I am brave, I am bruised, I am who I’m meant to be
This is me.

My boy is covered in scars.

The other day I noticed some scabs on his elbow and asked him about them. He grew defensive, thinking I was upset, when all I wanted was the story. He’s growing so much more confident these days–swinging from the monkey bars he used to avoid, running with his friends on the playground–that accidents are bound to happen. Scars are bound to show up. There’s his elbow, which will bear a mark, and there’s the line going down his neck from the spinal surgery, and the dots on his forehead from the halo afterward. There are the callouses on his hands, where he gently bites when he gets excited.

So maybe not exactly covered, but I feel them all. I carry them too. And there are enough there, I think, even as I know there could be more to come.

The boys asked me the other day for a definition for courage. I thought of what my answer would have been in a previous life, the one before them, before grace: doing big and scary things? Taking a huge, noticeable leap? Something public, to be sure. Something grandiose. Fearless.

Like moving to New York, maybe? People told me I was brave then, leaving the familiarity of my Southern home for the wilds of a concrete jungle, but I just felt out of options. I was desperate, not courageous.

I see courage now in so many of the things we don’t choose. In the scar from the port the doctor placed to pump medicine in. In the scarf worn once the hair loss has grown noticeable. In the mother sitting beside her two-year-old who’s receiving chemo every other week. In the six-year-old who walks into the hospital and then fights, but emerges hours later into the sun. In seeking therapy for a problem we never wanted to have.

And then…in telling these stories. The stories not of glory, but of wounds. These wounds are when are insides are forced to emerge on the outside, our greatest fears gone public without our permission, our being forced to admit we can’t do it all the way we thought we could before.

I remember standing in the cold at dusk on a New York sidewalk in the depths of a seasonal depression. I stayed. I was braver then than in the U-Haul, riding in the sun toward things I didn’t even know.

Courage is knowing, and staying anyway. Emerging.

When we were in New York with the kids, a busker was playing the trumpet under a bridge in Central Park. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” bounced off the walls of the tunnel, emerging into the spring air. Later, I took the subway down to Union Square on my own. I had forgotten that the farmer’s market would be there, white tents gleaming in the Saturday sun. I emerged from the damp depths underneath it all into that sunlight, the memories catching up with my present, bringing it all into one moment: this moment on the New York pavement, a book to launch and a man to be married to and boys to raise and a life to live here, and in Atlanta, and in Sydney. One boy in constant need of attention and the other in constant need of assurance, and yet they both want to know what it is, this word: courage. They need music for the lyrics. They want to be brave, we all do, before we learn about the scars involved–some songs have so many sharps and flats.

“It’s when you’re scared and you do it anyway,” I told them, knowing how begrudging that “doing it anyway” can be, how much I’ve fought it, how many times I’ve said no before the yes was nearly forced from me, was pulled even without my will, how often I would have run down another path given the choice. Does being brave even exist when its truest moments demand so much of what we never would have given on our own?

“You’re both brave,” I tell them, knowing how much higher the cost can grow as they do, wishing for no more scars even as I know how the stories that come with them can knit us to the people we’re meant to be with, and make us who we’re meant to become. Knowing that when we emerge on the other side, wherever that is, the biggest grace is not that we limped to the line, but were brought there.

The attention-seeker asks for the circus song from the backseat, and I love that one too. Next, the assurance-lover asks for his favourite. And because we know the words and the melody, we can sing all the songs, together.