The best part of a bad day is knowing it’s okay.

The slip of paper sat on the counter for a couple of days, daring me to do something about it. The mom of one of the other kids in TK’s class at his new school had rushed over to my car, passing it to me through the window at pick-up. This was a few hours after drop-off, when she had seen me in the lobby and introduced herself. Her daughter had apraxia, she had said. I had responded that TK does too. We think, at least? I had wanted to make a quick getaway: my sunglasses and I had an appointment in my waiting car, where I would drive home through tears (okay, sobs) and gulps of air and grace. She could tell. We should get coffee sometime, she said. There was lots to discuss.

I smiled, agreed it was a great idea, then ran to the car and commenced grieving over this latest change, its required adjustments, the coming hours away from TK and how he would respond to it all. When I returned to collect him, she gave me the paper. Her name, her daughter’s name, her phone number and email. She asked how TK had done. She asked how I had done. I told her about the crying–she seemed to know anyway. She seemed to be one of those people who sees. She nodded and smiled, affirming my guess. We arrived home and I placed the paper on the counter.

For all my telling and writing, I still don’t want to be really seen. Besides, I thought, we’re just passing through here. Taking her info? Putting it into my phone? It would be like accepting something I didn’t ask for, didn’t necessarily want. We’re not here to stay, I needed to explain.

Acceptance brings peace was what I had heard in a sanctuary at a women’s conference in Birmingham from one Elisabeth Elliot, whose first husband had been killed by the South American tribe to whom he had been sent as a missionary. Her second husband died of cancer. She told this to me, one woman among hundreds, one woman who was in the middle of a series of personal and professional failures during the hardest two years of her life thus far. One woman who was falling apart. She had some nerve, to see me like that.

Things have felt crumbly again lately–not like they did back in Birmingham, when I knew I was misplacing myself. Now, I’m right where I should be. But you can still be lost there. You can still feel like you’re slipping away, becoming a version of yourself that isn’t…you. Not who you’re meant to be, at least. And when I dared to speak the words to a trusted few, those words were accompanied by the characteristic throat-thickening and tear-spilling that always accompanies deep truth, and I knew something would have to be done.

I’ve always been high-strung. This is a sanitized way of saying that I’m a control-freak, Type A, in my own head, anxious individual. It’s been passed down through the women in my family like salad forks and monogrammed towels, this need to carry everything at once on arms too tired, to shoulder unnecessary burdens, to pop up like a jack-in-the-box throughout the meal because there’s one more thing that needs to be done. Worrying, though, is not a badge of honor. And if I’m going to be a martyr, it should be for a better cause than my own ill-founded fears. But I’m used to the feel of the frayed edges wrought by anxiety on my fingertips–they feel oddly safe, familiar. Lately, though, they’ve been tearing.

Things were supposed to be getting better, like they did when TK was six months old. We had moved to bottles, freeing up time and chest real estate. My old clothes fit. I was running. Little Brother was crying less, sleeping more, getting a personality. But I kept slipping into patches of sadness, and I blamed hormones leveling out. Maybe rightly. So I would give it some time. But my own sleep kept getting worse, and though the pendulum swings often for mothers of young kids–for all of us, in some ways–it was swinging way too often. Too fast. Between overwhelming joy and deep anxiety. Between wanting to hold them close and wanting to jump out the window. My fuse was too short. How long to wait?

Parenthood leaves marks on us all. All deep love does–ask Lily Potter. Some are prone to stretch marks. Some give up careers. Me? My already overwrought interior life becomes denser than ever, and the weight starts leaving marks of its own.

We were finishing dinner, TK getting wiped down by The Husband and LB on my hip, and it took one swipe of a baby’s arm for my Friday-night champagne glass to fly through the air and shatter on the kitchen floor. It might as well have been me, for all the pieces left down there, and I felt something inside finally whisper truth: You’re not just passing through here. I looked at them, the men in my life, and I knew that I did not want them walking on eggshells, on the broken pieces of me that could litter the floor if I didn’t just ask for help. If I didn’t accept it.

I’m not particularly interested in labels, as you may have guessed from my diatribes on TK. So I’m not going to diagnose this as generalized anxiety or mood swings or hormonal changes or postpartum depression, because what matters most is not a name but that I open my eyes to where grace will show up in this part of my story. Because show up it does, for all of us: whether it’s during coffee with a friend, drinks with a spouse, weekly counseling sessions, a pill taken daily. Grace shows up in the places we’d sooner die than end up and admit to our father we’re in that neighborhood and need a ride home. Grace is all over those neighborhoods, all over those places. Grace is there, and it’s in the ride home. I’m calling for a ride home.

Leonard Bernstein wrote a musical, and Henri Nouwen wrote about that musical, and both men knew about brokenness. The priest in the story, shortly after riding the wave of human approval, watches his glass chalice fall to the ground and shatter. He follows. Children’s voices are heard, singing, “Laude, laude, laude”–praise, praise, praise. As he walks among the shards, the priest gazes at them and says, “I never realized that broken glass could shine so brightly.” And so I lift my own hallelujah–a cold and broken one, but still a hallelujah–and consider that maybe sometimes our broken places can reflect light most brilliantly.

My own shards are gathered a little while and a team cleanup later, and I sit outside on a Friday night and watch TH blow bubbles for TK. LB sleeps peacefully upstairs. Breathing forgiveness in, redemption out, I enter the mom’s information into my phone and press save while holding a new, whole glass in my hand.