The cries are changing–no longer do pterodactyl squeals pierce the night every other hour. Fading, too, are the urgent feed-me-now-or-I’ll-starve cries of the immediate post-newborn period. Now we have the whines of a four-month-old who wouldn’t mind a snack and a hug but can survive without them. It’s getting him there–teaching him to get through the night without both–that’s our job.

And it’s harder than the first time around, with The Kid, because he wore off all my outer layers and the defenses perched around my heart and that, along with the exhaustion of parenting a three-year-old and a baby, has left me raw and tender and open and vulnerable and all sorts of things that look risky, and risky seems bad.

Or it all can be, I’m finding, the very opposite of bad.

I pre-emptively warned The Husband that this next stage–the Getting Him Through It stage–may require more help of the masculine, milk-less variety, and he acquiesced. But when I threw in a mention of a possible night away for me just to nail it all down, perhaps a hotel? Well, then he laughed. Which was not an appropriate response. Because, after all, there has to be some benefit in becoming a human soda fountain for half a year and I know, I know, there’s the bonding and the magic and the precious baby and all the other wonders but here’s the thing: my life isn’t a hashtag (#sweetbaby #dearhusband #breastmilkisbest) and there’s room for shades of light and grey (fifty, apparently) and I would really love to sleep through the night sometime in the next decade, thank you.

But until then, there is the 1 am wake-up call. And all that comes with it.

Which, as it turns out, isn’t all bad either. In an “I’ll miss you when you’re gone…maybe” way that will make what is difficult now special in hindsight. And special now, sometimes. Because there’s the way he sleepily rests his head on my shoulder when he’s finished eating, right before I place him gently back down–the sweat on the back of his neck and the way he fits right into the nook between my head and shoulder. There are the moments of kindness when TH and I help each other out, even when we feel our energies would be better spent screaming. There’s the moment TH finishes diapering Little Brother up and places him in my lap and we salute each other. There’s the forced slowness that a less-than-restful night brings into the next day, the attention to detail that accompanies that slowness: the way I’m just sluggish enough to catch TK grinning at something Mickey Mouse said, or how I was too tired to look at my phone and instead saw LB gazing adoringly at his big brother. There’s the way exhaustion can splinter you and undo you and reduce you to bare bones and brass tacks, but those brass tacks can really gleam in the right light–so is it really a reduction?

Long nights wear us down and slow us down but so does grace–because grace makes us slow down enough to see the story. And then, to tell it.

Part of seeing the story, part of getting to the point of telling it, is recognizing which parts don’t belong. Which parts aren’t truth and need to be released. Because the darkness, the 1 am lack of light, makes some thoughts loom large and frightening, like how I need to start potty-training soon. That thought rolls into an overwhelming fear that it will not work, will never work, and he’ll be eighteen in diapers. There’s the comment on Facebook from a mom who likens her struggle to mine and tries to fit them both into the same box–a well-meaning one, maybe, but the thing about us right now is that we’re in a sort of in-between, in a spot of mystery, and that mystery and tension are not going to be solved by someone else’s suggestion of what I call my kid. There is an urgency to that suggestion–an urgency I recognize from my own life, my past, I hope–the urgency of “hear me, accept me, validate me.” An urgency that looks like a relative of hurry. But there is the life defined by diagnosis, and the life defined by grace, and there is the next night, when I get another comment, this one from a mom who doesn’t demand conformity, isn’t marked by urgency, but leaves room for mystery by adding, “Maybe you too. Or maybe not. Either way, we’re over here should you need us.” And at her suggestion, I find out about another way of learning, of how some kids see patterns that the rest of us don’t because they look at the world from a different perspective, and whether this acronym is where we land doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I hear echoes of TK in its letters and this, this, is grace–not demands, not hurry, but a hand offered, a reminder that the mystery can be the door to the beauty.

Because that’s what happens when you keep watch at all hours, when you live moments in the mystery and the certainty, the not knowing and knowing, the messy and the ordered. Your eyes learn to adjust to all sorts of light, even the dark-light, and see the beauty in each. You learn that groans of frustration can turn into prayers of supplication and sometimes even gratitude. You learn to look up in time to see the sun setting, and rising.

It’s the end of another day, and I don’t know what the night holds–rest, or the opposite. I’m warming a bottle and TK is arranging his toys like he does and TH holds LB. This is when we’re all together, before TH and LB head upstairs with the bottle and TK and I stay downstairs with the TV and the pump. I’m standing over the sink, back aching again as I wonder how long before it just gives up and goes out, and TH calls me over. He points out the window, tells me he knows how I love them because I’ve made him look at so many, and I see it: the fire in the sky that is the sun going down, orange and red and purple and blue, light flaming before it fades out only to come back again the same way a few hours and maybe a feeding later. And when he points the beauty out to me, I realize that there are days when the sunrise, and the sunset…you can’t even tell the difference.