Who am I? How did I get here?

Spring, 1987: I’m the girl hiding in the back of the line, shuffling her feet and staring at the ground, hoping this is far enough away from getting called to bat and embarrassing myself in front of the rest of my class, and if I can run out the clock then it’s a straight shot from here to home where I can escape with a book.

Summer, 1996: I’m the college sophomore who finally found a social niche and a safe place to come out of my shell, so now I’ll finalize my plans to be engaged just after graduation and married not long after that, and these three-hour labs will be my ticket to a career that will give me time for the family I’ll have soon.

Fall, 2002: I’m a graduate student running with the middle of the pack for the first time in my life, and this flirtation with mediocrity has saddled me with some identity issues that will lead to mistakes…and a new place.

Winter, 2008: I’m the city-dweller who rediscovered her faith by way of grace and is on her way out to her last first date.

Today: I’m a dentist on sabbatical, a wife learning that marriage isn’t an institution set up just to meet my needs, and a mother twenty-four hours away from letting them place her son on an operating table.

I watch him in the monitor now, his butt in the air, arms splayed out. He can’t sleep like that after tomorrow, I think, and tears rise along with panic over all I can’t control. All I can’t predict. None of this was on the sheet of legal paper I filled out years ago, the life plan I constructed from an organized mind and a clueless heart.

I think about the wife and mother I would have been a decade ago and whisper a prayer of thanks for the things that don’t work out as we expected. All that I asked for, and it never came close to what I got. I’ve been a reality-escaper, a control freak, an identity crisis. These self-inflicted shadows lurk about, always willing to make a reappearance, to have their recurring role bumped back up to series regular. I have not arrived; but grace has made me more susceptible to the truth.

Here is a truth: I am no match for the road that lies ahead. And as I battle the fear that, when named, is called Not Being Enough, the voice residing in my heart calls me to stop fighting and rest, because there is redemption in the fact that I was never meant to be. Enough has a name, and it is not Stephanie.

courtesy William Koechling, Twitter

So I remember other truths, like those  told in stories, and how it was Tolkien who wrote, “a great lord is that, and a healer; and it is a thing passing strange to me that the healing hand should also wield the sword.”

Well, it is passing strange to me too. But I know the hope in its truth.

Because there are the other moments, the glimpses of glory, that remind me. We have a story here too.

There were years of disappointment, then vows taken and a double rainbow. There is an emptied dishwasher even though I was an ass the night before. There is a tiny hand that wraps around my finger and leads me. And just the other night, there was the tug on my jeans leg and the whisper straight to my heart: “Mama. Mama.” 

The Husband and I whipped our heads to him, then each other, eyes wide.

“Did he–”

“I think he just–”

I dropped the plastic bib and followed where he led.

Tomorrow we will be the parents in the hospital with the child in the halo. In the coming weeks I will be the mom fielding questions about what that is in a reality that is inescapable, a situation that is uncontrollable. But because of grace I have an identity that is unassailable.

How did we get here? Love brought us–a love bigger than I am. Love will carry us not around, but through this. And love will make the whole thing beautiful.