*or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mom

Some days it feels like I’ve experienced a lifetime before 8 am.

This is the nature of parenthood, especially the early years of it, or so I hear from people who proclaim that “the days are long but the years are short!” And the days, they are long–especially when I’ve wiped two asses multiple times prior to breakfast. The years? I’ll get back to you on that one.

Edith once told Carrie, “That’s the key to having it all: stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like,” with more than a hint of defeat. And I think it’s hilarious–in a terribly sad way–when women talk about having it all. As if anyone can have it all. But I”m learning that what I do have, it turns out, is saving me daily. Just not in the way I planned.

These daily salvations don’t resemble heroic rescues: no pulling me back from the edge of the cliff, no airbag deployments or ripping of the shirt to reveal a bulletproof vest. Not even any of the drama-drenched moments of singledom–the dodged bullets of bad guys, the aha!s and guttural sighs of relief accompanying the final throes of a bad relationship. These tiny rescues are quiet, often tedious, and mostly dressed as monotony: sitting on the bathroom floor waiting for him to poop; a gurgle from the monitor signaling the end of my alone time; standing at the ready with applause when he puts the puzzle pieces together; shrugging off the glop of spit-up on my shirt; having two constant witnesses, there in the backseat, to my every outburst and expletive and steering-wheel-palm-bang.

And this: having two constant witnesses, there in the backseat, to my every burst into song and exclamation and dance move. So there’s that.

Salvation.

I live in a danger zone, and it looks like this: the threat of tackling life as a list rather than living it as a a story; of calling burden what is actually blessing; of being too damn precious with myself. I never wanted to take myself less seriously by way of hands smeared with poop and walls smeared with baby food, but here we are anyway: two deep breaths away from insanity or transcendence on either side. Grace gently nudges me in the right direction despite my protests. Grace is showing me a new way to see, and I’d like to think that I’m complaining less about how the light is coming in and just…seeing it.

There were trees on Whitehall in London that my audio guidebook told me are suited to withstand the city’s pollution: clay-digging roots, self-cleaning leaves, regenerating bark. As if they were designed to meet their daily challenges, even thrive in them. Meanwhile, the chaos of morning gives way to the chaos of evening and I find myself literally washing feet as a shaft of light falls through the window and I wonder how I forgot that light can be holy; that washing feet can be no less an act for them than a gift for me. That bedtime is soon, and in that and in the flow of water there is the regenerating power of grace.

I watched a movie in segments, like we do now, and in the final leg, while Little Brother slept upstairs and The Kid and The Husband rolled around Publix and I sat on the couch sobbing, the final question was, I think, this: How would you live your life if you knew everything would ultimately be okay? If you had to move from controlling to hands-off, if the hard stuff were unavoidable, but in the end, it would all turn out the same…and be all right?

Would it feel like this?

...there’s nothing like releasing fears and falling into peace. It terrifies, true. But it exhilarates. This, this is what I’ve always wanted and never knew: this utter trust, this enlivening fall of surrender into safe hands.

Would it feel like falling in love?

And I see that this is the trajectory of my own life: this slow uncurling of my fingers from my fate; this release from the bondage to self-pity and self-importance and just self; the often-painful enlargement of my vision, of my plan, to include all the unknowns and uncertainties and possibilities that just don’t have a home in a calendar or on a spreadsheet. I’ve never liked the wind in my hair–messes it up–but maybe I could learn to? Maybe grace could teach me the virtue of getting messed up, becoming gloriously unkempt. After all, I’ve got a head start–I don’t remember the last time I wore an article of clothing without dried food or snot on it.

It could be that the moments bent over a tiny butt, scraping food off the floor, blowing the bubbles to lightheadedness, these are not karma teaching me a lesson or God testing me but grace ushering me into love until I see that it’s not a room I’m trapped in but a home where I’m fully alive. This is regeneration and redemption and falling in love, day in and day out, never letting up, never giving up. Grace as a constant.

We wait at the traffic light, I and my two constant backseat witnesses, and neither of them likes being still. I bristle as though I’m any different, as though being still and knowing has ever been a personal strength of mine, and just as their protests begin to ramp up I remember what worked last time: how we turned it into a countdown, into a game. So we play. The tedium becomes adventure and the words become song and it could be either a detail or a miracle, it could be the fall from planning and into loving, that we’re all laughing when the red becomes green.