It’s official: I hate growth spurts.

I don’t even know what they are, which is part of the problem. Or, more accurately, I don’t know when they are. The websites tell me they occur around ten days to two weeks, three to four weeks, four to six weeks, and on and on in a series of overlapping numbers that, in the end, are guesses anyway because every baby is different. Which leaves me wondering, every other day or so, whether or not this is “I gotta eat” fussiness or just the regular stuff. Whether this day is different from the others with needs that must be addressed, or whether I’m just worrying too much as usual. Whether I am depriving or over-feeding my child. Whether I’m doing anything right.

It’s possible that this growth spurt issue is exposing an underlying insecurity. It’s possible that this trouble I’m having with it is really about more.

Whatever happened to predictability, indeed? I think it disappeared the moment they pulled The Kid out of me, or at least the illusion of it did. And Little Brother is driving the point home, with all his echoes of TK’s newborn weeks filling the house and the night and my anxious mind. This is not exactly the laid-back nature I was hoping to experience, to display, the second time around. Turns out this whole thing is still just hard.

Then the spurt, the storm, it passes, and I’m left with a wide-eyed wonder who no longer fits into his newborn clothes–that, and my own wonder at the impossibly fraught nature of this whole loving-someone-more-than-yourself venture, this chosen servitude full of surprises, the ridiculous demands mixed with hallowed moments that can all seem like too much, so often. And then it is too much: because TK climbs the play structure by himself now, The Husband’s breath held the whole time, and he slides down the big slide on his own, and he used to be afraid. He used to be tilted and askew and afraid, and now it’s like he’s becoming himself. The himself I feared he’d never be, and every day he proves me wrong. Every day he grows.

I took him to get shoes this week, and what used to be a ride through the emotional wringer for both of us–his crying protests, my frustration-limited empathy–was something new, something not entirely different or without protest, but something better nonetheless. Something like…growth.

Then there’s the growth that’s loud, that announces itself with doors opening and slamming shut all around the upstairs as he shows off his new skill, as if to shout “I’M the warden of this prison!”, and with it comes the absence of naps, those hours no longer to myself, and this is growth too–the uncomfortable stuff, the asking-more-of-me stuff. Growth that is rude, unapologetic, that wasn’t invited to dinner but showed up anyway, and without wine.

What a gift for some, to be able to take this all in stride, to celebrate each moment levelly and joyfully without prejudice. For others, is what I’m saying, because I’d still prefer an engraved announcement in the mail, an electronic follow-up, maybe even a text before these moments of uncertainty arrive at my door, before my plan–written, somewhat begrudgingly, in pencil–is erased once again and whatever was on the agenda is sacrificed for what is actually happening. For what needs to happen for us to grow.

Because my idol isn’t an unwillingness to grow, but an unwillingness to be inconvenienced by it. Elizabeth Gilbert said it to Oprah while I nursed, that on the bathroom floor she had wanted circumstances–everything–to change without requiring anything of her. I hear you, sister–but that’s not how it works, is it? How can it, when we get to always end up in such a different place, the kind of place where you look around and see, finally, that this is hard–so hard–but it’s also better.

“The unmerited grace [that] is handed to you, but only if you look for it,” is what Annie Dillard wrote about, and at 2 am one morning I am headed back from LB’s room, freshly exhausted after another feeding, and I climb into bed and it hits me, overwhelms me–how much I love each person in this house, this man beside me and these two boys sleeping unpredictably and inconsistently across the hall, and this is so not me, to be almost giddy with joy instead of depleted by sleeplessness, except that it is. Now. In this moment. And maybe more, that I will grow into, slowly or in spurts, predictably or probably not. It strikes me that if I’m constantly ruing the shifting ground beneath my feet, then maybe I’m standing in the wrong spot. Maybe I’m trying to plant a flag when I should be bending a knee.

The digging in of heels is so overrated, after all, when there is ground to cover. When there are stories to be told and beauty to be beheld.