No one told me that water-breaking would be so painful.

The contractions were rippling through every fifteen minutes, give or take, and it was that give or take and the varying intensity of them that left me uncertain, wondering if I should call the doctors’ answering service again and risk being that girl or go to the hospital or just wait. It was, after all, unlikely–right? The fact that I had worried about this very scenario had, I thought, been an insurance policy against it–the after-hours labor possibility, the figuring out of what to do with The Kid, the rushing to the hospital in the dark. Then I stood up and doubled over, racked with a pain from the inside out that made me feel as though I was being squeezed in half. Then came the gush of liquid, the exclamation point after all the question marks: Go! Make the calls, grab the bag, kiss the sleeping TK, get into the car.

He was born at 1:06 am, the latest I’ve been awake in quite a while. The whole thing, therefore, had a hazy, dreamlike quality to it: the mostly-empty hospital lobby and corridors, the unpopulated pre-op rooms. The dream was shattered first by my own puking, the product of worsening contractions. Then it was shattered in the OR, when they lifted him up and he cried–it was all real now. That cry led to more water, filling my eyes this time, dividing me into two in so many ways and dividing us into before and after him. Is this always what accompanies new life? This breaking of dams, of walls, of water, these waves of pain, these cries, this exhaustion, this joy? These baptisms. Can it all ever really be short of, anything other than, everything?

And the two weeks since, this adjustment of him into our lives and our lives around him, has been less of the acute disorientation of the first time around, thank God. But there is an emotional heaviness to having two, to balancing time and having to say no to one who doesn’t fully understand, and that is its own pain, the pain that comes with the joy of navigating a new shape to our family, to my heart. Few things feel as full of effort as bringing new life into the world, whether it arrives as a seven-pound human or a three-hundred-page manuscript or an idea finally coming to fruition: living our calling can feel so hard, like so much work. These newborn days of constant laundry, of dodging spit up, of broken sleep, of twenty-four-hour days–it’s so easy to get lost in it all to the point that I feel I’m holding it all up, keeping it all together, and that’s where the trouble starts. Life begins to feel less like a path than a stairway, and everything seems to depend upon my continuing to climb it.

It feels like nothing is ever enough when I’m looking to myself to be the enough. And this, I’ve learned, is no way to live. My own words, originated in a divine space and handed down through grace, echo through my heart and fingers: Enough has a name, and it is not mine.

Life may call us to climb, which may make us forget that we are held. Because the biggest work, the one thing I can’t do, is save us all–and this is everything. I can’t be the grace we need, I can only let it break through, flow on, baptizing us in its wake and setting us free from the tyranny of me. It’s true–the laundry won’t get done if someone doesn’t do it. It’s true–the baby won’t get fed if I don’t step up. So it’s easy to feel as if this whole operation needs my signature to continue its existence.

But I didn’t fill the empty space, create the stirrings of life. I didn’t break the water or heal the neck or design the smile. The weight lifts, and the climb begins to flatten.

And the things on the list–the appointments, and the shuttling around, and the feedings, the the folding–the effort begins to ebb a bit as I attend to them more as gifts than tasks–no easy thing, sure, but not impossible, either. I’m driving TK away from his OT session, where he killed it and where my initial alarm at him needing such help is vanquished with each marker held, tunnel entered, new skill learned. Things change, you know. A song comes on the radio and I realize after a minute that I’m hearing it differently. In New York, I ran to it in Central Park and along the East River, the low undertones matching my pace; now I hear the higher notes and they match TK’s smile meeting mine in the rearview mirror. Later, he leans on me harder than ever, maybe feeling the shifts himself, and this weight is the best kind: the heaviest and the deepest, and I have a moment where I can barely breathe as I take in the beauty of it. It’s not every moment, but it’s so enough. Grace, it changes my vision and my hearing and every fiber, washing over us like a baptism, turning effort into open hands and filling stairways with songs.