I routinely miss the trees for the forest. On a resume, this trait might be listed as a strength: I have a big-picture mentality. In actual life, I walk around with shoulders slumping underneath the weight of my often faulty vision (no wonder they always hurt!). Every day can feel like a Monday when you spend it looking ahead at all that must be done. Gratitude can cure this nasty disease, and I’m learning to practice it. Motherhood, though, can intensify it.

I’ve watched one too many Lifetime movies over the years, and now that The Kid has arrived on the scene, my paranoia threatens to cast its shadow over everything and suck the joy right out of life. His helplessness confronts me, demands to know if I am enough.

And then I remember: I’m not.

When I was pregnant and still knew everything and we went touring daycares, our first visit ended with a trip to a fenced-in playground. The school’s coordinator pointed us to the corner of the outdoor space and said, ‘That’s the ecology center.” The Husband and I looked over and saw two trees and a pile of dirt. We held our laughter until we reached the car. Having given up on the enterprise myself after years of sore arms, I just love it when people try to polish turds.

I will never read enough books or defuse enough conflicts or calm enough tempers (mine) to achieve perfection. I have exhausted myself from trying, at various points, to be the best, most put-together version of whatever role I was playing–student, professional, religious zealot–little ecology centers popping up all over my existence and me, digging myself deeper into self-reliance as the dirt piled up and the shovel grew heavier and the scene more hopeless. I look at the years ahead, the million little choices to make regarding TK’s life and the effect those choices will have on him, and my knees buckle beneath the burden. How will I raise him to be an honorable man, a person of integrity, a well-behaved individual in a world full of assholes–and I, chief among them? I can’t even get through a morning without apologizing to The Husband for something.

My shoulders hurt. I’m tired. There are too many people watching. I’m afraid–there was another kidnapping movie on TV last night. I just can’t do it.

I hear TH sleep beside me. I see TK, peaceful in the monitor. I unclench my hands and teeth and other body parts and remember that I didn’t get here by trying harder. The next morning, I look out the window and see the blue and purple hydrangeas in the backyard that I didn’t plant or water or groom, the ones that just happen to match the flowers we chose for the wedding, and they were here when we moved in that December, hidden beneath the ground but waiting to bloom. Everything they needed, already there in the dirt with them. And it occurs to me that I, too, already have everything I need because I have more than myself. As I allow grace to undo and remake me, as TK sees that, we become what we are meant to be. Because that is where grace works–not in seconds, but in stories, a narrative independent of time. Beauty from the dirt; little trees everywhere.