Last week, The Husband and I were both able to go to Little Brother’s preschool fall party. We walked in ambivalently, feelings split because a) we love LB, so we wanted to be with him; and b) we are true introverts, so the thought of awkwardly conversing with parents we don’t know while our kids “make crafts” in front of us was enough to send us both burrowing into Netflix for the afternoon instead. Alas, we persevered and, when LB saw us in the doorway, his face lit up. He proceeded to show us around his classroom–and by that, I mean that he pointed to artwork on the walls and declared, “Apple!” to identify…well, everything. His joy at our being there, his pride in something that is just his, his growing confidence–it all reminds me of The Kid, now. But it also stands in stark contrast to The Kid, then. Back when he didn’t point, or show us things, or say a word. Back when he was himself, but not as fully as he is now. A version of him that is growing into more. LB starts in a different place than TK did, and I find myself grateful for the battles he doesn’t have to face even as I know he’ll have his own, even as his ease reminds me of TK’s difficulties. With all their similarities, they each have their own path. We all do.

“We’re versions of each other; we’re not the same,” said Norman Lear this week on Pete Holmes’s podcast, which is, I think, a more succinct way of expressing what I just wrote. I saw my likeness in TK last week, when TH and I took him and LB to the neighborhood playground, a site of some of my darkest fears and deepest anxieties. My children hanging from metal structures as if defying gravity, and my own breathlessness rises with their bravery, their growing confidence, side by side doing the things that, only recently, neither could. Growing in tandem and teaching each other, TK’s improving motor skills and confidence the source of so much of their movement and my anxiety. Brutal beauty. My likeness showing up as he steps out in air, then in hesitation pulls back: not yet. A few other kids show up, and the familiar cocktail of emotions assaults me: hope, fear, nervousness. At one point, TK runs over to a group of them, hovering around the edges, present but observing more than participating, and I am that kid again, on the outskirts, and in this moment I would do anything to protect him from the inevitable hurt of just growing up even as I know what gifts it can bring with it. I want to rescue them both, scoop them up before they ever hit the ground, intervene before feelings are ever bruised. The certainty that I can’t kills me. He runs back over and he’s smiling. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll start breathing again soon.

The next day I’m still battling the anxiety and the fear that kept me up the night before, that began on the playground and played out into the future as I lay in bed and wondered what their lives will look like. If people will understand TK, if LB will stand by his big brother, if…they will be okay. I “run into” my friend at the gym and she knows from my questions about her son, a decade and a half older than TK yet so similar–versions of each other–that I’ve worked myself into a knot. That I need reassurance, and truth, and hopefully those are the same thing.

They are.

“Don’t borrow worry from tomorrow,” she tells me, and I already knew this but somehow in the hearing it helps me breathe again. It reminds me of what my pastor and friend says, what he told me in his office when I came to complain about God moving us across the world: He’s still on the throne. Don’t take him off and put yourself there. It reminds me, too, of what I read this morning, that peace isn’t about the absence of something–challenges, difficulties, struggles–but about the presence of something bigger. Grace, which never leaves. The throne, it is taken. I begin to open my eyes, to look up. Ephphatha.

I think about how my friend, whose kid faces his own challenges that are different from ours but somehow make us all look more alike, how all they’ve been through has put them in contact with people, into friendships, they never would have known otherwise. “Our people,” I tell her, and when I go with LB to pick TK up from school that afternoon–one of our favorite parts of the day, jointly–we welcome him into our arms and I hear a kid in the office a few feet away exclaim, “There’s James!” I look over at him, this face I don’t even know who knows my son’s and therefore mine, and I search for meanness or ridicule. There is none. There is friendliness, and kindness. “James is a friend,” TK tells me all the time. And on Halloween–the first one we’ve actually participated in, the first year he goes up to each house boldly and excitedly–when we head back home, he puts himself in charge of handing out the candy. “More friends are coming to our house!” he turns to me and says, grinning, and the cynic in me wants to warn him, to prepare him for the people who won’t be “friends”–but something inside is changing. I am still me, but I’m growing into a version that is more fully me. And I grin back at him, nodding through tears, because that’s what life is–smiles and tears–and he, we, will have both. But right now he is all joy. Right now, there is a quote book inside that I bought because now we have words from both of them that could fill it. Right now, I am being emptied of all my crap, slowly but surely, so that I can live and love more fully. All the parts of me are coming to life, and breathing, and this is what being fully alive means: the hurt, and the fear, and the joy all there.

And I think of another thing I heard, how the voice had said what the author had written: “Sometimes I wonder if the burdens we carry don’t end up carrying us.” I gently amend it in my head, knowing the point, which is grace–that the burdens can all be blessings–but that we are carried by more. We, in all our versions, are carried by the one who never changes.