, and I found myself loving this demeanor with which I’ve done internal battle, this quietness of his that I feared was a silence, this studious examination of working parts and this surveying of the scene rather than total immersion in it. I loved it, and I loved him–for being him. It felt like freedom; this gentle humbling that consists of everything shifting into its rightful place.

Yesterday morning his therapist texted to cancel his two-hour afternoon appointment, and the panic rose up within me as my plans for the afternoon, the topography of my day, all fell to pieces. And during those hours, as LB slept upstairs and I should have been alone at my computer, I instead played outside with my boy, bouncing a red ball up to him on our porch as he dissolved into laughter and said, “More, mama. More, please.” This boy who was locked inside himself for so long, inching out here and bounding out there, and I see that this difference between What I Think Should Be and What Is–this difference is the terrain where grace runs interference, where my own falling short is reflected and erased, where my stubborn refusal to stop measuring myself is forgiven and redeemed. Where I am set free. Where I am being taught how to love, and be loved. Where we are all the beloved.