The truth is not debatable, as my former counselor would say, so let’s start with the truth: I love my son, desperately so. This truth will never change. But there is no mutual exclusivity between that and the fact that sometimes, I remember how life was easier when I sat on my fire escape in New York and daydreamed with a glass of Prosecco in hand, just because I could. Dear God, that seems a lifetime ago.

This morning, during some particularly loud and long crying jags (his, then mine), I wondered if I had ever felt this way before: exhausted, inept, ready to quit on a daily basis. Had such a time ever occurred? My memory bank told me that it did, told me, in fact, the exact dates of its duration: July 2003-June 2005. The Worst Two Years of My Life, as I’ve referred to them, filled with days of not wanting to get out of bed without even the decency to blame it on actual depression; rather, my distaste for life was purely circumstantial.

I’m kind of a baby myself.

Then I remembered what came next, what came even because of those two years: the Escape to New York, the finding of grace and redefining of faith, the formation of lifelong friendships, the traveling, the snagging of a certain love of my life. Five years of ups and downs and financial insecurity and personal bliss and fire escapes, preceded by a shitstorm of epic proportions that, thankfully, included the counselor mentioned above sent as an emissary from above to anchor me to the truth even as I wandered despairingly. The same counselor who married me to that love of my life five years later.

So, in the darkness of a nursery as cries pierce the air and my sanity, I remember. I remember my own story, how what is seen was not made out of what was visible. I remember how my future husband just showed up at church one day, happening to know my people already, and how he was way too nice to ever get involved with me–or so I thought. I remember moving from the fire escape to a Starbucks, typing my story as winter grew near and the city grew dark. I remember that the best stories come from the darkness, from the spots of insecurity and despair and seeming hopelessness.

You say you see no hope/You say you see no reason we should dream

That the world will never change/You’re saying love is foolish to believe…

Look, if someone wrote a play just to glorify what’s stronger than hate

Would they not arrange the stage to look as if the hero came too late?

He’s almost in defeat/It’s looking like the evil side will win

So on the edge of every seat from the moment that the whole thing begins, it is

Love who makes the mortar and it’s love who stacked these stones

And it’s love who made the stage here/Although it looks like we’re alone

In this scene set in shadows/Like the night is here to stay

There is evil cast around us but it’s love who wrote the play

For in this darkness love can show the way

(David Wilcox, “Show the Way”)

I know a love that is hard-fought, often disbelieved but never disproven, tested to the edge and always found to be true. This is the love shown to me over and over in my life, and it will therefore be the love I have to give as I learn it myself. For me, most things–including these early days of having a child, and likely the later days too–are not all flowers and unicorns and happy thoughts and floating on air. More power to the people whose personality test reads “sanguine,” but mine veers more toward “melancholy.” Those upbeat types would probably read my blog and see a huge Debbie Downer who just needs to chin it and stop complaining. There is truth to that: I do make things more difficult, typically by taking the slow train to seeing blessings in the mess. Mess being loosely defined as whatever doesn’t run as smoothly as and in the manner that I planned it. But my rough edges, my tendency to miss the forest for the trees, my unwillingness to hew every status update into a positive whether or not it reflects how I feel? These parts of me allow my story to be told the way it was meant to be–with redemption included. With the Now, but Not Yet. With the, at turns, crying and angelic face of The Kid next to mine as I survey this messy miracle and know that the common denominator to every experience worth being recounted is love. And when added to faith and hope and grace, that is everything. And in this family? We have all of the above.