I always saw my life playing out as a romantic comedy. All the going-nowhere relationships were just buildup to the eventual meet-cute scenario that would introduce me to my leading man, with whom I would walk off, hand-in-hand, into the sunset and our happy ending.
The problem with re-imagining your life as a movie is that no one else, least of all the Real Showrunner, recognizes your self-proclaimed role as director/producer/star. So any deviation from your script is an aberration to be fought, fixed, reshot. And then there are the extras who demand to be featured, or those you assigned as leads begging off the project entirely. It’s all just so much work.
Last night, I went in to kiss my son and got a mouthful of snot.
These are not movie scenes, these moments of life that involve sickness and frustration and mess. The mundane movements from detail to detail that constitute most of our days. I am typing this with a swollen finger, a product of a patient’s bite. This life doesn’t feel like a movie. And most of the time, it sure doesn’t feel holy. And yet it is full of the kind of sacred moments I would miss, do miss, were it not for grace to wake me up, remind me, gently (or not so gently) nudge me out of the director’s chair and call for a new vision.
No one talks at a baby shower about how all the “cute” gifts will be covered in spit-up and shit in a couple of months. (Okay, I do, but that’s just because of the cute mimosas they were serving in baby bottles. Sue me.) No one imagines that their journey to a family will be reframed as a struggle to conceive, lying on cold tables and looking at ultrasounds of ovaries instead of babies. I remember pre-The Kid, when The Niece would hack her daycare cough and I would think, “poor thing, she’s got a cold.” Now TK hacks that same cough and I wonder if I should call a team of pulmonologists–is this NORMAL? Is daycare/my career RUINING HIS LUNGS?! No one told me that one of my closest friends would be a liberal hippie I’ve never met in person. And sure, I imagined marrying a man who was my best friend, but my script did not include a confession of feelings followed by a year of waiting in that friendship for it to become more. The Husband? He pictured having a little boy one day, but I have in on good authority that the ball-wiping part of the package didn’t appear in those dreams.
I outlined my life. Grace threw out the bullet points and established a narrative. Those moments that used to look like deviations and interruptions are now where real life is found, because happy endings? They are messy.
My life is a new genre full of all the old ones: comedy, drama, mystery, and at diaper-changing time, horror. The moments don’t follow a script, and I’ve stopped fighting that. Mostly. Because I’ve seen what grace can do with surrender, and it looks like this: a husband whose witty kindness balances out my cynicism. Friends whose idea of vulnerability runs deeper than leaving the house without lipstick. A child who sits beside me now, throwing his Cheerios around the kitchen as I pretend it doesn’t bother me. And then I turn to him and see him staring at me, head tilted in a way the script didn’t call for, with a lopsided grin to match, fist pumping into the air. I couldn’t have imagined that grin on my own. Grace means I never had to.