I am a complainer; The Husband is a fixer. To put it more gently, I am great at diagnosing problems and he is fantastic at doing the research required to correct them. Which is why, when I was complaining recently about the body-taxing difficulty of removing The Kid’s bumper pads every time I change his crib sheet (untie, pull off, put back, retie–who has time for this when Downton Abbey is waiting on the DVR?!), TH headed to the internet to find out how he could help. (Why, you may ask, didn’t he just offer to change the sheets himself? Oh, he did. Then I reminded him that he hasn’t taken my course in Baby Bedmaking. So off to the internet he went.)

A few minutes later, he approached me with a confused look on his face. “I just wanted to find out how to make it easier…people yelling about how bumper pads kill babies…” I comforted him and reminded him that message boards are of the devil; they are where insecurity takes its biggest dumps; they are a land full of trolls seeking to justify their existence. In other words, bitches be crazy. “But I didn’t ask if bumper pads are okay! I’m going to use them anyway! I JUST WANTED HELPFUL TIPS!” His attack-and-solve brain could not compute such behavior; this is why Fortune 500 companies don’t have online communities full of CEOs wondering aloud about How to Have It All.

We shouldn’t be able to sum up parenting with a sentence on a message board, or intelligence with a comment on Facebook, or life with a Tweet, or theology with a rubber bracelet. These are all the ways we dumb down our existences into a size manageable enough to control. I struggle every day with the fear that accompanies loving TH and TK to a point that I didn’t know I was capable of; I fight the defensiveness that goes along with reading comments from moms who contend that if your child sleeps through the night before age one you are starving him; I negotiate with the ambivalence that is paired with being a working parent. I take the fear and defensiveness and ambivalence and stretch them into perpetuity, imagining scenarios like the snot-nosed little punks who will dare to give TK a hard time (how long can you go to jail for roundhousing a kid, anyway?). And I know that the world will never let up on its affronts to my need for control. SO. What now?

Saturday afternoon, TH and I were sitting on the couch while TK played nearby. I was probably working on a to-do list; TH was likely managing spreadsheets. A moment later, TK speed-crawled over and pulled himself up on the ottoman. My arm shot out reflexively, as if all of life’s dangers can be fended off with a human brake, and then something amazing happened. This child who, for weeks, squatted carefully to the ground to dismount from the standing position over a period of about a minute–he figured out how to fall. And he effing loved it. And once he realized that he could fall hard on his can and be just fine, he began to let go and stand, balanced, for several seconds. Then again, sometimes he would skip the balancing and just fall for the sheer joy of it.

Before I dove for the phone to video this MASTERPIECE THAT NO OTHER CHILD HAS EVER ACHIEVED, I took a moment to see it with my own eyes. Is it that these moments are so rare, or that I don’t look for them often enough and life is teeming with them? TH’s eyes met mine. “This looks like a blog post,” he said. And I saw him, the man whose story met mine in a city that required me to let go before I could get there; and this child who is half him, half me, barreling into our ordered existence and teaching me how to live. I don’t want to be a girl about it, but damn. I was overwhelmed.

That moment when you find out that there’s something stronger than self-sufficiency or amassed knowledge or public reputation or getting-it-all-right or GRAVITY that holds you up when you need to be upright, and breaks your fall when you need to let go? This life of ours, where a gym is a house of God and our grace lies in messes and a woman full of mistakes can be a mother? This is where I end and more begins.

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