In what is a stunning metaphor for our lives right now, our Christmas tree collapsed the other night. Mere hours after I had strung the lights in a fit of achievement that was accompanied by a soundtrack of Baby Crying. I was upstairs when the tragedy occurred, attempting an early shift of sleep. I awoke to what sounded like furniture being moved across the floor downstairs, and I clenched my fists, gritted my teeth, and wondered what the hell The Husband was thinking–doing P90X in the living room at 10 pm– and why he was narrating it with a barrage of foul language. I stomped out of bed and leaned over the stair railing to hiss down at him: “What is going on?” News of our tree’s demise floated back up to me.

It’s been a rough week, made rougher by my deciding in my mind that it’s time for things to get better: after all, my two-month anniversary of getting cut open was Monday; The Kid began sleeping through the night at two months; it’s impossible to be more tired than I am; and the ultimate reason–my deeply abiding, underlying belief that God and I have some sort of contract that obligates him to keep things from getting too bad. The whole “God won’t give you more than you can handle” needlepoint masterpiece that is actually a twisted version of an otherwise-intended verse, passed down through the generations in a game of Telephone, altering the truth to an unrecognizable but palatable and control-freak-friendly form.

Sometimes, in the dark, we’ll reach for the closest thing rather than the truest.

The closest thing, for me, these days? Well, here’s the deal: positive thinking is not my default setting, Dr. Peale. There are currently no boot straps to pull myself up by, and I am unimpressed by shallow, misunderstood theology and spit-back Scripture that scratches at surfaces and decorates wall hangings. I need a deeper succor, a truer balm when my factory settings feel like pillow-punching, voice-raising, tear-flowing, hope-abandoning. My thoughts go to dark places, the tamest of which is my current theory that Little Brother is an undercover operative for ISIS sent to inflict a new form of biological warfare ending in the dissolution of our family and my sanity.

This is not a good look for me. The newborn weeks have, historically, not been. As in, that one other time. And it doesn’t help when this time is supposed to be all Johnson & Johnson magic, sweet baby-head smell, and the life I’m leading is by all measures charmed and blessed. It doesn’t help when, technically, everything is good but feels like a prison sentence. Then I’m the asshole, right? Because there is the sin of ingratitude–of calling a blessing a curse. But there’s also this: the calling of hard things, hard. Of spades, spades. Of unflinching honesty in the face of Pinterest perfection. I’m living in the tension, on the fine line, between the two places, between ingratitude and honesty. I’m living in a bit of both, and imperfectly. That’s just the truth.

I had an epiphany the other day, more likely an average thought but what felt earth-shattering and soul-affirming: I am not temperamentally fitted for this. No one is, really, fitted for exhaustion and screaming and ceaseless unpredictability, though some have a disposition that renders them more able to “roll with the punches” and “go with the flow”–either that or they’re taking a drug I’d like to be on, please. (Or they’re lying. They’re all lying.) But no, my realization was deeper and more freeing: I am, simply, not particularly maternal. Not from the start, at least. I’m a Miranda, not a Charlotte. And these first few weeks of life, with their thankless giving, endless laundry, constant upheaval–they are not my wheelhouse. This is not the part of motherhood I enjoy. Now, The Kid? Are you kidding me? That guy…he is my boy. And his brother is, too, just more so in future tense. I love them both, but I do not enjoy the majority of the day spent with a newborn. And that is so okay. It’s okay to admit that, to acknowledge that, for me, the maternal instinct doesn’t shut on like a light but grows along with my child, intimately knitting us together as the days become months and years. TK made me a mom, often through sweat and tears. My heart bursts at the sight of him now but I remember a time when I just wanted to run from him. I loved him from the beginning but now, I really like him. I enjoy him.

The love is not less just because it’s not pretty at first.

Part of the “problem,” maybe, is that I was a lot of things before I was a mom and I plan on remaining a lot of things now in addition to motherhood. Finding my maternal instinct isn’t so much a reach-in-and-grab it endeavor as it is a slow burn, a growth that is messy but true, sure but slow.

LB and I have a ways to go, is what I’m saying. But we’ll get there. And this whole work-in-progress thing? Isn’t it exactly what grace is for? What redemption is?

And that–we’ll get there–is part of the truth-telling I must whisper to my soul when doubt turns to despair and the dark feels closer than the light. I am being remade now, reshaped, which is a much different thing than I expected: not a demolition so much as an uncovering, a lifting out. The parts of me that are for this–for marriage, for motherhood–are being called forth and brought out in ways both joyful (rare smiles, effusive laughs) and trying (piercing screams, questions without answers, marathons without endpoints). They are not at the surface; they are in the deep. They are being called out in whispers: gratitude. Servanthood. Trust. In hoping for more than what is. In believing it’s there.

Because what is, right now, is a screaming baby and a fallen tree. All of which has so much of Christmas stamped on it, so much of the rustlings of Advent.

This morning I went for my laptop in the cabinet that the tree is currently resting against. The tree that fell because we went big this year and the stand we’ve been using wasn’t strong enough to hold its mass. Metaphor. I pushed against the collapsed pine and it wouldn’t give. My computer remained buried behind needles, and I cried. I couldn’t do it. There is so much I feel I can’t do right now.

Then TH came in, working from here this morning because of the frantic look in my eyes and the tears staining my face, and I asked for help. For help to do the thing that I am not enough for. And he lifted the tree while I reached inside, blindly feeling and searching for the thing that is part of who I am. My fingers found it without seeing it and recovered it. It was there, hidden in the dark, and I knew it. I knew it because the truth is bigger than what I see or how I feel, and I do not make it–it makes me. It reaches inside me and lifts out the pieces, one at a time, that are needed for this moment, and one day there will be completion. Wholeness. Everything put together, made right. Today, though, there is tiredness and crying. So I walk over and whisper the truth in his tiny ear, the truth that is hidden underneath dark spots–that we love him, that he completes our family, that we waited so long for him. There’s a moment of quiet, and later there is a smile, and I cling to these like I do the moment in the middle of the night when I pause in my own crying and whisper a prayer of thanks. It lasts only a second, but it looks and sounds like so much more to come.