Maybe this is exactly where I’m supposed to be right now. Maybe this, right now, is making me a better person. –Piper Chapman

No, I’m not comparing parenthood to prison. That would be unfair–I mean, they let you watch TV in prison. And pee behind a door, right? 

There are days, though, when the boundaries of your circumstances feel to be closing in, when your shoulders are stooped and your back is aching, and on these days–in these moments–it’s hard to remember that you longed for this life. That you prayed for it. That you celebrated its arrival. It’s hard to remember all that when the day kicks off with a blowout that leaves you and The Kid covered–covered, I say–in shit, and Little Brother is screaming a few feet away because no one is holding him, for God’s sake, and the speech therapist rings the doorbell and you just have to answer it with poop in your hair and a baby on your hip and a half-naked kid running around in a Pull-Up. A clean Pull-Up, thank you very much.

It’s easy to turn the blessings into burden. It’s easy to look around at everything and feel like it all adds up to a lot of work, and not much glory.

And we do what is easy. We love what is easy: traffic-free drives, no wait for a table, uneventful doctor’s appointments, flights without turbulence. No diagnoses. No nanny quitting after three months and leaving you scrambling to find someone new to trust. No tantrums with transitions. No pureed food on the floor. No shit in your hair.

And because sometimes, on these days, I’ll be damned if I listen to nursery rhymes one more time, I took a few minutes to listen to the poet Mary Oliver instead. And she said this, there in the alternating calm and chaos (coordinated with traffic lights, natch) of my boy-child-populated SUV, as I tried to remember what the therapist had told me about holding my back straight and pushing my shoulders against the seat like there was a water bottle between them because this would help with the knots–she said this into all that:

“Lucretius just presents this marvelous and important idea that what we are made of will make something else. Which to me is very important. There is no nothingness. With these little atoms that run around too little for us to see, but put together they make something. And that to me is a miracle. Where it came from, I don’t know, but it’s a miracle. And I think it’s enough to keep a person afloat.”

And what I heard was, it all adds up. These moments in the car, the moments in therapy (his and mine), the times I tell him I love him, the minutes and hours and days watching videos and adjusting diets and modeling behavior and breathing grace–they all add up. They have to, right? Otherwise, what’s the point?

But there’s more to it than that. There’s more to it than reaching an endpoint or attaining an outcome. Because this life, I have come to begrudgingly admit, is not a steady diet of met expectations or a valiant journey of victory after victory. It is stops and starts, fits and pauses, progress and setbacks, and for so long I only let it be one thing–the “good” thing–and fought to label the other as anomaly, as aberration, as an obstacle to cross. When all that time, grace waited in those moments. Thanksgiving lay in those crevices, gratitude in those valleys, and I would have missed it if all sorts of things hadn’t consistently, gloriously fallen apart.

Because this, as it turns out, is the arithmetic of grace: weak plus grace equals strong. Defeated plus grace equals victorious. Despairing plus grace equals hopeful. Broken plus grace equals whole. Now. The arithmetic of grace is that there is always more.

There’s nothing like finding gold
within the rocks hard and cold
I’m so surprised to find more
Always surprised to find more

A day stretches before us, and I wonder if it’s one of those days. As the hours wait to be filled, I fill–with anxiety, with fear, with guilt over what hasn’t even happened. And I realize that this thing I do so easily, this blessings-into-burden equation, is one I calculate without figuring in grace. I realize that the weight of the day rests so heavily because I am afraid. Because I know that every minute holds an opportunity for me to make a mistake. To mess them up. To hurt them. They are not the burden. I am–my cracks and fissures, my rocks hard and cold.

What can be done? What can I do?

Nothing, grace whispers. Wait.

The potential nanny calls me back, and I tell her the details, tell her the diagnosis, and she tells me her son had the same. That it was reversed. “So just let that encourage you,” she says, “whatever happens.” She knows. Vulnerability plus grace equals connection. Then I get to work and the office manager shows me a book she’s reading, tells me about how worked up she gets and how this is helping, and I recognize the cover from the last hands I saw holding it–from a friend in New York, and I see it now, eight years later, grace whispering again. And later I’m at home with the boys and LB sleeps upstairs, his image in my hand on the monitor screen, while TK and I wander the backyard. This could be a chore, a bore–this stomping through the same grass, covering the same terrain over and over. It could be me aching for my phone, fifty feet away, planning a to-do list in my head, counting the minutes until we can do something else.

It could be.

But today, it is a joint expedition. I ask him questions, and he answers them as only he does, as only he can, and we laugh together, and he occasionally takes my hand to lead me somewhere old, yet altogether brand new. These moments, scattered around like dust or like gold depending on your vision, waiting to be held and seen and lived, adding up one after the other into redemption.