For the second time in the last few months, I’ve succumbed to a stomach virus. At this point I have nothing left to believe but that when these bugs get together for their annual convention, they mark me on their calendar every time. When I hear of a virus going around, I check the fridge for Gatorade and ginger ale because I just know it’s only a matter of time before I get hit. Also, I’m paranoid (generally) and dehydrated (right now), so I’m pretty sure everything I just wrote defies logic.

Most of my “why, God, why?” moments in the past year have come in the middle of the night, synchronized with a crying baby or an alarm in my belly, and I’ve learned that the answers are rarely forthcoming. Then again, if life were really fair, I doubt I’d be sitting, legs propped up, on the couch under a blanket in the basement of the house I live in with my husband and son while someone else cleans upstairs and children die in Syria. So there’s that.

Recently, when the middle-of-the-night alarm was The Kid and I tensed into that runner’s crouch as my mind painstakingly debated whether this was something he’d soothe his own way out of, that question popped into my head: Why? And for the first time in…well, maybe ever, I realized that it’s not the futility of asking it that’s the point–as in, why bother if I’m not going to get an answer?–but the fact that it may be an unnecessary enterprise altogether. Because there were those moments, soon after TK first arrived, when the exhaustion and frustration and ineptitude and darkness all mixed together with his cry and distilled my range of emotions into a moment of martyrdom, converted a blessing into a curse, and revealed my long-bred and deeply-ingrained selfishness. Why is he doing this? I would think, and sometimes ask The Husband, who to his credit did not reply, “Because he’s a baby, you dumbass,” though that answer would not have been incorrect. I wanted a reason, a clear-cut, black-and-white reason because with a reason comes a solution. And at 3 am on random weekday nights I was fresh out of solutions.

But this night, when his cry woke me and I lay in limbo until I realized he wasn’t going to calm himself down, I stood and headed toward him. TH was close behind, and after a few minutes, TK was back in his bed and we were in ours, and the boys in the house drifted off to sleep while I took my usual time doing so. While I waited, I considered how much easier that whole “ordeal” had just been without my typical protestations. And I realized that sometimes the why doesn’t matter–at least, not the why that I would have asked. Sometimes that why moves away to reveal a greater one: because I’m his mom.

And the point of all that is, that if there’s a reason that’s bigger than me and the way I feel at any given moment, then I may just be able to calm the F down once in awhile and trust in that reason coming through and answering all the whys that my heart tends to create in its need for control. Why does TK prefer TH right now, wriggling out of my arms to reach for him? (Shockingly, my reminders to him of who carried him for nine months and was cut open to deliver him don’t make a difference.) Why did I just shut the tip of my finger in the door when I know perfectly well how to close a door without doing so, and now every time I type, a sharp pain radiates through my hand? Why do people we love get sick and forget who we are and suffer for the last years of their lives? Why do I wake up twice a night to pee with the theme song from Men in Black stuck in my head?

What if, behind the silent, trailing-off, heavenly “Because…” that feels like a cold non-answer, there is only love waiting to be revealed in a WHY. that defeats every expectation until there are no questions left?