The voice over the phone could have belonged to anyone I know: “This isn’t supposed to be happening.” The tears, the fear, the shock. How many times have I thought them, said them myself, over my life? Over the past few years? The past few weeks?

In no way was I prepared with an answer. Yet…because of everything, that’s somehow exactly what I was: prepared. So I talked: “It will either happen or it won’t. Either way, it will be what it’s supposed to be.”

That was last fall–I remember because you don’t forget moments like that, and because the kids and I were outside. We aren’t outside as much these days because it is the High Holy Hell season, the days of steaming humidity at 8 am, of demonic insects sinking their teeth into our legs (mine look like a connect-the-dots picture that Satan drew), of nausea due to standing in direct sunlight for five minutes, of back-of-the-knee sweat (and every other kind of sweat), of aching for pumpkin spice and football and crunchy leaves and all the other accoutrements of autumn. Summer is amplifying my anxiety, my already-too-Pollock-y emotional canvas. Summer can kiss my ass, to be honest, until both boys can–and want to–swim (without rubber shorts), until (God have mercy and let it be a when, not if) changes in schedule don’t lead to floods of tears and floor-focused tantrums and whining. Oh God, the whining. Summer is ripping me a new one, just like anal strep (WTF is that) did to them last week and for an entire morning the three of us sat in a waiting room, then a doctor’s room, then endured anal swabbing (Little Brother did, at least–The Kid opted out via his proxy, me), then waited in the pharmacy while our insurance was apparently confirmed through HORSE-COURIERED TELEGRAM and LB was put in time-out about a half-dozen times for pulling products off the shelves as the rule-following TK would turn to me and solemnly announce, “Will time out. Will time out.”

This summer is everything packed into every day until we’re all about to explode. Or maybe that’s just me.

I’ve had Dark Thoughts, so many of them, darker as the day gets longer and the patience even lower; thoughts focusing on the choices that led me here and alternate paths and my deep-seeming unhappiness and my feeling of being trapped and my sense of being utterly alone and my proclamations of being imprisoned. It’s been ugly enough when silent; when it spills over, it’s damn scary. I’ve questioned my mental health and my faith, my right to be a mother at all, my unavailability to rent a studio apartment in Tuscany and disappear for a few months. I’ve been deeply ungrateful, deeply troubled, deeply thankful, deeply relieved, deeply afraid, deeply everything.

How’s your summer going?

Then there are moments. They feel so rare and fleeting that it’s cruel, until I consider the possibility that they’re not as rare as I think; I’m just missing them. Some are so missable: wisps of heaven floating down in our family room in the late afternoon, when I take a deep breath in the midst of their picking and whining and pull out a book. LB climbs into my lap and TK nestles next to us and I read aloud and for a moment, I am in heaven, and I see how it is, that my children are everything I’m not: forgiving when I’m unforgiving, without any capacity to hold a grudge while I still remember every time they’ve stepped on my toes; they are affectionate when I want not to be touched; they are happy. Joyful. For an instant, I let this contrast shovel more guilt into the pit I seem to want to inhabit, then the light changes and I see that this is their gift to me. It’s grace’s gift to me: this sacred balance of the hard and easy, the sad and happy, the me and them. The pendulum will always swing, gently sometimes, and sometimes (SUMMER) all over the place, wildly and apparently without direction. Then I will see its rhythm, its never-directionless beat, the beating of grace’s heart with mine until one day–a day without bugs and humidity and sickness and pain, a day not even of this earth–we will all beat in the same way, at the same time. I see glimpses of what that unison will look like, experience instants of how it will feel. Some days it’s all I have standing between me and a ledge: that wisp of hope. I stop trying to grasp it, try let it carry me.

Let the court documents show, by the way, that I and mine have had to enter too many damn hospitals over the years. Too many surgeries, too many scans and evaluations and overnight stays and uncertain outcomes. But there are moments–moments that are not wisps. Moments of parking in the deck, of waiting for the elevator in anticipation, of walking the hall with so much expectation that I realize I’m running because I can’t wait. Then I open the door and, yes, it’s still a hospital–but who knew good things could happen in dark places too?–and the two of them are on the bed, one held in the other’s arms. She looks up at me, and whispers reverently: “Isn’t it wonderful?” I whisper back: “She’s perfect.” Of course she isn’t, nothing is, and yet–that’s exactly what this is. It’s exactly what was meant to happen, what was always supposed to be.