“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different…”      C.S. Lewis

Months after the nightly awakenings, the cries in the dark and the unpredictable midnight hours, months that were silent and peaceful, and–it always seems to happen this way–I had just thought to myself that he had been sleeping perfectly for a while. (As if that’s a thing; check it off the list.) That our nights had been uninterrupted, placid, predictable. Just in time for #2 to blow them up.

But the other night, he cried out. The monitor by my head lit up with its accusatory shades of red, its bleating breaking my sleep into Before and After. I looked. I waited. I stayed calm. For about two minutes. 

I seethed.

These lessons we learn, they sometimes come so hard that we think we’re done. We’ve mastered that section of the syllabus and received our certificate. You’d think, after weeks of the halo, after muscle spasms and tantrums, after medicine-induced vomiting episodes, that a little think like a nighttime wakeup would be nothing. I wish it were nothing. I wish a lot of things about myself that just aren’t true yet.

I went into his room and patted his back. He turned to me and grinned, the little turd. He wanted to play. I stayed a few more minutes, then returned to our room where The Husband, whose superpowers are Kindness and Sleeping Through It All, lay motionless. I wanted to punch him in the head.

The crying didn’t stop. TH woke up. I shut down. This may be the worst part, when I refuse to acknowledge we’re on the same team and just go silent. Or maybe the worst part was next, when I screamed “SHUT THE F$&K UP!” into my pillow.

I don’t tell you that because I think it’s funny or cute. I tell you that because I’m ashamed and I hate it and because I know there are some of you out there who have felt the same way after doing the same thing, and it’s important to remember we’re not alone in how we struggle. In the things about ourselves we wish we could make disappear.

I don’t do well off-schedule, to put it mildly. Enter grace.

We’re headed toward another Newborn Season, and we’re both afraid. But I know what I’ll get from TH’s end, and I have much less to fear. That makes me want to crumple up and cry, the fact that I can be met with such grace and not give it in return. But isn’t that the story of my life? And isn’t the point that there is more?

Sometimes all it takes is a mid-day break, an hour on the couch with the ladies of Litchfield, and I can meet the end of nap time with an air of freedom and the joy that comes from interacting with my two-year-old boy rather than avoiding crazy women bearing shivs. Sometimes that’s enough of a dose of perspective to set me straight. And some days–rare and memorable ones–I’m fooled into thinking I don’t need anything, because the temperature is ten degrees cooler and everyone’s mood is lighter and bliss is rampant, moments of glory nearly blinding even in mundanity.

But some days it takes getting leveled by the night before, crawling hands and knees back to the truth, broken and tearful. The truth, which during a nighttime blitzkrieg can be so easily overshadowed, distorted by darkness and my own persistent flaws.

Sometimes it takes falling and getting picked back up before I can see straight.

These moments, these times when I get leveled, I hear so clearly the lies: You’ll never change. This is just the way you are. You’re going to alienate them. And what makes the lies so loud, so scary, is that element of truth to them. Because I’ll never change–completely. This is the way I am–now. And I will alienate them, sometimes. Those truths tear me up. Then I remember what I came here for: the truth that is more.

The truth that I will never be perfect, but I will change. Slowly, surely, maybe seemingly imperceptibly. But I can look back now and see I’m not where I was, and this is something. And though these particular flaws are the ones I am given to, I am not given over to them. And as for alienating…well. Isn’t that what forgiveness is for? Isn’t forgiveness just grace stretched out over time, over a marriage, over eighteen years and then the rest of life? Grace for the nights and the mornings after.

To believe anything else is to buy stock in hopelessness, and faith tells me this is an unwise investment. So I believe–in more.

And the next day, I apologize. I take The Kid to music class, and the sixth time seems to be the charm because he sings back to the teacher, gives her a high five, then dances and beats the drum and I’m leveled again, but in the best way. Tearful for the happiest reasons. That night, he eats apples–his first fruit in months. The things I never imagined would be revolutionary, are. And so we all change, one breath at a time, growing as though we’re led by a hand that knows the way.