In your tears and in your blood
In your fire and in your flood
I hear you laugh, I heard you sing
I wouldn’t change a single thing

“When did we become these people?” I asked The Sis, echoing her thoughts from a couple of weeks ago, as the younger invitees to the four-year-old’s birthday party ran circles around us. We laughed, but I could feel the anxiety tightening its coil around my heart. The Kid was the youngest there save a fifteen-month-old whose mother had just told me she’s having to keep him from climbing the stairs at home. But mine’s not climbing the stairs, I thought, and the familiar cocktail of panic and fear called Maternal Guilt (splash of lime on the rocks, please) competed against the wine in my hand–Solo cup sloshing as I took turns with The Husband following TK in his circle of curiosity around the house. And when we were the first to leave, the fear jumped in the car with us, the inner dialogue and analysis and comparisons that would unfetter me from the freedom grace promises.

And these promises–they aren’t vague notions and flowery phrases, but hard truths written in ink and flowing like water. Yesterday, a baptism at our church for the couple who endured miscarriages and years of in vitro and now, their boy’s wet head between them. I remembered TK’s ceremony a year ago, the conversation and understanding that preceded it: the son of covenant believers, the sign of a promise dependent not on his faith, but God’s grace. I remember the message still occupying my inbox, sent from a friend among my dearest, who felt my panic when TK gasped for air one time and she responded with the catechism that is hundreds of years and wisdom old. The comfort that pulses deep, even through the hairs on his head. I look down at the rings on my finger, one given with a promise on a rooftop in New York and the two beside it, on a beach in Florida. I know the vows I’ve made, but how easily I forget the ones made to me.

It’s so much easier to, as my Italian friend in New York used to say, “see the monsters around every corner that are not really there.” To let the MRI and CT and comparisons and milestone averages speak louder than the promises. And then yesterday, as I was once again following him around, TK and I turned the corner outside the gym-turned-sanctuary and the girl looked at him and said, “Aww. What happened to his head?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He tilts it funny. What’s wrong with it?”

Deep breath, throat thickening. “That’s how he was made.”

She pressed on. “His head is just…like that? Well, he’s still cute.”

And she loped off, leaving an oblivious toddler and a gutted mother in her wake.

I swept him up, hurried outside, felt the tears sliding down. I had a few seconds to go before the privacy of the car, then what? A couple of years before he asks what’s wrong, before I have to hold it until we get home and I can cry in my closet? I felt ripped open, crushed, violated. Experiencing hurt on your child’s behalf–watching it stretch out before you, years into the distance, a never-ending sea of vulnerability–is like having open-heart surgery without anesthesia. The Husband arrived minutes later to my explanation through sobs. And I remembered, as I told him, how I had met this same girl’s mother weeks ago and she had described when they met their daughter at the orphanage in Guatemala. How she, like TK, had a tilted neck that turned out to be simpler than his and was now healed. I wondered how much of this the girl knew, how many of her questions came from innocence and how many from insecurity. I wondered if one day, TK will be so restored as to see someone with an affliction similar to his now and ask questions and feel pity. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Or would it?

Because one thing I’m learning from living in this broken world is that there is a difference between pity and empathy. And if TK lives with an awareness of his flaws as part of a design, if they cling and persist all the way down the line this side of eternity, then is that the worst scenario? If his place is to be more at home among the offbeat, the less-than (or so much MORE than?) “perfect”, will he not be all the more able to weep with those who weep? There is one who is close to the brokenhearted–should we shun the things that make us more like Him?

These are not the worst things. We know they’re not, as trials are held and not held and children of all colors are killed and thirty-one-year-old sons die alone in hotel rooms. Part of my job is to see the kids with special needs, the nonverbal and the hand-wringing and the tube-fed. Yes, it can be worse. But we each carry our own brokenness, and if this is our road, if this is how grace is to be imparted to me, to him–through waves of tears and oceans of vulnerability and a bit of a tilt–who am I to ask for another cup? Yes, I’ve learned the difference between pity and empathy–have lived it. And you can lump me with the raw, the honest, with those whose flaws are right out in the open either by design or by admission, because I want to read and hear from the people who are real about where they are in their story, not those who only proclaim the ways they’ve met the mark. I can deal with misplaced pity, with masquerading–I used to dole it out myself–but I’m not inviting it to my birthday party. It’s not among my dearest, you see.

I know where this story is going. And whether TK receives his restoration at the hands of a surgeon or at the gates of heaven, I know who will be its true provider. I know that if I’m going to stay afloat in this sea of uncertainty called parenthood, called life, I’m going to need a bigger boat than my own efforts. I know that grace is a healer, and not always of the infirmities I would prefer to be rid of, but always of judgment, of self-pity, of martyrdom. There are no victims in this household, and no better-thans either. And in those moments soaked with tears, when resentment and fear threaten to ride home with us, I slam the door and send my prayer upward, to someone who knows about wounded sons. Behind me, a toddler plays happily in his carseat, his babbles on their way to becoming words and “flaws” proceeding at their preset pace on a journey to glory.