I’m not falling behind or running late. I’m not standing still, I am lying in wait.

There is one moment I remember most clearly about both of my sons’ births. Standing out among the scattered and hazy memories of pain and activity and and the cold of the OR, I recall waiting: waiting to hear their voices.

With The Kid, the wait seemed interminable. Eternal. Fitting, right? Maybe he, maybe grace, was giving me a heads-up in that silence: There will be waiting here, with this one. When his cry finally did reach my ears, it wasn’t the loud and frantic cry of Little Brother. But it was something. I heard him, and that is when I felt I became a mother. That is the moment, with each of them, when the tears finally flowed: when I heard them.

Our path with TK has felt anything but linear: so many starts and stops, questions and wondering. The milestone questionnaire at the pediatrician’s office, and my feeling that I was failing some sort of test. Moments of victory and seeming defeat, of struggling to stay above water, of wondering whether some skill would ever develop. Facebook reminds me that a year ago, we celebrated the uttering of a two-syllable word; now he tells me every morning: “It’s Christmas! Time to open presents!” Facebook shows me a picture from five years ago, mother and child sitting by the window in a moment that I know, at the time, was bathed in stress and sleeplessness; now all I can see is the way the light fell on us, how beautiful it was.

Sometimes our hearts take longer to catch up to what grace tells us is gift. Sometimes a step forward looks more like a step backward before the story plays out.

Sometimes, some moments, I venture into the dark territory of wondering whether grace is involved at all; whether this is really a story told by love. Karma, after all, makes so much more sense. There was the patient I saw in New York, the little girl with a speech impediment I didn’t know about, and when I jokingly asked her mother to translate I was met with hurt and horror. And there were the other kids in other offices who had diagnoses of their own, and when I saw those words written on their charts I wanted to run in the other direction because I knew this would require more of me, more time and more effort and more emotions to push down and bottle up–chief among them, fear. And now, in a place where some of those fears have landed in our laps–were handed to me as that swaddled bundle who took his time to cry in the hospital–I could interpret it as karma. I could believe that I got what I deserved. I could continue to call them “fears realized.” Or…

We could all learn a new language.

I am no longer waiting to get what I deserve. I am waiting to see what love brings in all its effed-up glory. Because…CHRISTMAS.

On Sunday, The Husband and I stood at the front of our church and were surrounded, touched, and prayed over by people who know us. Words were spoken that reached the bottom of my soul and came back up again. I have hugged, held hands, cried, and said I love you so many times in the past few days that my life would look like a f-ing Hallmark movie if I didn’t say “f-ing” so much. I have never, ever felt so loved. And we are walking away from all this? It doesn’t feel like a step forward. It feels like a step backward–away from everyone who knows us, who knows our children. It feels wrong. Or, as one friend calls it, “God’s big dumb idea.”

And then I look around at what this season really means. At what Advent is, in its bones and at its depth, truly about. It is about waiting…and then being surprised. For the answer to resemble nothing we pictured. For the source of hope to arrive at the darkest moments, masquerading as the weakest thing, in the unlikeliest place. Approach the manger with me and let’s get all up in it.

Grace always works in uncertainty, for we are incapable of imagining what it can do. The language of karma is reciprocal and predictable. The language of grace explodes expectation. It turns “worst fear” into “beloved miracle.” It transforms backward into forward. It relocates home from a place into people and makes it all eternal.

Little Brother’s words come at the expected time, and I watch as he intentionally speaks them, chains them together: “Bye bye Daddy. Bye bye Mommy.” I watch the milestones happen according to the pediatrician’s questionnaire and am stunned to find they are no more or less beautiful, whichever order they come in, however they show up.

And there is this: this opportunity to say goodbyes that, really, are transformed by grace into “see you soon.” There is the chance to say how we feel, how to have the “last times” that are so painful yet carry with them such gifts. I hold each of these, treasuring them up in my heart. We don’t always get that chance. We don’t always get the chance to watch milestones unfold in their own fashion, exactly how they’re meant to in more than one way, and not everyone gets to watch their child ride a horse from walking into trotting, fear becoming glee. So many places we never would have gone were it not for all the things we never would have chosen.

Because we’re moving, because his schedule is different, TH and I walk alongside each other on the indoor track, wordless but in step. And because it’s his last session and she’s never been, The Sis meets me at the barn where TK rides his horse. She hands me a cup of coffee (without bourbon–dammit! She’s slipping, y’all) and we watch him ride around the ring, then trot, then–because it’s our last time–his therapist invites me for the first time to join them on their trail ride. Because she’s here, The Sis comes with me. And on a cold and gray winter day in Atlanta, while it is summer in Sydney, the two of us walk behind my son as he speaks constantly from atop his horse. It seems that we cover the same paths over and over, that we walk in circles, yet somehow have been, are going, everywhere that matters.