We were talking about cancer. Because someone close to her has it. Then she mentioned The Kid, so speech delays came up. Not your typical over-the-elliptical gym conversation. So you can’t blame the woman next to us for taking notice.

“Don’t worry,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes while her ponytail bobbed up and down in rhythm with the machine. “Don’t you worry one little bit. It’s all going to be okay.”

I’ve heard this before, this reprise of one of several songs: “They Talk When They’re Ready”; “One Day He Just Spoke in Full Sentences”; “I Didn’t Talk Until I Was Three”. And the tunes can be encouraging, except that he is three, almost four, and by “not talking” most people mean “not carrying on a conversation”. And what I mean is, we do not have any words. So many people, in trying valiantly to help, are really tossing a Band-Aid onto a gaping wound.

But her words had heft. They came from a deeper place, I could tell. So I kept listening.

And there in the early-morning life of the gym, machines humming and cable news buzzing in the background, she told me her story–her son’s story. How he had no words when he turned four. How the comparisons show up at your door (and on Facebook, and at birthday parties) and it’s so hard not to invite them in. How, when people ask now how they communicated with him, she can’t even remember–except to say that they did. That she knows they did, remembers not the mechanics of it but that they understood him, and he them. She told me how he loved music and words with rhythm, like Dr. Seuss. About how they knew he was smart, even then. She told me their story, and in doing that she told me ours.

I felt known in the cardio room.

He’s applying for college now, she said, with Emory a top contender, and he speaks three languages. He wrote his essay about his love for language, about how, even though he doesn’t remember now the struggle he had with words, the fact that it’s a part of his story is what brokered his eventual passion.

Oh, and he wasn’t potty-trained when he turned four, either.

She offered advice, and encouragement, but what she really offered was kinship. And as I thanked her again, walking away, she said it one more time: “Don’t you worry. He’s going to be just fine.”

I had almost gone to a spin class that morning instead.

The last week has been rough, with vaccinations and flu shots, viruses and fevers. Yesterday I felt we were all finally on the mend, but it was rainy and gross outside, and I strapped them into their seats and went on a drive. TK alternately cried out and whined in the backseat, and Little Brother let out some protests too, and the traffic was thick. I felt my blood pressure and anxiety rise together, those bastard twins, and wondered how long I could keep the frustration at bay, the sanity in check. We were almost home. Could I make it?

TK let out a piercing screech.

I didn’t know what he wanted. I hate the not knowing–it digs in deeper than I realize, burrowing a nest inside my heart where it nurses fear and guilt, creates a home for them. It threatens to take root and make me forget everything I believe, make me renounce what’s true for illusions like control and pursuit of perfection and ease. It tells me I’m not enough, that all of this is my fault, that it will never get better. It laughs at admonitions not to worry. It scoffs at the idea I am loved.

Sometimes I listen.

And I feel I should be clear on this point, because I talk here about anger issues and temper lengths and there is room for misinterpretation: the number of times I have raised my voice at my children could be counted on one hand (SO FAR), with most occurring during the newborn period. But there in the car, with the screeching and the traffic and the inner gnawing, I raised my voice at TK.

“STOP WHINING.”

A pause of silence, a trembling lip, then the tears: fat ones rolling down tiny cheeks. And I am gutted, gutted. There at the light, I turn in my seat and reach out to him, hold his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Here’s the thing: the yelling usually happens inside. And it’s not like that’s brave, or better. Because for all the times it fails to erupt, it’s being heard somewhere else, and keeping a bad thing quelled isn’t a virtue when it’s born of fear and pride–that’s just a discipline. And grace doesn’t want my discipline; it wants my surrender. It wants my yes. It wants my assent to the possibility of beauty in the moment even when I don’t see it. It wants an altogether different kind of heart. One that doesn’t fight to keep the bad voices at bay, but rests in the sound of the only one that matters.

Brennan Manning talks about his early-life penchant for keeping rules but not knowing love, saying, “I studied hard, scored excellent grades, won a scholarship in high school, and was stalked every moment by the terror of abandonment and the sense that nobody was there for me…I never felt loved.” But grace didn’t leave him there. “But finally…I came to understand that I was truly loved…I began sobbing. As I drained the cup of grief, a remarkable thing happened: In the distance I heard music and dancing. I was the prodigal son limping home, not a spectator but a participant.”

In the car, I hold his hand, tell him I was wrong, that I love him. He holds my hand back, looks at me. Forgives me. One day, I will remember that we spoke without words.

Just before this eruption, I had been praying The Prayer: HELP. “Where are you?” not so much any more as accusation of absence but growing to be an expectation of presence. After the eruption, after our tears and the holding and the quieting, the traffic moved and I told him we were going to the dry cleaners. He grinned, pointed right at the building in the distance. He hears everything, knows so much. We communicate. These piercing screeches that punctuate the seeming peace, these breakdowns in the car, they are not interruptions. They are becoming clearer and clearer to me as invitations into deeper grace, deeper peace–into knowing how I am loved, and how to love. Spectator to participant.

Later I watch as a TV tour guide explains how inside the Vatican, because of all the lit candles (each corresponding to a prayer) and their smoke, paintings cannot be hung. They’d be destroyed. This calls for a different kind of art. So mosaics were born, each with thousands of tiny colored fragments that come together to form a picture. To form art. How long does it take them before they’re finished? I wonder, as LB leans against me, burying his head in my arm, and TK drives his car over my leg, laughing as I do at how it tickles. These moments–quiet and loud, messy and clean, bidden and not–falling like fragments into their places.