On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for him.      C.S. Lewis

This doesn’t feel like love.

Another week, another physical therapy appointment, and this time The Kid starts sobbing as soon as we get past the waiting room. He walks over to me, buries his head in my knees, and I don’t want to go in either. I don’t want to watch him hurt. I hate it. What I feel is hate. What he feels is pain.

None of it feels like love.

I speak up, and the therapist agrees–that he’s getting too old, that we’re not sure it’s working, that we need to talk to the rest of the doctors and figure out the next step, because the Botox hasn’t fixed the tilt or his disinclination to turn left.

I would follow him around for the rest of his life and turn left for him if I could. I would do the PT and let them mess with my neck if it would fix his. I tell him this in the car later, and he doesn’t understand it yet–the words, or the love, that sends us into these inconvenient and sometimes painful places, our efforts to rid the dark by finding the light. I’m looking for answers even as I’m loving every part of him.

It doesn’t hit me until later that I have some trust issues when it comes to love.

TH hands me a gift from my sister-in-law and it’s the Advent book I’ve been meaning to buy, but the one I would have bought would not have been inscribed, and this one is: with a scrawling of words that catch my breath and fill my eyes–my name, followed by: 

You are so lavishly loved.

Why am I crying? Didn’t I know already?

But this, from the one whose words daily remind me of the inextricable link between grace and gratitude, who wrote that these gifts surrounding us are love notes from him if we would only look–I trace the words with my finger, feel their imprint on page. Can they be imprinted elsewhere, too?

I think about the first time I realized people love differently, when The Dad and I had dissolved into yelling and I stepped outside a few minutes later to watch him checking the air in my tires. The Mom, she would just say it.

Not everyone does love the same way.

I think about the other reminders: how I hardly ever go to the gas station any more because The Husband fills my tank (pause for inappropriate laughter). How I am watching as some of my friends become mothers too, how their faces change and their voices soften. How some, painfully, are not yet, and how they have changed too–struggle that softens in a different way–and all of this can be love?

I think about the people with whom I’ve reconnected because I’ve shared TK’s story–all the people who love him because they know what he’s gone through, and I feel overwhelmed by the love that’s directed at him, that he will one day know about because I’ll tell him and he’ll understand and he will be different because of it. We will be different because of it.

I’ve had a hard time believing I could be so loved, because I’ve always equated love with performance-based approval. For God’s sake, I said I’d be an organ donor once just because I wanted the DMV worker to not look at me with reproach. TH had to hand out candy this year because I was afraid the kids wouldn’t like me if I only gave them one piece (except for the SOB who reached in and grabbed half the bowl with one hand–he, I didn’t mind denying).

But a love I don’t have to work for, that is independent of my faithfulness? If there’s nothing else like that, can it still be real?

I watch TK stack his blocks in a new pattern, head cocked, and I’m starting to understand.

I woke up early one morning last week and in the darkness felt a prompting. To meet. Not to fulfill, or accomplish, but just to show up. And in the light of the lamp, book open, I knew that this love was always there, waiting for me to see it.

We took TK to see Santa at Phipps Plaza (a racket I swore I’d never assent to, then realized they operate by appointment and efficiency and so I SIGNED UP), and the scene was a cross between A Christmas Story and “Toddlers and Tiaras”. Parents were begging their children, remaining in the picture with them, holding the kid on their own laps instead of Santa’s to get the perfect photo. The assistant approached me and I told her what we wanted. “JUST THE KID, IF HE CRIES THAT’S FINE,” she yelled to the photographer. They snapped him just before he lost his shit and looked back at us as if we’d betrayed him.

How often have I looked up with that same expression on my face?

We could be headed for spinal surgery, and though I know God is full of surprises and works in mysterious ways (NEEDLEPOINT PILLOW ALERT!), I also know he can work within the bounds of pragmatism and that if TK ends up on another operating table, it will not be because we don’t love him. And it will not be because we aren’t loved, either. Love that is real and infinite has the power to transcend circumstances, to turn “in spite of” to “because of”, to not “rescue” us from what will make us what we’re meant to be. It doesn’t always feel like love.

But it is.