I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife.

So this is what an open heart looks like: at the beginning, a closed-off collection of rooms. Doors glued shut with staunch refusals at letting that type of light in, at being transported to that place, at sacrificing for that cause. So much other, so much they and them. So many bars and boundaries.

Then, an uninvited crack of light peeks through. Possibility enters the equation, coupled unbreakably with uncertainty–the most uninvited guest. The unknown beckons one moment, taunts the next. Life alters between impromptu symphony and cruel joke. Everything is changing. And just when you had figured out the rules, had gotten comfortable, had begun to understand the way it all works. You had fought for that comfort, for that understanding. And now you’re losing it?

Then you remember: you hadn’t fought. You had surrendered. You didn’t get, you were given.

Nothing feels safe anymore; the very idea of home is…dislocated? Relocated. Home becomes something different. Someone different. That’s when the bars sag and break, the doors are unlocked from the inside, and the whole damn space opens up. This is the slow and steady work of grace, this grace that operates not in one night stands or fell swoops but over years and in moments, ebbs and flows, until you wake up one day and realize you are not the person you were. But you are becoming exactly who you’re meant to be.

It sucks. And it’s wonderful. It’s painful, and healing. It’s nothing I asked for, and everything I needed. It is bloody surgery and fine art.

So this is what an open(ing) heart looks like now:

Telling my counselor ten years ago that I felt like a loser for not having what everyone else seemed to have: love, marriage, kids. The response: that I was describing loss, and needed to feel it, acknowledge it. That all these years and love and marriage and kids later, I still feel the specter of loss haunting me, threatening to take it all away. Everything, even grace, looks like a monster when I live in fear. And then, fear is overturned as sadness isn’t shunned but recognized in its rightful place alongside joy, the unbreakable coupling. And a heart opens to the wholeness of emotions.

I sit on a patio at a restaurant where, years before house and marriage and children and life-altering decisions, The Husband and I sat and talked about what that life might look like. All these years later, I sit across from a friend and the restaurant has a different name and I didn’t even know her then, before we shared stories and sons’ struggles and laughter, and I tell her what we’re facing and she listens, commiserates, supports. And a heart opens to the chance of long-distance friendship, of eventual reuniting, maybe on this same patio. At the same restaurant with a different name, because sometimes things get renamed, and this too is grace.

After nights of waking at 3 am with every possible fear assaulting my mind, I decide to write down each one of them, a listing that somehow feels like the opposite of the listing of rules I used to follow, try to master. And as the list grows, my fears unravel, turning into prayers that then become promises–I realize they always were. What looked like loss now appears as opportunity. It all was waiting to be renamed. I begin to sleep again.

She mentions it over wine, this idea she had of writing letters now to give to her children later, and one afternoon when The Kid goes downstairs to therapy and Little Brother goes upstairs to nap, I decide to do it. In composition notebooks–the ones I used to fill in school, with assignments–I write words that are deeper than my frustrations, expressions better than my outbursts, and the morning that was closing in on me becomes an evening that opens me again, to how much I love them. To what is most true. And now, they will know too.

A week of predictable schedules and alone time is shot to shit with two viruses, in two children, in a row, and while I wait for my turn in front of the viral firing squad, I mop asses and floors and write off rugs and spray Lysol and consider again that I made this choice, to abdicate doctoring for mothering, but that doesn’t keep me from feeling like I don’t know who I am or what I’ve done any given moment. Then he tells me he’s sick, and I think back to the last time–that he couldn’t even express that. But now, he lets me take care of him; he calls me “Doctor Mommy.” And while I feel sure that most doctors are not scrubbing vomit out of God forsaken sisal rugs while toddlers climb on their backs, I have to laugh: at the two identities fused in his mind while I haven’t been able to make sense of them; at the contractors keeping LB from napping and giving me a splitting headache while they improve a house we may not keep living in; at the impossibility of being whatever I was while becoming whoever I should. At this current, temporary-yet-truly-forever inability to plan, to see with certainty beyond an inch ahead. The way sickness and grace expose so little of tomorrow but so much of the faithfulnesses of yesterday. How these menial tasks can somehow both pin me to earth while providing glimpses of heaven.

How I ask for crystal balls and surgical notes…and get flesh and blood, beating into a story, within a heart that remains surprisingly, dangerously, beautifully open.