Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. –Diane Ackerman

He was screaming in the chair, but this wasn’t my first time at the rodeo. I guess it wasn’t his, either, because when I told him that everything would be okay, he assured me it wouldn’t. “It’s always been scary and bad before.”

Maybe I’d be a better dentist, a better person, if I had always been so empathetic to these pleas. Maybe I’d be better if it didn’t take having my own kids for my heart to ache this easily, for my hands to reach out. For the news to be nearly unbearable, for images to sear themselves into my brain.

Then again, maybe I got here exactly the way I was meant to.

My reassurances aren’t as rote, but the words that came out still surprised me: “What if this is the time it isn’t?” It was a weird moment: Oprah in the operatory, dispensing inspirational quotes next to the drill? I let the words hang there, mainly because I wasn’t sure what to do with them or how to follow them up since I hadn’t planned them in the first place. We forged ahead, and by the end he high-fived me, said he hadn’t felt a thing.

I don’t imagine I’ll ever be so lucky. I’m feeling it all.

The Kid has been “asking” us things lately, though it took awhile to figure out that was what was happening–mainly because the questions come in the form of a whine, and the only wine I like is served in a glass, not from the backseat of a car. Or the backyard. Or any room of the house, at any moment, the urgent sound shortening my fuse. I thought at first that he was being defiant, then that he was tired, and then one morning in the calm of the backyard I realized it was complementing the sound of a plane overhead. That he raised his hand toward the sky. That he was talking to me. And didn’t I feel like an asshole before I felt the triumph?

And isn’t that maybe just the trajectory these days?

As TK gets older and the discrepancies between three-year-olds who talk and those who don’t become more apparent, I’ve had to broker an oft-begrudging peace with this unpredictability, this inability to live life by the books. I resent that we can’t plan our lives around milestones, even as I learn to reorient them where they should be: around a Rock.

But it still feels like a punch to the gut when another mom talks about her son starting lacrosse this afternoon. And during the children’s team meeting, when one parent makes what would have been a harmless joke–what would have been a joke I might have made–about how, come on, all four-year-olds are potty trained? That one lands like a dagger as we stare four in the face and wait for things to click. As a Monday afternoon becomes a literal shitshow when I run him to the potty, sit him there to finish, and when he signs that he’s done and dismounts and next thing I know he’s squirting fro-yo-style on the floor and stepping in it? I text The Husband and hand in my notice for this job.

But then there are the moments that wouldn’t have happened on any other road. It’s late afternoon and Little Brother is napping upstairs and TK and I are in the sunroom, and the clouds are gathering in the windows. The sky opens up, rain pelting above our heads and thunder pounding, and he turns to me, afraid. He leans on me, buries his face in my side and stays uncharacteristically still as I talk to him, rub his head. Then he places his head on my lap and falls asleep, the storm raging around us.

Sometimes this gig makes me want to jump off a bridge. Other times, on this particular path? I swear it’s arranged so that I see heaven more clearly.

And I read it a few days later, about answers coming out of thunderclouds, and soon after that, in a book I’ve read so many times, this: “Everything could make sense…love always deciphers everything.” Maybe whines are questions, and he’s reaching out there from the backseat, so that when I reply that “I’m here,” and want to follow it with a “but” because I’m going a little crazy here, grace stops me. Grace lets the “I’m here” be enough. For him. For me. Maybe whines are the precursor to speech and resentment is the precursor to empathy and maybe this is the trajectory that grace takes–that it can take anything, just everything, and make it beautiful. In the middle of every storm, and coming from every cloud, this possibility that maybe the wind and the waves aren’t battering us, but teaching us how to sail.