When I was eight, I walked out onto a stage and sat down at a piano and began playing a piece I had practiced so many times I’d had dreams about it. My fingers moved reflexively to a rhythm that time and discipline had perfected, and for a moment I was lost in the music.

Then I began to think.

Or maybe fear? I began to fear, though thinking and worrying have been a couple for so long in my brain that one rarely shows up without the other. I began to think about messing up, and I began to fear the embarrassment that would accompany a blunder, and that’s exactly what happened. My hands, now sweaty with anxiety, slipped from their rhythm and I couldn’t recover quickly. I had to start over. But this time, there was no getting lost in the piece. There was careful concentration until the torture was over. At some point, the redness left my face and the tears dried from my eyes, but the damage was done. Fear had robbed me of music.

I’ve never really stopped being afraid of what people think; I’ve just learned to recognize the fear and sing “Beat It” under my breath. And now my fingers travel across different keys in a battle to recognize life’s rhythms, to tell the truth, to recover joy from fear. To document grace.

It’s a form of therapy, I guess, and trust me–I know therapy–but it hasn’t always been. Fear and insecurity can twist writing like they can everything else, and for so long my writing was my attempt at approval or my passive-aggressive verbal weapon or my self-important instructions to a world that needed help revolving around me. An act of pride in various incarnations. It still is, I’m sure, until grace gets its way and the real and raw is recovered. Life banged the milquetoast right out of me, and trite is no longer a blanket I long to burrow underneath.

But the call of conformity will always beckon, and in no arena have I heard it more loudly than this motherhood venture. We women are a crazy lot, aren’t we? And we’re all mothers of something, whether it’s our children or our creativity or our students or our careers. We have it ingrained in us to nurture. But wow. Not since men with small willies has there been a group more inwardly insecure and outwardly overconfident. Please visit ANY mommy message board before you protest. Becoming a mother transforms a woman into a fearful expert. When you find, or give birth to, that thing you’re supposed to mother, nothing else has ever mattered more. And so the fear kicks in, and the consequent attempts at appearing adept. Recently I saw a link to Pinterest fails: women shared the intended “perfect” outcome of a project, then their awful actual version of it. Bravo, I thought. I am so over the competing.

The Kid’s progress report from “school” the other day read: James sure does love chicken fingers! And my first inclination was to worry about a low vegetable intake because damn it if he doesn’t throw anything green right off his tray at Restaurant Mom. Then I thought about how much joy chicken fingers have brought me in my thirty-five years. Later, he reached over from his booster seat and rubbed his sticky fingers all over the countertop, leaving a film similar to the one a certain other male in this household often leaves on the remote control during meals not spent at the table by candlelight (read: ALMOST ALL MEALS). TK is his parents’ son. If The Husband ran the house, there would be more bouncy time but a film over everything; if I ran it, countertops would always sparkle but we would adhere to an endless list of rules. It turns out that even after marriage and motherhood I am still the same person I always was, but with a new name. And more grace under my belt. Both are making a difference. Last weekend, when I first woke up and prepared to attack a growing to-do list, I turned to the window and there were the early-morning pinks and purples that love had scattered across the sky. And I saw them. I poked TH and he turned and saw too. I’m still me, but grace renames me and gives me new eyes to see, new material to write.

And last night, after TH and I put TK to bed, we ate chicken fingers for dinner.