It was almost as if…dare I say…he welcomed the wonder of it all. –Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different

When I first lived in New York, in the summer of 2005, I quickly learned the subway’s 6 line and how to catch the express train to Union Square–a mecca of familiar retail like Barnes & Noble, and new ones like Forever 21 (which, regretfully, I was/am not). I would emerge from the underground and check out some stores, then head south on Fifth and hit up some more staples (J Crew, I’m looking at you…and your sale section). After awhile I memorized a route that took me past a favorite church and down a street of polished townhouses into the West Village, where I would end the first half of my journey at Magnolia Bakery, cupcake in hand.

I always felt that, after the effort spent getting to it and the miles I walked home afterward, I earned that cupcake.

I spent the overwhelming majority of the first three decades of my life thinking I’d earned a lot, actually. Isn’t that the unsaid and unspoken agreement by which many of us live–the law of karma? The world, after all, lives by–and recognizes–hours put in before assessing reward. It’s such a hard habit to break, this cycle of determining my own worth by my merits. By my productivity. By whether my kids are potty-trained or I’ve yelled at them today. Now let’s see: neither of them is, and one sports a black eye that I garnered for him when our stram (stroller + pram, I’m coining it) hit an Everest-sized bump that I failed to notice, probably because I was quantifying the lack of gratitude shown for all the hard work I’ve put in on this earth. (Some of you will be getting letters.) I HAVE MOVED ACROSS THE WORLD FOR MY FAMILY. I WIPE TWO ASSES THAT ARE NOT MINE EVERY DAY. I MAKE FOOD THAT TINY PEOPLE DON’T EAT THEN I PICK IT OFF THE FLOOR LIKE CINDERELLA BEFORE THE BALL HAPPENED. I could go on. I have gone on (ask The Husband). Surely, it’s time for God to throw me a solid and make things easy?

Life used to be easier and I never appreciated it.

I got blisters in New York. I sweated from countless places. But I ate cupcakes on the street and slept in until noon. I wandered around. I got lost. I got found. I stared at water views. I experienced grace. I peed alone. Looking back, it seems like it was…easier. But it was the same, just different. Because now, I do the same things. I just do them with a pair of tiny dudes, their combined weight working with gravity against me, their whines piercing through the quiet of unfamiliar grocery stores and interrupting the Bible story at church, their wrestling leaving one foot in my face and another in my crotch. I wipe cupcake off their faces and arms and legs and stram, and I sweat in playgrounds. I drive twenty minutes to a therapy center multiple times a week and wait for two hours while TK gets services. I would never have driven this early (read: I would never have driven in Australia) if TK hadn’t needed me to. I would never have done so many things if I hadn’t been needed to…if I hadn’t been needed.

It is weighty and often onerous, this being needed. It wakes me up in the middle of the night with thoughts of childcare and school starting, of sharks and drownings and kidnappings and breaks with sanity. It pulls me down into a depth from which I think I may never recover, and then it does the strangest thing:

It saves me.

Or, to be clear, grace saves me through it. Grace had the wisdom and foreknowledge to see what I didn’t, that I was on a collision course with myself, and grace intervened. Grace made everything harder, and better, and worse, and wonderful, all at the same time. Grace made everything more.

And what that looks like now is somehow the same as before, but different. There are the thousand tiny kindnesses of grace showing up. From the silly–the bedding I found that so resembles what I had and loved those years in New York, only now it’s bigger; it stretches further and over more people–to the deeply meaningful: the books my friend sent that I’m devouring on our back deck as the boys play beside me. The homes we’ve been welcomed into, where we’ve been watered (wined) and fed and our children have been embraced with stunning consideration. The liturgy that is the same across languages and hemispheres and continents. The rooftop bar TH and I went to the other night with a view of the water and a bridge, much like so many of the rooftop bars we frequented in New York.

Except now…this time, we came home to two boys who swam naked in the pool with grins on their faces, their faces that look like both of ours. (I only worried about drowning…occasionally.) Now, when I get to the gym, I park a stram and heave out those two boys and, in a move my old self wouldn’t have seen coming, I take them on an escalator ride before I work out, the three of us clasping hands like we’re going on some grand journey. And we are.

And at church this week, I didn’t get to stay with the grownups this time. I sat with my children, who alternately charmed and disrupted, and when the story came along, I wondered if it wasn’t for me as much/more than it was for them. Because when they were asked what kind of person we have to be to receive that divine love, a boy spoke up that I knew in New York, but he was a baby then. Now he’s an older kid, the same but different, another reminder of grace bringing the pieces of this puzzle together, and he answered in a way that not every preacher’s kid would, but in the best way, because he said: “You don’t have to be anything. He just loves you.” My boys scrambled across my lap and swatted at each other, and I grabbed their hands and heard it, this story that is always, always the same but meets me in every different place I am as though I’ve heard it for the first time.