This morning, the boys complained about not wanting to go to basketball camp. It was to be their last one this school break, and they’re tired–end-of-school-break tired, as opposed to end-of-school-term tired, which are two different and very real things–and they were just DONE. To punctuate this message, The Kid barfed in the bathroom sink, and The Husband and I discussed how we’d manage it because, wouldn’t you know, this was the one day of the week I had something planned. He was working from home, so instead of playing basketball in a gym, the boys stayed home and watched it from a couch.

Meanwhile, I drove a half-hour to a university. I parked and walked through the rain, my travel mug of tea stuffed into my rain jacket pocket, sloshing and soaking the leg of my jeans. I tripped, only slightly less dramatically than Shiv on this week’s Succession, so by the time I arrived to my friend’s office I looked like a limping wet rat who’d pissed its left leg.

For nearly the next three hours, my jeans leg dried and I was immersed in the world of linguistics and autism. I sat beside my friend and in front of three computer screens filled with diagrams and articles and book chapters and more information than my brain could take in, and I loved every minute. My emotional connection to this work is powerful and propulsive, and its discoveries apply to my personal now even as I imagine all that I can do with it in the future, which I think is one way to define hope, this now-and-not-yet thinking.

Then I got home and talked to TK about some of those discoveries, and it was a gorgeous moment. Then I cuddled next to Little Brother on the couch to watch some (more) basketball, and it was another gorgeous moment. Then they started fighting and TK screamed about something after just screaming about something inconsequential so I thought the second scream was also inconsequential except it wasn’t, so he cried and accused me of not loving him as much as LB, and that was not a gorgeous moment.

He’s been accusing me of that quite a bit lately, and here’s the thing: I don’t love him less, but I have to wonder if it’s too easy for him to think that. I have to wonder if my tailored approach to parenting has its faults. You see, justice is one of his passions, and his idea of it is very narrow, and we’ve been working on the difference between equal and fair. I gave up on equal a long time ago with TK and LB because, it turns out, they are two separate people whose brains work quite differently, and therefore they can’t always be treated identically across the board. But fair? I guess I’m still working on that. And I have to be open to the possibility that there’s a different way for me to see things.

I’ve finally reached a point in my life at which my vision is, to put it technically, “all over the place,” and the optometrist is doing that thing where they train one eye to see well up-close and one to see well far away. Two eyes working differently while looking at the same things. Which is deranged, but also works, this contradictory approach to vision. “Deranged but works” might be an apt description for love, and life, and grace: the strengths compensating for the weaknesses, the hope that grace and I will fit together to see the whole beautiful picture.