“The things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful.” –Ben Platt, concluding his Tony acceptance speech

“Can you become…a new version of you?” the voice sang from my screen every week throughout the end of college and the first half of dental school, and I wanted to scream back, “I HOPE SO BECAUSE I’VE BEEN WORKING ON IT MY WHOLE LIFE!” This desire to be something other than the meek, flailing twenty-something (and before that, teenager, and before that, kid) that I seemed to be, it fueled everything I did. My biting sarcasm (and other defense mechanisms), my studying, my clinging to the barest hint of relationship, my move to New York City. LIKE FELICITY! I found comfort in a narrative that appeared to glorify my own. Plus, she got the guy in the end. I mean, they cheated on each other, like, A LOT, but they ended up together.

Meanwhile, it seemed that everywhere I went, there I was. Still. Without the guy.

Now I have three guys. A trinity of males who fill my heart and my washing machine and my waking (and sleeping) hours with concern for their well-being, efforts toward their happiness, irritation at their insubordination. I am the same person I ever was, fighting my own constant inner unholy trinity of frustration, anger, and self-righteousness. I’m also more different from that kid and teenager and twenty-something than I’ve ever been, for being a wife and mother has unlocked parts of me that I never had access to before. Parts I didn’t know existed. Some of them? Damn ugly, recesses of selfishness and a need to control everything/one in my path, writ large in the daily monotony of life within a family. Some of them shocking in their gentleness or ferocity, reflecting the mystery of being a mother, soaked in ambivalent waters that run so deep.

The Kid is getting all Felicity on me, becoming a new version of himself. Or is he just becoming…more himself? I watch as he resembles some type of local celebrity: there are people crossing our path daily who see him coming, and welcome him. He stops and smiles at the mother on Spit Road whose son studies him while she grins big when he walks up, asks him what kind of car he has today. He turns to the next table at restaurants and gives his coy “Hiiiii,” flashing a smile, and when they’re lucky they get a look at that day’s vehicular choice too. He delights babies, who squeal with glee (usually) when he approaches and tickles their feet or pats their faces. His confidence is growing along with his charm. He is becoming unlocked, getting accessed. And it’s beautiful.

But not everyone likes these updated versions of ourselves. This past weekend the boys and I entered the lift at the shopping center, the glass one that we ride without destination multiple times a week, and TK set about pushing the buttons as he does, like an expert, the lights flashing beneath his fingers that are so attuned to when the door needs to open and close. It’s like a language he’s learned. But not one everyone speaks it.

An older woman got on the lift and narrowed her eyes at the injustice of a child being permitted such freedom. At the audacity of a mother who gave the permission. She watched his every move, to the point that she missed her stop and became outraged. What follows is a transcript of the ensuing conversation:

Nasty Old Bitch (NOB): He just made me miss my stop!
Me (doubtful, but willing to put it to rest quickly): Well I’m sorry about that. But I don’t think it’s the end of the world. (Okay, maybe that wasn’t very placating after all.)
NOB (Stares at him, trying to block his hands from the buttons, growing increasingly agitated as the elevator goes the opposite direction from her destination; finally glares at me): Where are you even GOING?
Me: We’re not going anywhere. We’re riding for fun.
NOB (interrupting me, nodding so hard I’m worried her plastic surgery scars will rip): That’s what I thought. RIDING FOR FUN. You have no business doing that. And he has no business pushing buttons.
Me: Like I said, I don’t think it’s the end of the world. And if you can’t handle a kid who wants to ride the lift for a few minutes just because it makes him happy, that sounds like your problem.
NOB: HE MADE ME MISS MY STOP!
Me: Well, you must be very important if you don’t have thirty extra seconds to spare for an honest mistake!
NOB: Well he must be the most important one of all!
Me: HE IS TO ME.
NOB: NOT TO ME!
Me: AND THAT’S YOUR LOSS.
Pause; silence.
Little Brother: Mommy?
Me: Yes, buddy?
LB (Grins): Hi.
Me (laughing): Hi.
(Elevator door opens, woman exits angrily. I WIN.)

There have been other versions of this story before, I assure you. Snide remarks made under someone’s breath. My reticence, my fear of conflict leading me to stay silent. Hell, I’ve been my own version of the NOB, sneering at parents who clearly don’t discipline their children enough, rolling my eyes at crying babies on planes. I’ve been all over the wrong side of everything. But this time? This time, the anger and frustration that typically plague me, born of either self-righteousness or fear? They were gone. What I was, was oddly calm. I was defending my child against irrational ugliness, and damn it felt good. And bad, because it’s never fun to deal with bullshit (mine or others’). But mostly I felt like a warrior princess who’d be DAMNED if anyone was going to step up on her baby.

What I’m figuring out is this: we are all mixed versions of ourselves at any given time, the Me from decades ago interacting with the Me of now (hello, inner child therapy exercises). I am not becoming a new person. I am not becoming stronger, unless the kind of power you mean is the kind that often looks like weakness, the exhaustion of parenting, of life, of facing my own insufficiency driving me into the grace that answers with all its enough-ness.

A friend put it better in a message recently: “To put my allegiance to a sense of Me at any point is to say that I am immutable and unchanging. I am the created; I am a work in progress; and I am so incomplete and messy and fucked that I can’t even redeem myself. But the animating fact is the love of God, the immeasurable grace, the unchangeable holiness of who He is.”

Hell yeah. Whether I walk away from an encounter feeling like Wonder Woman or NOB, whether TK is sporting one of his wide-as-the-earth smiles of late or melting down at the rain-soaked Vivid Sydney display at the zoo, whether LB is delightfully defusing an elevator dustup or providing material for the next edition of The Strong-Willed Child…I can stop chasing alternate universes where I don’t have anxiety, where TK isn’t on the spectrum, where LB doesn’t act out to get attention. We are always in the right place, even when it sucks. My strangeness and yours and his and hers, hobbling us into the rescue of grace by what we will never and always be.