We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.    –Annie Dillard

One winter day during my last year of living in New York City, I was not ready to sacrifice a Central Park run just because of a blizzard. I reasoned that if conditions were bad enough, I’d just cut the run short. I dropped by the gym and threw my stuff in a locker, then headed back out, past the employee at the front desk who did a triple take and cried out, “Are you serious?!” I shrugged, praying I wouldn’t return on a stretcher, and made my way through the flakes to the park.

When I got there the snow was falling harder and piling up everywhere: the trees, the walls, the roads. I figured this experiment would end one of two ways, and I was filled with self-doubt about it going the good one. That doubt was fueled by what, in good conditions, would have been a plus: a near-empty park and paths to myself. Then a lone figure appeared. His steady gait and weather-proof gear identified him as a fellow runner, and as we passed each other we exchanged a grin of solidarity–sort of the “You, too?” moment that C.S. Lewis wrote about. The world at that moment felt sparsely populated yet so full of possibility, and I finished that run with a sense of accomplishment (and hope–I was training for a race) I’ve rarely ever felt.

I learned not to discount the hard runs, because sometimes they carry the best stories.

Our world these days has in many ways become smaller in the sense that it has narrowed down to a short list of priorities, most of them involving how to get The Kid the therapy he needs to draw out his full potential during these young and formative years. But as we’ve limited our focus, I’ve realized that this new area we inhabit reminds me of Manhattan and its 23 square miles: small, yet full of everything we need. Support shows up in the bold lines of email inboxes, in the ding of a message on my phone, in the “I’ve been there; here’s what helped” advice of other travelers. In places I didn’t expect or didn’t know existed–and there’s a lot that I didn’t know existed.

There have been moments of triumph and moments of seeming defeat, and they often come mixed together. Last week a friend brought her three-year-old son to play with TK, and they played more around each other but for a high-stakes chasing session near the end of the visit. During a quieter moment, she shared with me what a difficult time she had experienced during the newborn period with both of her kids. Like I know anything about that, right? “It’s like I had the selfishness beat out of me,” she described, and I was nodding so hard I thought my head would topple off, because Oh. My. God. YES. And here we are again, facing uncertainties that take me back to that time just as Little Brother is coming out of it, and this new world threatens constantly to undo me: playdates that remind me of how much easier it would be for us and TK if he spoke; birthday parties that amplify the differences between him and other kids his age (he wanted no part of the group picture–boo; he did sit at the table with everyone for pizza and cake–yay!). Feeling like the differences are so much more plentiful than the answers and wondering if those differences will one day dissolve or just keep following him. Feeling overcome by it all so that, on that Friday after the birthday party, exhausted and spent, I pull an Andy Bernard and hit a wall–literally and figuratively–and The Husband takes over with bath time and, in the spot where things felt most bleak, now there’s grace being slowly revealed.

He tells me that we’re both going to lose it sometimes, reach the end of ourselves, and it’s another of those moments when the world that felt so small and lonely a second ago begins to open up; the air comes in and with it, the light. So I walk back into the bathroom and nod my head, yes I can take back over, and I kneel down beside the tub and take the washcloth in my hand and bathe TK. As I run the water and wash off the soap, I feel myself being washed clean too, being baptized into this new life and world. I am convinced now, hope seeping in, that I will look back one day and see it all as gift and I ask myself: Why not start now?

I’ve been shrouding the light with my own agenda for too long–setting goals and expectations according to my own limited perspective, independent of the beauty being revealed around me. As I open my eyes to it, I see a world that is not smaller, a view not more narrow, but a widening of the former life to include grace I did not account for then. And when I make room for that grace, I find that the dimensions are not just wider, but higher and deeper too. The colors more vivid, the language more descriptive. If bath time can become a scene of baptism, then I am not being beaten into a new world, but born into it. Loved into it–into the place I was always meant to live, into the person I was always meant to become.

And so is he.

Wide, so wide. And high, long, deep. These are no ordinary measurements–I am learning the dimensions of love itself.