The nights around here lately have been…mixed.

Little Brother has taken to sleeping through the night about half the time, which is wonderful because it means he can, and the opposite of wonderful because my body is still on his old schedule, the one where he wakes up halfway through, so I wake up then and lie there, anxious and sweating, wondering…Will he or won’t he?

Is there a book on how to sleep-train moms?

And The Kid. Well, he has chosen a few nights lately to scurry into our room, scaring the sh*t out of us (or The Husband, really, because of the aforementioned vigil I keep) and demanding (wordlessly, natch) a chaperone back to his quarters. Either that, or he’ll cry out in the night until one of us (TH, because I’m on LB duty what with the dairy farm and all) calms him down.

Oh, and he crapped the tub.

Last night, though, was an all-out extravaganza: I woke up for my vigil and was thisclose to falling back asleep when TK shuffled in and I nudged TH, who was all, “Huh? I live here? Who is this small person?” Once TK was back to sleep and I was thisclose again myself, LB cried out just vaguely enough to make me wonder if he might not really mean it. Long story short, he meant it, and an hour later we were all back asleep. Two hours after that and time for the day to begin.

It’s true what they say, that it’s darkest before the dawn: I know because of the blackness in our hallway at First Wake-Up, when I tiptoe through the inky dark to scoop LB out of his crib while praying that TK won’t hear. Amazing how quickly the eyes adjust to whatever light is given, though, and how well a body knows its way around home. We always make it downstairs, LB and I, without injury, and onto the couch for his breakfast, and then back up to his room a bit later to put him down for his first nap as the sun is rising and it’s time for Second Wake-Up: TK Edition. The light changes, but the story never does. And there’s this: the sun, it keeps rising every day.

I remember the time when it always felt like night–the time when parenthood first arrived in the form of TK and it was not the fairy tale of golden moments and blissful-falling-in-love like I had expected or maybe hoped or maybe just had been lied to about. Because it was more of the everything, as real falling in love is apart from The Bachelor. It was complicated, like Nancy Meyers might attest, the shock of the erratic schedule and unpredictable awakenings and general soreness and unyielding demands of it all. Our love–mine and TK’s–was the pock-marked kind, moments of euphoria mixed with moments of despair, as we were both learning to be what we were, mother and son, and having not the easiest time with it. Then there was/is the whole wonky neck thing and absence of conventional words and waiting in doctor’s offices and feeling guilty about not knowing his pain and, after a couple of years of all that, it was this: the moment of looking across at each other and really seeing each other and knowing, finally, that for me it was him, and for him it was me, in the trenches all those days alongside each other, fighting to get to this place where love is conveyed with a touch and a look. And here we are.

With LB, there is the touch and the look now, the adoration-induced euphoria that comes with his glance and grin at just my presence, and I cling to it because I know that the two of us, if we’re to truly love each other too–in all the fullness of love–we’re going to get our pock marks too, our euphoria-less days, our own trenches. There will come a time when it’s not this simple, but it will be even more glorious because of that. More beautiful because of the scars. More real because of the everything.

That’s what happens when the mundane becomes holy; when sacrifice goes from feeling like a burden to a gift. “A sacrifice is, by definition, not an easy thing–but it is a sacred thing“, I read, and there is no way to stay in the one place–the easy place–and no curse that condemns us forever to the hard place. There’s just this, which is the all: Miranda bent over Mary in the bathtub with Magda telling her, “You love.” The cramped back and half-sleeping nights. The runs that are several miles of pain or the same distance of an awesome playlist. The pizza delivered to a celebration or ordered because I just can’t after this day. The same home, holding it all, this collision of what love really is: the everything, the “good” and “bad” smacked together and exploding into the four of us, what is meant to be.

And is it meant to be, that I accept it all like that, the way it is, with the same heart and the same attitude no matter how it looks? Because some moments I want to scream and others I am overwhelmed with joy and how do I accept them both as gift, as grace, when they come as packages wrapped so differently? Could it really be that I just choose to?

I think about it, and it seems as good a place as any to start. Because the thing is, if it were the choice and the follow-through, if it were all on my shoulders to hold up this life and make it beautiful with the toolbox I have, then we’d all be in big trouble. But…but. That’s not how it works, is it? It works because grace collides with me, my rough edges against its smooth and my incompleteness next to its wholeness. So I put my shitty little toolbox away, and I choose. I choose the grace, and the more, whether it feels like climbing a mountain or as natural as breathing. I make a choice like the one the four of us make to keep showing up, like the sun, every day–to choose each other, over and over. And so I walk toward the mountain and breathe in grace and wait for it to fill me and come back out.