Walking is big at our house right now.

Little Brother is, at fifteen months, just starting to get his sea legs–effectively shredding my theory that The Kid’s late-walking status was due only to his neck troubles. No, apparently we just have kids who walk late. And who have huge heads. Which, come to think of it, may be related…but the point is, LB is pushing his walker around like a flash, manhandling it around corners, and walking pretty steadily while holding one of our hands. Which means we’ve been racking up steps together, doing circles around the house. Then there’s TK, who at four has decided he’s pretty much over the stroller. So we’ve struck a deal: he sits in there for the duration of our walk (my exercise), and I release him from the cage when we return to our street, at which point he struts along the curb and glances back up at me every few seconds, grinning with pride at his newfound independence.

Which is what I’m finding much of motherhood to be: fostering this independence; preparing them to, one day, leave me and make it in the world on their own. My job is to carry them, then hold their hands, then walk beside them, then release them. All the while, I rue either their lack of independence–wishing they would do more on their own already–or their growing and natural separation from me. The ambivalence of parenthood, searing and constant.

We took the boys to childcare at the gym over the weekend, as we do every Saturday, where the ladies have known them for a year now. And every week for over a month now we’ve regaled them with TK’s latest trick: each visit replete with a new word or phrase, met with their cheering. (He has a way of racking up the fans.) This past weekend he strode into the room where only one other little girl was playing and plopped down at the Lego table, getting to work on a project only he could see. We told the ladies about his newest phrase–“Close the door”–and he dutifully repeated us, tossing the words over his shoulder with a grin. The women clapped, we beamed, and then that little bitch giggled and said, “But it doesn’t even sound like he’s saying that!”

Her innocence was a given of her age (though that didn’t stop me from dropkicking her out the window), but it ripped open that wound in my heart that never fully heals, fed as it is by present stings and future fears: my sensitivity to his feelings, to the certainty that he, like all children, will be made fun of, but with the added bonus of the challenges that could make him an easier target. “He’s working on it!” I said, smiling through gritted teeth, and The Husband and I walked outside, where he made a joke and I laughed along. Then I started my run, during which I cried and prayed and may have plotted the tiny girl’s demise.

“I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow/For the first time, I’m thinkin’ past tomorrow,” sang the voice in my ear, and the parental ambivalence that dogs me, that has always felt like a call to split personalities or sign of mental disarray–it began to look more like health. Less like denial and more like truth. The idea that I can laugh through my tears struck me as my feet pounded the pavement and I began to wonder if this is actually the secret to it all: this confluence of emotions always nipping at my heels as I try to outrun it when maybe it’s time to jump in. To embrace it all–the sadness, the joy, the struggle, the victory–because this is what it is meant to look like: a thousand different facets of the same thing, each reflecting its own beam of light. I stopped threatening the little girl in my head and thought about where we are, where TK is, now compared to just weeks ago. The sorrow didn’t disappear, but I laughed anyway. And ran faster, in what felt like, finally, the right direction–the current pulling me where I’m meant to go.

Yesterday I walked out of the office on my last official day of working. I’ll be staying home for awhile, but not before I’ve watched them build out a new space for another dentist to fill. I’ve watched the walls go from bare to painted, the floors get stripped and redone, the walls move. I inhabited the space for a day, then said goodbye…and came home to my boys. I’m watching now as they grow and change and I prepare them to need me less every day, which seems like the craziest job in the world to have–especially considering I have no idea how to do it: this job of walking beside them that reminds me constantly of how much I am held.