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.

Being lost is a prelude to finding new paths. –Mary Karr

I sat on the bench alone this time, The Husband policing Little Brother on the playground outside while The Kid was gently led toward the water. He cried again, but I managed to hear the difference this time: not as loud or urgent. Within minutes, he was bobbing gently in his instructor’s arms, smiling while the water held them both.

Time for a meeting of the Saturday Morning Swim Club.

There are different names for these appointments: going forward, ours will be the Wednesday Afternoon Swim Club. There’s Monday Morning Horse Therapy. For a long time there was Thursday Afternoon PT, Tuesday Morning OT, All the Damn Time Doctor Visits, Annual MRI. Anything that takes place at Children’s Hospital, really. I like to refer to all of it under one umbrella: The Society of I Didn’t Sign Up for This Shit.

An older man approached and sat, ignoring the Introvert’s Golden Rule by which I abide: “Thou shalt not behave as though the other exists.” He launched into a series of questions–which one is yours? How old is he? How long you been coming here? Where are you from? He pointed out his grandson, who was playing happily in the pool. The man seemed unruffled by all of it. Maybe I’ll be like him when I grow up. I didn’t cry this week, so that’s a start.

TK made it through the lesson without any repetition of the prefacing tears, and I felt the progress seep into my muscles, relax them a bit. I added it to the breakthrough in potty-training, plus the new words he’s speaking every day. An equation that landed us in the black. It was a good day.

It doesn’t take long to undo those.

The girl in childcare at the gym stared at him as they ate their snack, and she turned to the teacher: “My mom says you’re supposed to close your mouth when you eat,” she proclaimed, throwing her shade all over the table and tossing me some side-eye. I ignored her outwardly and responded inside my head: “Listen, bitch-in-training. I know you. I used to be you. Congrats on the manners. But we’re dealing here with a little thing called Low Oral Tone. A bit of Dyspraxia. A Tongue-Clipping Surgery thrown in for fun. So you can take your Rule-Following Award and insert it in the location of your choosing because one day you’re going to find that it’s not following orders that saves your life–it’s falling apart that does. And your haircut is bad.”

I turned to TK and we grinned at each other silently. It’s possible he reads minds–he can read every damn thing else.

The next day was a playdate and lunch with some peers of the kids’ and mine–peers being a word I like to throw around when I forget that we’re on a different path than most. The time ended with some piss on the floor and my back in knots, hyper-vigilance coursing through my veins alongside the usual anxiety in a cocktail that left me exhausted, a mockery of the parent I’d planned to be. The one I’d proclaimed I would be.

There is less proclaiming these days. I’m not saying who I am; I’m finding out who I am.

And with every broken promise, every failed plan, every rule that’s fallen by the wayside, there is something new. Something painful, at first, tears falling after playdates and birthday parties and hard days; the grief that accompanies the closing of one door to be gently led to another–to the water. There are new friends, ones who know, who text back with that message and their own similar stories so that you realize, finally, you’re not the only one sitting on this bench. There are new appointments: fewer scans, fewer evaluations, and more mornings at a barn. More sessions by the pool. There are new definitions: joy was once happy hours and dinners out (still is); now it’s also the sound of urine hitting porcelain after fourteen months, the grin on both our faces, and the sound of angels singing that I could swear I hear from where we sit in the bathroom.

There are the moments when I abdicate my Anxiety Throne and get to be the calm one: when we’re in traffic (the one time TH loses it ever); when TK needs a quiet voice to lead him away from the elevators and something within me that I so did not generate myself changes the way I even talk so that I can reach him. There is the quiet voice that talks to me, the hand gently leading me away from all the hotels where I try to keep booking a room to live in–hotels with names like Guilt and Fear–and the voice tells me again and again: “You don’t live here. I’m taking you home.”

And there are the moments when he changes too–when the anxiety recedes and he plays quietly with, yes, a peer, and I realize that in spite of all he’s been through–hell, because of it–he will help others find out where they belong. Who they are. He will be a spot of peace, of calm for someone. For a lot of someones.

There was a moment this week at a meeting of what was formerly (and still often) called The Society of I Didn’t Sign Up for This Shit but is now more routinely called Horse Riding. The flies were buzzing all around me and the stench was pungent–maybe even more than usual. I couldn’t figure out why I had to be stuck in such an unchangeable position, covered by mosquitoes and reeking of waste. Then I looked below the bench and realized there was a pile of dog shit beneath me. And I saw that there was another bench just a few feet away–a new spot just waiting for me to fill it. I got up and moved and knew I wouldn’t be alone there for long.

When she made the suggestion, I had to hide my laughter. It was just so perfect–and by that I mean, wrong–which means it’s probably just right, if the past few years are any indication. My gym friend had just recommended an activity for The Kid that her son had loved and benefited from, and it was/is so not in my wheelhouse/comfort zone. Not my scene.

She wondered if he might want to try karate.

Then she suggested taking him to an anime store.

At that, I almost lost it. My Asian friends know that I’m a bit flummoxed by their cultural touchstones: working out in pants and a robe with a belt whose color is based on technical expertise rather than outfit compatibility? Hello Kitty out the ying yang? Uncooked seafood? Cartoonish anime characters with creepy giggles who look like this?

No. Just…I can’t. Which of course means I’m probably supposed to, if Monday afternoons at the horse barn have taught me anything. Which is why, on a recent summer afternoon, I took TK to a proper karate facility and we watched a class. Even though, prior to this outing, the most Asian activity I’d ever participated in was eating a cooked sushi roll at P.F. Chang’s.

These are the newnesses of life I’m being opened up to, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes resentfully assenting, sometimes (hardly ever) blindly optimistic. But always apart from my own plan, the one currently sitting in the bottom of a landfill underneath, probably, a diaper stuffed with diarrhea in a metaphorical illustration of what love and grace (interchangeable, really) have done to my life. Which is to say, wrecked it. And made it brand new.

In case you haven’t heard or been through it yourself–new life? In the form of the birthing process? Can suck way before it gets beautiful.

But in so many ways, we’re moving to the beautiful part. The part where you listen for what seems the first time and realize that what sounded like noise before has become music–and not only that, but your favorite song. The one that you struggle to call your favorite, because it’s hard to listen to what with all the ugly crying it causes, but then there’s also that part that makes you laugh, and the one after that that makes you exhale in relief. That song, for us right now, is “It’s Quiet Uptown,” and though TK has moved on to an infatuation with the Schuyler Sisters and their #work, he still likes to listen to “the push song”–as in, push away the unimaginable. A phrase he utters all the time, despite it not being six months since he said his first word. And when the song reaches this part–

The moments when you’re in so deep
It feels easier to just swim down

–that’s when TK turns to me, grinning, and says, “Swim up.”

He’s been swimming upstream his whole life, and while I’ve been fighting it, he’s been mastering it. So much so that it’s what he wants to do.

I think sometimes that maybe I do too. That this path–full of pushing harder than I’d ever thought I would have to just to get him to use a fork or try the bike or say a word, or fight more than I’d ever imagined to be his advocate and make him understood and tell his story–that it’s almost like we were meant for it. That it’s making us who we’re supposed to be, knitting us together eternally, and creating a masterpiece.

My friend brought her boys over last week and as our four kids played in the backyard, multiple surgeries between two of them and long roads yet ahead, I thought about how it’s knitting me together with others too; how now it’s not just our college and New York years that we have in common but something deeper and somehow more real. That it was fun skipping from party to party or eating raw cookie dough for four years, and it was sure as hell fun hopping from bar to bar in the greatest city in the world for five more, and there are days when I’d sell both of my ovaries (done with ’em anyway) to go back there, but then I look at these four boys running circles around us and I figure between them and a bottle of wine, we just might be onto something more.

Our pastor had talked about the rhythm of spiritual life, how it’s an endless cycle of messing up and repentance and restoration and there’s not, this side of eternity, a moment at which we reach a finish line–all done with screwing up!–but that it’s over and over, day after day, and anyone expecting differently has the wrong idea. And in these early days of summer, I think about that rhythm–how it can feel monotonous, frustrating. Or how it can be the basis for a new song. Our schedule changed, both boys with me, and TK and I struggle to deal with a routine upended. I take him to the barn in the morning now, and he fought it–this is not our usual time! Then we arrived, and he got on the horse, and the gait became a rhythm he recognized. I heard his therapist talking to one of her students: “When he started, he couldn’t do any of that.” I sat on the bench where I always sit, but the light fell differently this time of day. The same, but different.

We went to the doctor for a checkup later and what used to be soaked in tears–listening to chest and peering inside ears and mouth–now, he laughed through it. I cried at the same but different boy. And when I took him to get a haircut, this time without his tears too, she asked me if it was okay that she had cut it short in the back. “Did you want that scar showing?” she said. I smiled and thought of the therapist who, that morning, had admitted that when she started with him a year ago she’d thought he would never talk. “Yeah, I want it showing,” I answered her. “It’s perfect.”

I went to bed the other night with one more companion than usual: a sense of self-satisfaction cradled me to sleep, the result of nailing this parenting thing. I hadn’t yelled all day, hadn’t fantasized about running away. I’d provided multiple meals for my children and cleaned up after them without dissolving into tears on the floor among spilled milk and tossed bread. I’d taken The Kid to the potty hourly and refused to lose my mind when he fought back every time, even though he’d just gone for his therapist multiple times in a row, PER USUAL. Yes, I was feeling good. My home was orderly and the summer, instead of looming ahead like a dark cloud, glimmered with promise.

This was Friday. The first day of summer vacation.

It took about forty-eight hours for my serenity to unravel, and this was over a holiday weekend. WHEN I HAD HELP. I wasn’t alone in the trenches, which would have made for somewhat of an excuse (at least it does every typical weekday). But unravel it did, on Sunday morning, all over the bathroom floor and right beside a turd that emptied from TK’s pull-up when I attempted one of our potty sessions and he thrashed wildly, flakes of shit peppering the floor and walls like an apocalyptic decor option. I yelled. I cursed. I lost my ever-loving mind, and summer hadn’t even unpacked its bags yet.

I’ve been a parent for four summers now, a quartet of four-seasoned years, twelve of their months permeated by stifling heat, oppressive humidity, and the God-forsaken neighborhood pool. I think it was that pool that did me in–that and original sin, but let’s save the theology for later–because we went three times over the weekend. You’d think four June-through-August cycles of the same routine, of daily running out of fucks to give, would have left me either steely with resolve or too drained to care, but neither would be the case. The pool haunts my dreams, and here is why.

TK has never been a fan of the water. Anything larger than a bathtub and he approaches with CIA-level suspicion. Maybe he senses that this is just another giant toilet we’re leading toward, and we know his aversion to those. When he was a baby, he would fuss and cry and then give in, leaning back in the giant float we’d brought as a crutch, and though the experience was about the opposite of a lazy afternoon in the Caribbean, it was bearable. With each progressive summer, though, he’s grown more uncomfortable with the pool, more distrustful of it. To a degree, I can’t blame him: it is strange that adults are so insistent upon our children urinating in one spot while we abandon all qualms about it between Memorial and Labor Days. And our pool is a special breed, filled to overflowing with adults and teenagers and, in particular, small children who aspire, via the swim team, to Olympic-level greatness while flailing around spraying water in my hair. If circumstances were different, I might be okay with this scene, social anxiety and fear of large crowds notwithstanding: this past weekend, for example, there was a keg two days in a row right outside the clubhouse, and once our neighborhood’s team was banned from a swim meet because the parents were drinking too much. To which I would say both, “Really, guys?” and “That’s awesome.”

But the pool, much like summer itself with its crop tops and exposed midriffs, has a way of revealing too much. And this year, with TK’s aquatic anxiety at a peak, it revealed that maybe I shouldn’t have included Teach TK to Swim on the goal list. Maybe I should have just started with Avoid Silverback Gorillas and high-fived myself at that daily success.

TK has a method of dealing with unfamiliar places, and though I’d prefer it be more like mine–down a glass of wine, or shrink into a corner with a book, or just avoid them, it is this: he circles the perimeter repeatedly, finding points of interest along the way–typically around the outskirts–and returning to them for investigation. He watched with interest as The Husband swam Little Brother around the shallow end, but provided a definitive “NO” when asked if he wanted to try the same. Finally, he located his Safe Zone, and to my chagrin it was located right between the two diving boards, where kids lined up to hone their competitive jumps and, while waiting, stared at us.

Again: not a trip to the Caribbean.

I tried to find a way to be okay with this, a monologue to talk myself off the ledge of unwanted attention. I prayed. I summoned my not-giving-a-fuck-ness, which always seems to tarry when I need it most. I urged TK to a less noticeable spot. Finally, I gave up. I sat down on the ground and invited him to join me–and he did. And like a couple of unrepentant assholes, we sat and watched each kid dive off the board. At some point I looked down and saw that TK was grinning ear to ear. So…math redo: make that one asshole. C’est moi, PER USUAL.

The fears didn’t go away, and I know they won’t: the sense that we’re racing against the clock, a timer within my heart counting down the time we have before kids get mean and feelings get hurt (mine, mostly), before the world is less interesting and more menacing. Can we outrun this clock, I wonder, given the progress he’s made in just a year, the words spilling out daily and his other skills growing alongside them? I will do anything to protect him even as I know that I can’t, not completely. It sucks. It’s life. I sat there with him, these familiar concerns bouncing around my head like pinballs, then my mind started drifting. I got some writing ideas. I thought about dinner. I calmed down. I didn’t get any answers, but the scenery started changing: the view came into more focus. I saw what he was seeing from this place we had found for ourselves. And it wasn’t a bad spot. It was actually kind of wonderful.

“All will be well; all is well,” we sang on Sunday, after my Blowup in the Bathroom, and the guilt leaked out of me with the tears that overflowed from my eyes. Once again I had found my spot. Strange how the words felt false and true at the same time; wishful thinking and naming of truth. All will be well? It’s what I say I believe. Do I? All is well? Are you joking? I would beg to differ. But also…the words echoed, washed over me, filled spaces deeper than my feelings and made promises lasting longer than the summer.

“Nothing’s gonna change my world.”

Tuesday marked the six-year anniversary of my departure from New York. That afternoon, The Husband and I boarded a flight that lifted us off the city concrete and dropped us into a new life. A suburban, family life. The anniversary of that day–that ending and beginning–is freighted, as so much of life is, with ambivalence. “In New York you can be a new man,” sings the cast of Hamilton, and if the tune had existed then, I would have marched along Manhattan’s streets belting it out in my head. The city was, for me, my own personal Reconstruction period: after coming off several years of what felt like decimation and dismemberment, years full of daily trouble, I landed in a place where I learned that trouble doesn’t just have to undo; it can also remake. It can be a preface, not a punishment. So when we stepped aboard that plane, I and the man who had been first my friend, then my fiancé, and now my husband, we headed toward what I thought was our happy ending. I had learned all the hard lessons! I had a ring! My uterus was move-in ready!

I didn’t know that you can be undone more than once.

Last weekend TH and I flew to St. Louis to watch one of our New York friends get married. We missed our flight, which was new for both of us. (Thanks, TSA!) On standby, we missed the next flight too, finally boarding a plane that landed us four hours later than our original plan. Our flight, late and unintended as it was, was aboard an aircraft with screens at each seat, so I was able to watch the first half of Brooklyn. At one pivotal moment, the main character was approved for entry to the US and stepped through a doorway into the light. She glanced back at the immigration queue she’d just navigated and all that lay behind it: her old life in Ireland. Then she stepped forward into the light of her new life.

I wish I were that graceful about it. Usually I’m having to be pulled, kicking and screaming, by Security (Security is my pet name for Jesus).

St. Louis was another first for TH and me. When I visit a city, I worry about two things (among a hundred): terrorism, and that the alcohol will run out. Happily, neither worry proved valid. True to form, we eschewed the touristy stuff (an arch that sways in the wind? NO THANKS!) for our stuff: late-night room service dessert and refueling of our introvert tanks after a cocktail party. Time at the hotel gym. And, notably, a full movie. In a theater. WITH POPCORN. It turned out that the theater was a charming local franchise with an organ player who played tunes before the movie started, and after we watched Captain America and Iron Man duke it out, we exited to find an usher waiting with a tray of mints. Then TH touched a screen and a magical car materialized to take us back to our hotel (yes, it was my first time using Uber). Yay for new things!

Would that all new experiences were so delightful. Now my move-in-ready uterus is blocked by tied tubes and has expelled two human beings. The first one, The Kid, has challenged every plan I made, rule I set, and book I read. He has undone me, and the harder I fought it, the more it cut me. Now I watch as the wheels of his not-playing-by-the-rules brain turn and I’m finally allowed glimpses of the beauty of what was once so terrifying, so destabilizing, so upsetting to my sense of order. Five months ago, he wouldn’t utter a word. Now he talks to me from the backseat, and I repeat what I think I hear–“Wow!”–and glance back at him for confirmation. He stares at me, practically rolling his eyes, then–slowly and intentionally, as if I need some extra help, he E-NUN-CI-ATES: “WIIIIILLLL,” he repeats, pointing to his brother’s empty carseat. As in, “You dumbass. Where’s my brother?”

Of course, lately he refers to Little Brother mostly as “Uh Oh Will,” because here’s a new thing too: LB seems to have been designed with the factory settings laid out in all those books I tossed into the trash, and where TK was cautious and obedient, his younger sibling is a fucking HURRICANE. “He’s so cute!” people tell me as he grins coquettishly at them, burying his head in my neck full of scratches that HE put there the last time I made him do something he didn’t want to, like nap. He bolts for the street so often we are relegated to the backyard, and TK casts an aggrieved glance toward the gate, looks back at me and moans, “Front yard?” “We can’t,” I tell him. “Because your brother’s an ass,” I want to add, even as the little twister runs his chubby legs straight into me and bursts my heart with his double-sided cuteness: salty and sweet, fiery and snuggly.

We returned from our trip this past Sunday just in time to meet The Mom and Dad in a parking deck and transfer the boys to our arms. Then we carried their grinning faces into our church, which we joined this week after a year of attending, and befriending, and learning. And as our friend preached his sermon, I couldn’t believe that he mentioned something that wasn’t new, something TH and I had heard when we first moved here and were church-hunting and failing at it. That sermon had included an illustration of a backpack. It was a how-to lecture, really, like so many sermons are, and it was weighed down with rules. With the Law. With shoulds. But on this day, in this new church that no longer is, we heard grace. We heard him talk of backpacks weighing us down, and a grace that takes them away because it is finished, and I nudged TH: “Full circle.” He knew, because it’s become a sort of code for us–“backpack”–the endowment of rules without good news, of weight without glory, of Old without New.

And as I felt weight being lifted off of me, the words all carrying truth I’ve heard before that is somehow brand new every time–like the wine and bread–I felt familiar old worries sink in. Like the coming summer, and the fact that we don’t have every day planned out. Then that familiar old voice whispered something new yet eternal into my heart: a truth. What will I do? I was asking myself, as I heard the answer: Just enjoy them. And in a heartbeat, what would have once been an imperative, a rule to follow, an obligation I would never fulfill…it became the unlocking of a doorway into something new. Freedom. Not you HAVE to enjoy them, but you CAN. “Now it springs up, do you not perceive it?” the prophet wrote. “I am doing a new thing.” The future echoed, truth making all things new, and all undoings re-makings.

“I’m very good at falling over.” Peppa Pig

The morning before Mother’s Day, I considered leaving my family.

I was in the middle of a good run–the rare kind, the kind when I find myself actually smiling and bopping my head to music only I can hear and thinking I might just run a damn while today–when I got a call from childcare. Of course they have my number–I’m the mom. Primary caregiver. The concern turned out to be nothing, but I had to go and check, and Little Brother, after seeing me, cried when I left. Which made me feel like an ass. The guilt piled on, because I’m always ready with a shovel. I stepped outside and considered my next move.

I decided to keep running.

The first half of my run was fueled by music; this half, by anger. A ticker of vicious thoughts scrolled through my mind, and even the Hamilton soundtrack couldn’t drown it out: I’m never going back. I’m just going to keep running. It’s not fair. It’s too much. WHEN DO I EVER GET A BREAK? Guilt popped through again: A good mom wouldn’t be thinking this. A good mom would gladly sacrifice for her children without counting the cost. A good mom would immediately turn this into a blog post by seeing the beauty in it.

Well screw that. Guess I’m not a good mom.

I finally stopped running. I prayed: help. I flipped to “Wait for It” because Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr is pissed and passionate and flawed and all the things I felt. I knew I would go home–I know I’ll always go home (*so if I ever go missing, please go ahead and assume abduction and not abandonment and call the police, thanks*). But I really didn’t want to. I’m so tired. And sometimes I feel so close to the edge–sometimes I even wake up that way, with fourteen more hours staring me in the face.

The Husband, whom I had told I was running home from the gym, asked if I wanted him to pick up lunch. I told him I wanted to be left alone. Is there a Hallmark card for that? Dear Husband that I prayed for and waited a lifetime to meet, please take our children that we longed for, experienced loss for, whom I love so much it hurts, and go far away, and do not touch me until I say you can. Happy Mother’s Day from me.

Motherhood can feel like a club I’ve somehow gained entry to–maybe the bouncer was on a bathroom break?–full of inexpressible joys and unfathomable love. And sometimes? Sometimes it feels like a blanket soaked in puke that I can’t crawl out from underneath. That I can’t get a break from.

But I also can’t get a break from me.

When I was a kid, I heard my mom tell her friend–when she thought I wasn’t listening–that I felt things deeply. And I’ve carried around that apt description all my life, wavered between seeing it as a gift and a curse. Because I don’t want to just skim the surface, like Galinda sings, and dance through life. But being so penetrable–by circumstances, by emotion, by my kids–can leave some carnage. It can leave scars. It can leave some wanting to run away. Motherhood has made me confront both the person I have been and the person I am now, and there are distinctions even while they bleed into each other, across years and events and locations and relationships. My anxiety has skyrocketed since holding two lives in my care, the shades of it from my earlier life paling in comparison. I’ve gone from being completely self-focused to rarely peeing alone: yesterday I was in the bathroom with one kid looking up my butt while the other cried and pulled at my hand as if it were a life raft. But I still have the same interests, the same desires to read and run and own my time. (To think: I hated residency for many reasons, one of which was being on call all the time. ON CALL ALL THE TIME.) I am the same person, but not. My identity hasn’t detonated, but it has shifted with earthquake-like force. Apparently my already-fragile emotional makeup is supposed to take this shift in stride and document the highlights on Instagram.

Well fuck that. Guess I’m not a good sane person.

My friend at the gym, the one with a son who is The Kid plus thirteen years (and is THRIVING), talked to me there the other day for an hour and a half. We covered everything. Sometimes I look back over these conversations and think she shows up when I feel at my most lost–and not just regarding TK. She is a hope-giver, an encourager, but she doesn’t do that with platitudes. She doesn’t deal in “chin up, sweetheart”s. This particular conversation, she talked about the days when she thought she was going to go crazy. Then she looked me in the eye and said, “When you have those days? You forgive yourself.”

Her words echoed through my head on my run. “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” said philosopher David Whyte, and though he was talking about forgiving others, I’m taking it to heart regarding self-forgiveness, because I’m going to need some help with that. My frustrations are rarely worked out during the privacy of a solo run; they are more often fueled and ignited by the throes of motherhood and family and around people who are my people, people I don’t want to hurt and will. People from whom I will also need forgiveness. Assuming this larger identity has been, continues to be, painful work–all the what ifs and fears and guilt only too readily available to scream over the more quiet insistences of grace. Marriage and motherhood hold an immovable mirror in front of me, and the reflection can get so ugly. The willingness to face that reflection requires deep faith and a big God–two things I’d rather be travel-sized, easily manageable and capable of being tucked away until I need them.

I need them now. I need them always. I need them to be bigger than my flaws and my fear and my anger. And because of my flaws and my fear and my anger, I’m finding that they are. I would never have known any other way.

I came back home after my run. Later that day, flowers arrived with a card attached: “to the best mom ever.” I looked at The Husband and snorted. “Hardly.” When we were putting the kids to bed, TK grinned at me. “Happy mommy,” he said. He’s not yet capable of sarcasm, and it didn’t sound like a request, either. Just an observation: happy mommy. These people I love, they keep calling me things that don’t feel real or right. They feel like a joke. I want to laugh bitterly and run away. The weight of motherhood and all its expectations, so ridiculously exemplified by Mother’s Day, is often crushing. I can’t breathe. And sometimes it is the weight of Little Brother’s head on my shoulder in the minutes before I place him in his crib at bedtime, heavenly breath at my ear, me not wanting to ever let go. I’m not fixed; I’m me. This morning I thought about leaving again, and I bet I will next week too. I don’t have answers, just grace. Which, I have to believe, is more than answers. Is everything. Is what takes the words that feel like a joke and makes them true.

As a child, one of my greatest fears was being called to the principal’s office. There was no chance this would ever happen, though, because I was the consummate rule-following good girl–the one the teacher always picked to take names when she left the classroom (are teachers even allowed to leave the classroom unattended these days?). Yeah, it really endeared me to the other kids. So I just dug deeper into that identity, protecting myself from the rejection of my peers by hinging my worth on the approval of authority figures. The only time I ever went to the principal’s office was to get an award (Alabama State Spelling Bee 1989 first-place plaque, if you must know).

When The Husband and I headed to The Kid’s school last Friday for an IEP meeting, I had prepped with prayer and Xanax. Thirty years later, school meetings still unnerve me, and I’ve had enough diarrhea lately, thanks. At stake during this meeting was the plan for TK next year: specifically, if he would be moved to the inclusion pre-K class (16 mainstream kids, 6 special needs) or kept in his present class to complete pre-K there (12 special needs kids). As I do, I had tied my hope to one thing: moving to the inclusion class. For God’s sake, the child can count to one hundred and read six-word sentences. HE EVEN LOVES THE HAMILTON SOUNDTRACK. So what if he still shits his pants? Four months ago he wasn’t saying a word. Surely that had to count for something. Besides, we have the summer to bootcamp potty-train and lose my sanity.

I sensed my familiar longing for approval, for a specific outcome, radiating from me as we took the elevator to the second floor, and I hated it. How long before I grow out of this nonsense? I thought. I felt the truth echo within my heart, a loving Probably never, sweetheart–that’s why we have grace. I tried to stop reducing a two-hour convocation on my son to one outcome, but my efforts have never been what I’d refer to as “sufficient,” you know? So I sat down between TH and TK’s teacher and listened.

Within minutes it became clear that TK would be in his same class next year. Goddamnit, I thought. Did his teacher not even WATCH the ten-minute video I sent her of him reading? I caught a sideways glance at TH, begging him silently to speak when I knew I couldn’t without releasing an ugly cry. He asked questions and we listened some more. I asked a question, coupled with a sob: would this hold him back from entering kindergarten on time, if he’s ready? I was assured it wouldn’t, contrary to what I’d thought. The situation seemed less shattering. I calmed down a bit. My heart still ached, but I was beginning to see the upside of this. For one? More help with potty-training. You know, in case I go insane this summer and wave a white flag.

And there were other things, once I took my eyes off a singular result long enough to see them: the fact that last year, two months after a diagnosis, we were sitting in a room at a school he wouldn’t attend, a strange-and-never-to-be-known environment, with three people who had met him once and would soon disappear from our lives. They handed us sheets of paper that reduced him to a (laughably inaccurate) composite; they were describing a child I didn’t even know. Which piqued a fear in the back of my mind: did I know him? Would I ever? Now, a year later, that child runs through the school doors, grinning and shouting, “MAMA!” We have conversations. He answers my questions (when he listens. MEN.). He tells jokes (his version of them; we’ll be working on his material). He asks for things. USING WORDS. And yes: I know him. And so do his teachers–the same ones he’ll have next year. This year, those teachers described him and it wasn’t a composite; it was a kid. The Kid. A kid who didn’t sound like a stranger; in fact, he sounded a lot like me when I was a kid. Which, despite some obvious issues, gave me hope because…yeah, I’ve done all right. If hiding his toys so he can get to them before everyone else is an “area for improvement” on official paperwork, I can live with that. Because it sounds pretty damn resourceful to me.

I thought about it later, this tendency of mine to reduce everything to one point, to hang all my hope on a single thing, one box checked off. And I realized that what it really comes down to is the thought in the back of my mind that this shouldn’t be happening to us. He should be playing in the backyard, not stuck in therapy. I should be in the backyard with him (or at a bar, whatever), not sitting in an elementary school conference room staring at a list of goals. This is what it has all come down to in doctor’s offices and hospital rooms and in countless moments for which I knew I wasn’t sufficient: we shouldn’t be here.

I left out one thing. And it happens to be everything.

Last Sunday at church, we brought the kids back to the service from their classrooms for communion. We do it occasionally, to get them used to situations where more is expected of them. Without fail I am drenched in sweat afterward, but it feels important so we do it. This week, The Kid was especially vocal in the back with me while we waited for the call to the table. I tried to tell him to keep it down, but commands like that have lost a bit of their importance ever since he started talking after FOUR YEARS OF SILENCE. When he began inching his way up the aisle toward the front, I followed behind him a few feet, not entirely concerned. He’s never been one to push the limit too far; he’s too cautious for that.

Or not?

Apparently all his therapy is injecting some serious confidence into him, because before I knew it, he was at the front of the room, his elbows resting on the communion table as our pastor prepared the elements. I was frozen for a moment, there a few rows ahead of TH and Little Brother, where I had found a resting spot beside a friend in my quest to observe without hovering. A vision of the future flashed before my eyes: TK ripping the tablecloth from the table, wine spilling everywhere. I sprang forward and grabbed him, pulled him back with me. My friend whispered in my ear, “Well, they always do tell us to run to the table.”

And just like that, the moment was transformed. Friends smiling, our pastor placing his hand on TK’s head, receiving the bread and the wine, surrounded by people who know us and our story. There was a time I would have been horrified, embarrassed at the attention. No longer. I felt grateful. I felt grace, the grace of being exactly where we’re meant to be. These moments somehow both one thing and everything.

The news of Prince’s death made waves over the internet last week. I have to admit to emitting a gasp when I saw it, probably over Facebook or Twitter because that is where I get my news now. He seemed other-worldly, oddly eternal. I was immediately hurtled back through time into my junior high gym, the lights there dim and my body swaying in a slow-dance rhythm. I likely wasn’t dancing with anyone but standing awkwardly by the food table, practicing in case someone asked. But still. These events have a way of hitting us where it hurts, the inner child crying out against our own mortality and irrelevance. It’s like we’re saying goodbye to a part of ourselves: the part that particular celebrity represented, the time of our lives they inhabited and the emotional space they filled. At least that’s what I gather from the endless posts citing Prince’s contribution to the individual lives of people who’d never met him. “How is everyone going to make this about themselves?” a friend texted right before I was about to type the same thing. We all want to matter. And it sucks being reminded of where we’re all headed.

I finally went through the boys’ old clothes last weekend, having stored them in bins and bags and closets and drawers. It was time. Eighteen months’ worth of shorts, pants, shirts, onesies, towels, and all the other accoutrements of babyhood. Little Brother is moving up to a 2T, hovering between clothing measured in months versus years, and though I love a good spring cleaning, this one was a bit of a death. We are so done with the baby business, but closing a chapter–even when you’re ready and sure–is its own complicated goodbye. The Kid is all little boy now, growing taller by the day, his legs and arms devoid of rolls, lengthening out into spindly extensions of him. LB still possesses the round cheeks and outie belly button and thigh terrain that come along with being a baby, not yet a boy, but he too is growing by the day. Sometimes I’ll go to retrieve him from a nap and my breath will be taken away by what two hours of sleep have wrought in his features: he just looks older. It’s inconvenient, because it means I’m older too. Hurling their clothes into the donation bin (okay, watching The Husband do it as I sat in the car) had me feeling like I was leaving a piece of myself there: the long sleepless nights and spit up, sure, but also the days when they would fit inside the crook of my arm. And that hurt a little.

So did our trip to New York, and not just because of the virus. Every time I go back to the city that in so many ways made me, I feel more disconnected from it. The movies I saw filming there are far from new releases now. Our favorite wine bar is on its third incarnation (something about grass-fed beef). And from the 33rd floor of our hotel, I failed to fall asleep to the city sounds that used to lull me into unconsciousness: the horns and brakes and laughter just kept me awake and finally reaching for my ear plugs. Le sigh. The city slips further from my identity every year, even as it will always remain a part of what home is to my heart: grace, and mess, and unexpected gifts.

These goodbyes, these slow ebbs and disconnections, we might as well call them what they are: death. And I’ve thought about it a lot lately, due to speakers at conferences and Oscar “In Memoriam” segments and endless Facebook posts. We are all headed in the same direction: the end.

(How awesome would it be if I just dropped the mic there? Goodbye, cruel world! NO SUCH LUCK.)

I’ve gone through enough endings, though, to know that what Semisonic sang in 1998 still rings true, that every ending is really just a beginning. Because they were just echoing the gospel of grace that has rung true in my own life, that rings true every day: every time I hear TK utter a word, a sentence, a song: there it is, the death of our fear that he would never speak. And it gives rise to a new beginning, of apraxic issues and articulation challenges, but I believe they will one day die too. There’s the death of expectations regarding children, and marriage, and what life should look like versus what it messily and beautifully is. It’s getting harder to hate death, or fear it so much, when all the new life I’ve ever seen comes out of it: death as an avenue for healing, and a door to hope. It may be the craziest part of what I believe, but try and blame me, after what we’ve been through.

TK has recently taken to the Hamilton soundtrack, which is a good thing because it ain’t going anywhere anytime soon. His current favorite track, the one he repeats over and over, is “It’s Quiet Uptown.” Guess what it’s about. Near the end of the show, Alexander and Eliza Hamilton mourn the death of their oldest son in the midst of their own preceding estrangement from each other. It’s a song I always skip past because sobbing in public is apparently frowned upon, and even if the carpool line is the most public I get some days, I’d rather not show up there with puffy eyes. But TK loves it, I think because of the piano intro. When that kicks in, a grin spreads slowly across his face and he starts–get this–dancing. Dancing to a sad song. Which seems…inappropriate, until you listen to the words. Until you get to see the whole arc: refound faith, reconnected love. Forgiveness. The tune plays on, and I watch my boy laugh and dance to the strains of death, and life. And through my tears, I smile right along with him. He’s got it right, as usual.

I got the pills weeks ago, and I’ve only taken one. But it helps to know they’re there. And I’m giving a speech imminently, so it really helps to know they’re there.

My days in New York, where I will return today and give said speech tomorrow, were a strange and wonderful blend of anonymity and being known. I developed deep friendships but could walk down the street without ever seeing anyone I knew. I could lose myself in a crowd but show up at an apartment later and immediately enter into meaningful conversation. I flitted in and out of stores without a word but George, the owner of the coffee truck on my way to work, knew my order and had it waiting every day.

There is a beauty to both: anonymity, and being known.

I think one of the hardest things about marriage, and parenthood, and any deep relationship, really, is the daily exposure that comes with it. There is no way my husband and children won’t see my bad side every day, especially on those days (all of them) when the bad side is every side. But this is also the safety, and the hope, of these relationships: a promise has been made. No one is leaving. Which means that we’re all stuck with each other–and that we all stick together.

The Kid and I went to his yearly round-up with the neurosurgeon (East Coast Edition) today. On the way, I detected a biological weapons-grade smell emanating from the back seat and I knew we had an explosive situation on our hands of the ass variety. “Dammit,” I muttered under my breath, because we were already late–and because I knew my near future was shit-laden. I gagged removing him from his carseat and it wasn’t until we got inside the medical building that I saw the smear covering an entire leg and ass cheek of his pants. The situation was out of control. I checked us in and asked the lady at the front desk if they had any gowns. She assured me they didn’t, and inside my head I assured her she was a lying bitch. TK and I headed to the bathroom, where a woman was doing her makeup in the mirror. Apparently she enjoyed the smell of diarrhea because SHE WOULD NOT EFFING LEAVE, even as I began to weep angry tears and remove from my son a substance so vile I considered calling for an exorcist. Finally, and one pair of pants in the trash later, I had him cleaned up, and we headed back to the doctor’s office, where he played happily in his pull-up as if nothing was amiss. I decided to go with it, having no fucks left to give since I left them all in the bathroom.

Once in our room, the nurse provided us a gown (FUNNY; I THOUGHT THERE WEREN’T ANY) and TK’s doctor, whom we haven’t seen in a year, came in. I got to brag on my boy–my speaking, reading, numbers-to-one-hundred-counting boy, and I got to hear that the MRI looked good: all is stable. The way his brain is, the little idiosyncrasies they found three years ago? Still there. Apparently that’s just the way he was made. Funny; at one time they were red flags.

My puffer-vested geisha and I headed to the car, which still reeked. I opened the sunroof and breathed.

Last week I visited the hospital without TK to pick up the copy of his scan to send to our other neurosurgeon (West Coast Edition). On my way out, I heard the lobby pianist playing something that just could not be what I thought it was. So I paused. Listened. Sure enough, the strains of “Hotel California” were dancing in my ears. “Dude,” I thought, as children in wheelchairs and head bandages moved about and the words “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” came to mind, “Know your audience!”

My gym friend, with the son who mirrors TK plus fourteen years, talked to me the other day about what was already on my mind; she has a funny way of doing that. Almost as if she knows me better than I realize–or that someone else just knows the both of us. Anyway, she mentioned that her younger son could have been a “real asshole” if he hadn’t had his special older brother, who brought out an empathy that might never have materialized. And I think about this often, about what goes into making us who we are. I think about it as I notice Little Brother watching TK during those moments when he’s frustrated and grasping for words. I think about it as I see them pick at each other, or make each other laugh, or tickle each other, or drive each other–and me–insane.

Her words were a balm because they reminded me of what’s really going on here, in spite of all my anxiety (pill-relieved and not), in spite of all my attempts at and illusions of control: we were, all of us, created. Which makes us known. And this can be terrifying, uncomfortable stuff: this sense of being unable to hide, of being exposed. I have to laugh at how much effort I’ve expended in my life to avoid being seen. To hide. And here I am, telling you my shit stories and referencing the bottle of Xanax that sits in my bathroom drawer. My laughter turns to grateful tears mixed with embarrassment mixed with fear but ultimately buoyed by the good stuff–hope, and joy, and–oh, God–love, because the me from ten years ago would have been horrified at this gratuitous oversharing. At this self-exposed weakness, this counsel-seeking and pill-grabbing instead of bootstrap-pulling. I think of the Inner Child technique my (gasp) counselor told me about, and I just have to pat that twenty-something little girl–and her present-day counterpart, often–on the head, and tell her it’s all going to be okay. That even in her fear and hiding and general ass-hattery, she is known and loved and headed toward things at once awful and beautiful. Things she might need a pill to deal with, or not, because grace is big enough for both. She’s headed toward things–she’s headed toward people--just as broken as she is, and their amount of knowing each other will be graphic and real and day-by-day and full. She is headed where everyone knows her name, and coffee preference, and rap sheet, and handicaps. She is headed, always, home.

Both of my children learned to say yes before learning no. I hear this is unusual, but I know it has nothing to do with any skillful parenting on my part. If anything, it’s more evidence for the growing case that they are better people than I am–and that they’re teaching me to be everything I’m not.

The Sis and her family had to say goodbye to their family dog last weekend. He’s been around since they first got married: back when they bought their first house, before they had their first child. He was my first nephew, a black bundle of sleek fur and bad breath, jumping onto me as soon as I entered their house and pissing the floor when I would bend down to pet him. We can’t believe he’s gone, even though there was fair warning. These individual griefs have a way of tapping into all the other ones we’re experiencing, have experienced, until they all coalesce into one big river that we realize is always flowing through us, joyful waters and sad intermingled because we open ourselves up to love.

It really sucks sometimes, having a heart.

“There’s a deeper music in loss,” said Pat Conroy, on an “In Memory Of” edition of NPR’s Fresh Air podcast, during which several of his interviews with Terry Gross were replayed. I’m more used to seeing his words on a page than hearing them in his voice, but both carry the scars of a life on the battlefield. Like all of our own lives. Hearing his stories, his laughter, his unmatchable wit in the face of pain, I felt the grief of losing him again, even from a remove–as a reader, not as family. I felt the grief of losing my canine nephew. I felt the grief of The Kid’s coming MRI, of needles that don’t end life but still bring pain. Of delayed understanding, and asking him to trust me when I know the pain looms larger than his faith. That, I can get.

“I believe, help my unbelief,” prayed the voice in the crowd, and how much do I love that it was our pastor’s? That we spend Sundays and life with people who are open about their brokenness, their not-enough-ness? Another thing he had said recently was that the world operates, and therefore parenting operates, under the axiom “I love you but.” I love you but you need to stop doing that. I love you but you’re not measuring up. He had said that grace reverses that order, that it can do the same for us and our children: “You did this but I love you.” I had tried it out the next week, on a walk with TK and Little Brother, when TK seemed determined to throw every article of his clothing out from the stroller and onto the street. The first time I said the words–you did this but I love you–I actually gagged a little, choking on my own inability to extend grace. He gave me plenty more opportunities to give it a shot. It’s becoming easier now, and something shifts within me each time the words are uttered. They’re not just for him, it turns out.

I believe–help my unbelief.

I had told the ladies in childcare at the gym that the MRI was coming, had teared up the day before because there are times when the river overflows. “If love is enough to get him through it, then he has that in spades,” our favorite one told me. “That little boy has so many people loving him.” And the week before at church, our friend in front of us had turned around and passed more than the peace, telling me that TK had taken her hand during Sunday school and led her to where he wanted to go. “I was so excited,” she said. “We were buddies.” This boy, whose life has often felt like time between doctor visits, he brings something out of people. Something that looks like their best: this joy over his triumphs, this solidarity in pain. I wonder, sometimes, what we would have missed if we had kept his story hidden–the weakness, the pain, the troubles. We might have just missed everything.

So I don’t hide mine. I say the words, and write them: anxiety. Guilt. Fear. I finally tell the doctor that I think I need some extra help. A pill to fall back on when the river’s water gets so high that I’m drowning. Because I’d always thought I was the one who had to find my own footing, who had to locate a branch to grab onto. I had thought I wasn’t looking, trying hard enough. I had thought the pain made me weak, but now I see it in him and I see it everywhere: that the pain isn’t what kills us. Trying to save ourselves does. And suddenly, I see life rafts everywhere, and all of them are grace: the friend who shows up at the hospital at 6 am, coffee in hand, and doesn’t leave until we’re safely headed home. I see her car pull up, delivering dinner and gifts. I see the texts and emails and messages from people I didn’t know existed a year ago. And yes, I even see a pill, because why did I for a second think there was anywhere his grace couldn’t show up, any way he wouldn’t reach down to lift me back up?

Help my unbelief…but I believe.