I feel like a failure every day.

I climbed into bed last night with this thought–far from the first time that’s happened–and sat with it awhile before uttering it aloud. The spectre of guilt chases me always, and sometimes it chases me down–particularly after days like yesterday, days that are full of sun and sweat and sports carnivals and early dismissals and more time at home and a late day at the office for The Husband. Days of the neighbour coming over to warn us that he found a snake in their driveway, followed by panicked questions from the boys about what it all means. Days of tennis following an already-long day, and homework following that, and never-ending laundry that does end, but not before I scream and slam the door while I’m doing it because the meditation (/medication?)? It has worn the fuck off.

Days when I, in bed, review the proceedings like I’m in a courtroom where I’m both the judge and the accused, recollecting how I gently encouraged The Kid to enter an event at the carnival and remained (perceptibly) unperturbed when he chose not to, but maybe some hidden frustration was transferred to Little Brother because when he chose not to enter the 50-metre novelty race with his age group after I not gently urged him to? I turned into an emotional ice queen. Days when all it takes for TK and I to meltdown and become adversaries is ten fractions questions. (Well, that’s not all it takes. There was also, oh, everything else.)

Motherhood’s ride-or-die, its constant companion, seems to be this singular guilt over not being everything to everyone, of inflicting less-than-perfect moments on our children that (we fear) they will carry around forever, or at least through therapy, and there are days when I cannot see around or through or beyond it to any greater truth. And on these days, I am defeated.

The boys’ current movie-on-repeat is Soul, for which I am utterly grateful, because I need it too. I need the reminder that there are no mistakes in jazz, only notes that lead somewhere unexpected. I need to remember that “the tune is just an excuse to bring out the you,” and that this is why every tune is different–and valuable. I need to hang onto the truth that life is not about long, purposeful, public strides to some finish line but is actually found in the failing, the flailing, the falling, the defeats that lead us to the bigger truths: to the melody behind it all.

Little Brother’s class, at last week’s Mother’s Day assembly, performed a song that included the words:

So let it play play play your way

Chase the blues away

With music all around

Surround yourself with sound

And the melody that we found

Nobody can bring us down

With music all around

Simplistic? Sure. But I find myself singing it all the time, and when LB is around he’ll join in, and then baby, you got a song going.

Which is the point, I think.

Not to create a perfect narrative out of life, or gloss over our mistakes so that we don’t have to feel the hard stuff, or publicly rehabilitate ourselves through revisionist-history social media posts–but to descend, unblinking (or maybe blinking a bit) into the mire of our daily lives and face it, so that we can see, embedded there, the other moments, the ones where we forgave each other and sat on the couch with our legs all tied together and told each other we (still) love each other. To see it all.

And, in so doing, to not create, but to witness the making of the song–not the one we thought we’d get, but the one we actually did. Because in grace, like in jazz, there are no mistakes.