The Kid loves puzzles. His favorite toy at speech therapy is an animal puzzle that makes noises when the pieces are fitted into their correct spots. Moo! Quack! Meow! And TK grins, turns the puzzle over, and starts again.

Last week, inspired, I picked up a similar puzzle for him at Target: a transportation-themed one with pieces including a motorcycle, a train, a sports car. I brought it home and turned it over on the floor in front of TK. He watched as I placed an ambulance into its proper position; blaring sirens rang out immediately. I was so excited, and not a little pleased with myself.

He bolted from the room.

There is a part of me that will never cease in its quest for perfection: perfect home, perfect dinner, perfect wife, perfect mother. I’ve identified this quality, called it out and shamed it. But it creeps in anyway, accessing some back door of my ego, an insecure lock not screwed into grace tightly enough. This need for perfection makes everything personal.

TK ran from my perfect gift and I was all, What the HELL?

When I told people, eight years ago, that I was moving to New York, I heard the word brave a lot. It’s actually pronounced ‘desperate’,  I thought in response, but accepted the compliment because brave was one word I never felt described by.

And now, with a wall in our kitchen taken up by a calendar full of appointments and a dozen CHOA specialists’ cards, I think about what it means to be brave. I’ve always secretly discounted it, writing it off as one of those Disney-themed qualities when trust and faith seemed more admirable virtues. Doesn’t brave just mean you don’t want to do something but have to anyway?

Then, over the past few days, I’ve watched TK slowly approach his new puzzle, steps closer each day, inching toward the pieces and gently running his fingers over them, then backing away. And I think there may be something to this brave thing.

My friend emailed me last week, after a late-night urgent care visit rendered a diagnosis that left her unsettled. Sometimes the bravest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask for more when you’re a people-pleaser who doesn’t want to rock the boat. I know, deeply, how it feels to let things go because you don’t want to be given that look or cause a scene. And now I know how it feels to not have that luxury because it’s not just about you anymore. “I think we’re being called to a new kind of brave,” I wrote her, and as the words appeared on my screen I knew their origin and it was not my head. Grace often lights candles first, a steady flame flickering just before it is set ablaze to illuminate everything.

I thought about my return to decade-old textbooks, my scrawled notes and bookmarked sites and the frenetic urgency of someone trying to figure things out, get this situation–his neck–taken care of, put behind us. I’m like all fingers-through-hair and wild eyes. Meanwhile, TK laughs and runs and approaches the pieces.

I read about Hannah pleading for a son and then promising him right out of her hands and into the only ones that could save him, could tell his story perfectly. I read old words like they are new, because they’re now about him, about being knit together just so. And in finale, I read, simply, this:

Joy is the way to live bravest of all.

And I realize that brave is not to be discredited, but rethought.

Fixing things may or may not be an option, but this neck will always be a part of his story, and for right now it remains un-figured-out. I sit with him on my lap and Dr. Seuss on his, my left arm propped on his shoulder to prop up his head, always, and I’m positioning myself to get it right when his tiny hand grabs mine and pulls it toward his belly. He wants it to rest there, holding him. I wonder who else wants me to rest, to be held.

I begin to see this tilt in a whole new light, candle flickering to flame, and I notice how he peers at everything; the inquisitiveness that marks his personality and the bone that tilts his head, and maybe it’s time to stop being frantic and start inching toward it, embracing it.

When I do, I notice the resemblance: a mother who looks askance at the world, her son with his own oblique pattern. I am not a perfect mother, but if you want to get all Good Will Hunting-meets-grace about it, I am the perfect mother for him.

What if I call this good, if I love this time for what it is rather than what it isn’t yet, if I stop trying to race to the next part and accept now for the feast it is, with its mismatched placemats and chipped china and broken glory? I watch as he approaches the puzzle a hundredth time, grin playing on his lips. Smiling at nothing? Smiling at everything. “Count it all joy,” wrote another James I know. His hand grazes the piece, head tilted and gaze fixed ahead, and I love it, how perfect the whole thing is.