When I was pregnant with The Kid, I wrote a novel (installments can be found here!) called The Growing Season. It began as a story about the ambivalence faced by a woman approaching the birth of her first child. Coincidentally. I tackled my own feelings as I wrote: anticipation, fear, excitement, dread. I was concerned with such monumental changes as not going out to dinner every weekend and becoming sleep-deprived. I never once wrote about tilted vertebrae or neurosurgical outcomes.

TK, present day, has appeared to enter a strong recovery phase. He is wearing a therapy collar part-time and tilting his head less in general. He’s happier, and so are we. As I pushed his stroller out to the car today after lunch and a carousel ride with friends at the mall, a thought filled my mind: It feels so good to do normal stuff. To chase him around the food court, to put his shoe back on his foot a dozen times, to share Subway with him, to roll my eyes in unison with my friend at our kids’ behavior.

Then again, what is normal? TK’s MRI could be considered other-than-normal, and yet as the neurosurgeon reviewed it with us yesterday, it was full of good news: the surgery did what it needed to the bone, the areas of concern from the last scan have stayed stable, there’s nothing truly scary going on. There is some developmental stuff in the motor/speech area of the brain that could explain his late-walking and speech delay but which, the doctor reassured us, will not hold him back overall.

I watch my son walk backwards across the room and figure out puzzles and think of all he has overcome to get to where he is and I know the doctor is right. But I still don’t know exactly how this will all play out.

I’ve always thrived on certainties and assurances and predictable, guaranteed outcomes. And this season of our lives, parts of which stretch out and overlap with new seasons and inject unpredictability into the future, has been nothing if not fuzzy, ill-defined, borderless, teeming with questions and lacking in solid answers. And I’m being stretched: asked to bear the full weight of grace, to open instead of sending back the gifts that arrive in their own time and way, to depend upon the Ultimate Answer instead of the hundred tiny answers, to rely second by second on a power greater than predictability. I’m being asked to trust in ways that are new and uncomfortable and that signal the end of life as I knew it.

But the beginning of new life. Because I’m being stretched in other ways, too. So much so that I’ve had to start wearing maternity pants. While working on a new novel.

Do I really want an agenda more than I want grace? After all, I knew the test would be negative this time. All the rest were; it had been a full year. There was a halo and snow on the ground and The Husband stuck hundreds of miles away. And there was that time when it had started as a positive then disappeared.

I had gotten used to hearing no. I forgot that grace has its own agenda.

And the things I had hoped for: relief for TK, a sign of healing, a fourth member of our family–they weren’t nos. But they also weren’t what I thought they would be. They were slowly unfurling in their own time, their own way. The mystery that is TK–this beautiful design that reveals itself in ordinary moments of held fingers and an as-yet trio of spoken words–unfolds daily, calling me not just to a different life but a different way of living. And the funny thing is, after all that’s happened, I have so much less room for fear than I did while I was typing that novel. I’ve learned that there is a goodness at work that exceeds my demands for yes and now and all the other ways I tried to nail down joy before. Joy, it turns out, is not dependent on yes and now but is more fuzzy, ill-defined, borderless, and teeming with questions rather than solid answers. To think that I spent so much time avoiding it.

Stephen Colbert says of his mother, “What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift.” Gifts dressed as pain, deliverance wrapped deep inside delays. All is grace, every bit of it.

Say hello to my little friend.