Many years ago, I read an article (it appeared either in Journal of the American Medical Association or Us Weekly, I can’t remember which) about a young girl born with a rare nerve disorder that left her unable to feel pain. My initial reaction to this story, since at the time I was in both dental school and a bad relationship and therefore knew a little somethin’ about pain, was something like, “What?! Awesome. I’m totes jeal.” I went on to read the parents’ account of why I should NOT be totes jeal, and it was a narrative that cited hundreds of injuries endured by the girl in her short life–burns, broken bones, head trauma—all because the absence of pain as a warning left her fearless in the face of danger.

I think a lot about how fear informs our lives, likely because I’ve come to recognize how far from immune I am to it. As The Husband and I faced The Kid’s impending surgery and halo season, I named my fears nightly in prayer and battled them daily in my head. None of them—none of them—have materialized. In fact, this experience so far has been (like much of life) a much different one from what we expected. Far from nursing a sullen invalid, I’ve been chasing a fearless toddler, a toddler who runs and jumps and dances through his days as I struggle to define the proper amount of supervision. He has fallen, but without incident—either he or one of us has always broken the fall with an outstretched hand. He’s sleeping pretty well, given the bolts protruding from his forehead and the fact that we’ve had to turn his crib into one wall of a fortress bordering a makeshift floor bed of mattress and couch cushions surrounded by pillows, a dresser, and two actual walls. We’re improvising.

So things are going well, considering. Which doesn’t mean we don’t still need prayers, but the nature of my own praying has changed: I’m still uttering words regarding his protection and healing, but there’s also the small matter of myself. Of how, when I am no longer distilled down to “just making it through the day” and “hospital survival mode” and “please return my child from the OR to me alive”, I tend to allow the petty things to sneak back into the picture: who emptied the dishwasher last, or how much messier the kitchen counter gets now that TK is pulled up next to it for meals, or if one of those damn bolts pierces my boob one more time…

And then there’s the Worst Case Scenario element of my thinking, evidenced by a text exchange with a like-minded friend who asked last week how it was going. I gave her the good report then followed up by asking her what it says about me that I’m waiting for something to go wrong.

She said it means we’re the same. So I’m assuming there are some of you out there who relate, as well.

I’ve been reading a gift from The Mom–Anne Lamott’s aptly-titled Stitches. And it appears Anne has also been reading my diary, because both of us spent much of our lives hustling into the next moment, attaining the next accomplishment, defining ourselves by those achievements. She writes:

I was good at being good at things. I was good at forward thrust, at moving up ladders…Unfortunately, forward thrust turns out not to be helpful in the search for your true place on earth. But crashing and burning can help a lot. So, too, can just plain running out of gas…That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

It occurs to me that much of growing up involves learning to be afraid, or at least learning to recognize danger and avoid it. But so much of my life, before grace had room to move, was a misdirection of that recognition–calling things “dangerous” that were actually the road to real living. My great fear was falling apart and being exposed as not being good enough or smart enough or “together” enough. But when that actually happened, I found out that I wasn’t any of those things–but rather than being the end of the story, it was the beginning. It was time to stop planning life and start receiving it.

Now that the day of surgery and the hospital stay are over and halo season is upon us, there’s a noticeable lack of forward momentum, a rhythm to our days that is less about accomplishing goals and moving past them than it is about just playing, being together through this. And I realize how much that old fear of my being unmade informs my life now, because it was when I was unmade from the person I had made myself out to be that I began to be made into the person I was meant to be. I recognize as dangerous now the things I used to cling to: worrying myself into a panic over what others think, trying to “fix” people, formatting my life in such a way as to avoid any semblance of struggle or mystery. Because the struggle and the mystery have yielded such beauty lately that it’s taken my breath away. And so I walk beside TK, who cannot look down but so often does look up, and let him lead me for a change.