Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. –Rumi

Last week the nurse pushed the mobile bed from our waiting/recovery room to the CT room. (Isn’t it funny how waiting and healing can happen in the same place?) The Kid and I rode together, he plastered all over my torso, where he had been for the last hour or so. After the realization that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. After the blood pressure cuff and the pulse oximeter and the thermometer, after the first attempt to get an IV left us with nothing but a black bruise on his arm and tears, so many tears. After The Professional showed up in the form of an IV nurse and her ultrasound machine and the vein was located and the skin punctured and the arm wrapped in a towel and taped up. After that, he passed out to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in my arms. Then puked a little. Then passed back out.

Now we entered the dim room with the massive machine and they pushed drugs into my boy’s open vein and placed him on the table. I waited to be told kindly to leave, but this time they offered me a lead apron and a chair. So I sat. Without phone or armor (but for the apron), I sat and watched as the machine spun and whirred around a sleeping TK, his eyes slightly open as they often are when he’s out cold. I watched and waited as silent pictures captured his cervical spine. I waited and cried, silently myself, willing the nurses to take their time coming back as I hate public displays of emotion, my own included. I cried and prayed.

I remembered one of my closest and dearest telling me about how she’d started praying recently–with hands open toward the sky, like a yoga pose for Jesus, and how it had felt different. Physically. How she had sensed a pressure in her hands, as though something was being placed in them. How that pressure had not let her go throughout the praying. I’ve run into all sorts of things: prophets on planes, people speaking in tongues, you know–the general weirdness of evangelical Christianity–and there are all levels of sincerity therein, from none to complete. My friend is the Real Deal. Not to mention the fact that I’m the one who has recently (with one foot at least) climbed on board the organic/biomedical/supplementation train on TK’s behalf, so I know me some weird. All of which is to say that, in that dim room full of whirs and spins and tears, I held my hands open on my knees and prayed.

Jesus didn’t show up and take a selfie with me. I didn’t see a fourth man in the furnace. The lions in the den didn’t whimper and skulk away. But what did happen next felt as natural as breathing: my hands, holding nothing, felt full. Felt held. Felt weighed down.

It was as clear as anything I’ve ever known or seen: TK and I weren’t alone in there.

The morning had been full of “no”s–mine and TK’s. His protests and cries, my frustration and resentment at this path, at how hard it is, how much it asks of us. But sitting there beside my boy on the table–not the first boy on a table–I felt one more thing being asked of me: Say yes. Say yes to the IV and the bruises, to the scars and the uncertainty, to the driving through the dark away from Kansas, to the machines and the scans. Say yes to it all, because it all has to be love. There’s no other possibility, not if anything I believe is true. And yes, it may appear to be a fucked up way for love to appear, and it sure as hell isn’t the version I would have picked from the catalog, but you know what? This also isn’t the end, here in this room. This moment isn’t where it all comes together; that moment remains to be revealed. This moment is the one where I say yes, where I may not know what the answer is but I know what it isn’t, and it isn’t that we’re alone in this.

My hands, open to the air, were starting to get sweaty.

The life I planned, the one from the catalog? That one fell apart a long time ago, the pieces scattering like ashes until they were no longer recognizable as anything remotely me or mine. Because that was never my life. The one I’m in, that feels and appears so broken sometimes, it’s like my phone, shattered by a drop from Little Brother in his high chair: fractured in a hundred places but held together in all of them. Like stained glass–a beautiful brokenness.

And I think about what that brokenness looks like when I really see it. How the UPS guy always slows down and waves because the little boy who lives here likes to play in the front yard to see the cars pass so he can hold his hand out and look at me, grinning, so excited, asking until I tell him: “Brown truck, buddy! Brown truck.” I see him ask for his tricycle for the first time in months, and with LB strapped to my chest I begrudgingly pull it down, knowing he’ll walk away from it like last time when I suggested he sit on it. Because of how I know everything. But he doesn’t. This time he smiles at it, approaches it, sits on it. From the catalog, I had picked the version where the kid jumps onto the tricycle and starts riding. In this version, that simple action is broken into so many steps, over so many months, until it’s like glass in my palm, and when there are more pieces to reflect it, the light is so much brighter. He sits, and I rejoice, and we smile huge at each other. And this moment isn’t the one where it all comes together either, but its pieces are so much more beautiful in the light.