I feel like I keep telling the same story.

I’m not the only one–Hollywood seems to share my “problem.” Reboots upon reboots, sequel after sequel. Have we run out of tales to tell?

The Husband and I saw a movie at the theater this weekend–a momentous occasion of late, especially considering that we went at night, a time typically only populated by my bath and bed. But Saturday, at the ungodly hour of eight pm, we found ourselves–after two glorious wine flights each–in leather recliners watching 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Talk about retelling the same story, except…not? TH and I saw Cloverfield when it came out in 2008, back when the theater was a block away and there weren’t two small people blocking our path to it. We watched from New York as New York filled the screen–a tumbling, broken, cracked-open New York assaulted by aliens. 10 Cloverfield Lane tells the same story from a much different vantage point, and at another point in time during that event. I listened recently to a podcast interview with the director of Cloverfield and the producer of 10, JJ Abrams, who alluded to the idea that the goal is to create a bunch of films set in this same universe–this alien-invasion story that’s really about human beings. And I’m drawn to the idea of the same story being told over and over, somehow without repetition because the characters’ perspectives make the retellings worthy.

I keep telling the same story, but not.

Every year, we celebrate a birth, a death, a resurrection. Every year, I walk The Kid through the doors of the children’s hospital and hold him still as they struggle to find a vein, then place him inside a machine that will map his brain and spine. We’ll do it again next week. It’s starting to feel repetitive–except there are differences.

This year, The Niece went to TK’s preschool class with him at church. When The Sis went to get her, TK ran up and hugged her. That didn’t happen last year. Last year, we weren’t even at church.

This year, our friends read Scripture and preached the sermon and fed us lunch afterward. That didn’t happen last year–we didn’t even know them then.

This year, I sat in a women’s Bible study–I usually hate those!–with a group of people who asked where Little Brother would be during the MRI. And when I told them, they all volunteered to keep him so that TH could go with me and TK.

This year, LB’s not the only one saying “mama” and “dada.” This year, at that lunch, TK climbed up and down the ladder of the play structure, while I hovered nearby then realized he had this nailed all by himself. So this year, I poured myself a mimosa and watched him go.

This year, the resurrection means more than ever. Next year it will mean even more.

This year I’m feeling things more deeply, the evening of Easter feeling almost like the evening of Christmas, that post-holiday slump filling the emptiness after celebration. This year, I know more than ever that the joy and pain aren’t separate but are, as Nouwen writes, “more alike than they are different.”

This year is the same, but different.

This year, TK is into locations and directions: knowing his left and right, recognizing after one trip the route to a place (and we take the same route to a lot of the same places), protesting when I change a turn or omit a step. This year, he likes to say it over and over: “Daddy up. Mommy down,” as TH gets ready for work upstairs and the boys and I sit at the breakfast table. This year, he says, “Daddy work. Mommy home,” and I think, Oh buddy–that’s a loaded idea. Then he grins at me, because it’s the stuff he’s always known but now he knows how to tell it. And I tell it too, seemingly over and over, this story of his that I won’t allow to be told by default, not by brain maps or radiology reports or IEPs or diagnoses but by the little changes that occur over time, this unspooling of a life lived every day, maps on hearts.

I understand his obsession with locations and directions. I want to know too, all the time, where this is going. Where we’re headed. Then the cross’s shadow hits me, in a different spot this year but somehow always reachable by it, and I drink the wine and eat the bread and I realize that I already do know where we’re headed. That I can tell the same story over and over and it not be the same because grace refuses to be predictable. these deaths and resurrections constant but always different, somehow all telling the same story but the life they bring, it’s always new.

I think it was Wednesday, that night last week when dinner became my breaking point. An evening at the Colosseum would have been more peaceful; The Husband, for his part, compared it to the Thunderdome.

It was just dinner.

But The Kid was throwing himself on the floor (apparently, along with increased language comes increased independence comes an increased sense of control comes increased tantrums–not that I would know anything about that MYSELF). Little Brother, who’s gaining some independence of his own, was tossing his food like confetti into the air, when not pounding into the table with his fist, a look on his face like he had just smelled his own diaper. When, in a perfect storm of chaos and cacophony, they both landed body parts in thuds on the table and floor and simultaneously emitted shrill whines, I slammed my own palms on the table and threw my chair back.

“I’m done.”

The days are long but the years are short blah blah FUCKING BLAH. Sometimes things just suck, okay? And sometimes you have to walk away. Or I did, at least, into another room, where I stared from a couch into our backyard and wondered how hard it would be to disappear and create a new identity. I breathed. I prayed. But mostly I just sat still, waiting and not, hoping sanity would be restored in both the kitchen and my soul.

Eventually, I got up. Not because I really wanted to, mind you–but because it was time. Time to return to them.

These breaking points, these broken moments, seem to populate so many of my days–hours–now. Brotherly squabbles, one kicking the other in the face and tears erupting, overflowing, discipline required but I don’t even know how to give it without feeling like I could have done better, should have done different. Uplifted prayers, mostly the “HELP” version, whispers of “I need you now. And now. And now,” this never-ending struggle to love and teach and be loved and learn, and when I start measuring successes and failures, kind words versus blown fuses, I feel the nudge that tells me I’m in the wrong territory again. This is not a math class–parenthood; life. This is a walk. Through grace. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MISTAKES, I hear, and am terrified. There will always be mistakes, I hear, differently this time–not a calculus of law but an invitation of grace–and I am free. Freer, at least.

Because the day always ends the same: rocking LB, his head on my shoulder. Lying beside TK, telling him all the reasons why he’s special, sometimes with apologies thrown in, until his breathing evens out and he falls asleep beside me. He falls asleep to love. That ain’t nothing.

Then I go to the bathroom, where hot water and relief await, and a glance out the window reveals one of those sunsets that takes the breath away: blues, purples, pinks, and oranges, melting into the tree line, and I know who sent it. It’s got his name written all over it. “Great is thy faithfulness,” the notes and words echo in my head, placed there so long ago, staying even when I didn’t believe them, and they slowly start to spread downward to my heart. I still get the sunset. After a shitty, failure of a day, I still get the sunset.

“His story will get told, either by default or intentionally, and until he can do it I GET TO,” I had written her, when we were emailing about whether it’s a copyright infringement to write about your children, because we both do. All the time. And afterward, I had thought about his story, and mine, how they are all just invitations into the greatest one. Into the only one that allows ours to make sense. How that story appeared to end with death and darkness, loud cries and torn curtains, blood and water flowing until none seemed left. How that was just the beginning, because I was saved then and am still saved every day: wooden beams and sunsets, forgiveness and redemption. Never a day without either. How, the next day, I will trip over a root in the yard and curse–of course–and that this is grace too, the fact that this is the path and we don’t always skip the yucky steps, what some call regret but I get to call redeemed, because sometimes you have to feel each tiny splinter before you can stand back and see them, whole, the wooden beams standing still and always, trees with roots reaching so far–even here, so that I trip over them–spelling deliverance.

Downton Abbey ended its six-season run recently, and as the last shot lingered on my TV screen–Highclere Castle in the midnight snow–I felt surprisingly bereft. So I spent the next few days scouring the internet for material that could keep the show alive a bit longer for me, and struck pay dirt by finding a podcast that interviewed cast and crew members. The last interview was with Laura Carmichael, who plays the (mostly) down-on-her-luck Lady Edith, and when asked about how she played Edith’s evolution from the beginning of the series, Carmichael spoke of finding her footing in the character at the beginning, saying, “I felt I could see her sort of pain really and that that was a way in.”

I loved that line–that the pain was her way in. Sorry, did I say loved? I meant lived.

There is a round hole in the wall of our downstairs bathroom that perfectly matches the size of the knob on the back of the door. This, as you might guess, is no coincidence. Recently I was faced with two small children who proved utterly resistant to my instructions, and somehow the doorknob made brutal contact with the wall. Sue me for the damn wall being so weak. Lately, and despite my loving exhortations to do otherwise, The Kid has become fascinated with the hole and has started dropping things into it. I’ll be in the next room with Little Brother and we’ll hear the sound of a pinball darting around its machine, and I’ll echo my refrain to TK: “That’s bye bye for good, then. You put something down there, it’s gone.” He remains undeterred by the proclamation, and I’m starting to think that this defect in the wall, this broken spot, is going to become the repository for all toys smaller than its diameter. That it’s just going to be full to the brim with stuff, though now it seems a bottomless pit. The other day, TK’s music therapist came over just as the pinball sounded, and I found myself confessing the secret to her: “Yeah, so I got mad, and now there’s a hole in the wall and he puts everything in it.” She laughed, and not nervously. I think she understood.

“Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain/And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain,” writes Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Alexander Hamilton”, the opening song of the musical. It’s not unlike my favorite Kanye lyric (because I’m nothing if not street): “I’m trying to write my wrongs, but it’s funny them same wrongs helped me write these songs.” I wonder what I’d have to write about if my life had gone according to plan, if it didn’t bear the weight of pain, of disappointment and redirection and mistakes and scars. Maybe I’d share more recipes? And TK, who is talking up a storm three months into the venture, I wonder about him as I push the stroller carrying my boys around the neighborhood and the familiar strains of the alphabet song fill the air around us and I can’t help but think that if he’d talked this whole time, if he talked more even now, that he’d sing less. That we’re okay exactly where we are.

We headed to the gym recently on a beautifully warm and sunny day, the kind of day that used to fill Central Park with runners when I lived in New York, clogging the pathways and leaving me needing some alone time after my alone time. And on this day, I showed the ladies in childcare–the ones who have followed TK’s story as he’s lived it, who have cheered and loved and known–I showed them the most recent video, of him spelling all the words The Husband has taught him, their practice sessions bouncing off the wall between the boys’ rooms as I put LB down at night. I watched them as they watched it, as their smiles grew and eyes filled, and I wondered about their stories, where their own scars were–and if those wounds helped them see the video, help them see TK, differently. Their broken places as their way in. I decided to run on the track because sometimes it’s just too sunny outside, you know? Sometimes a melancholic nature can lead down a path more solitary, and that can be okay. And then sometimes your gym friend shows up on the track to tell you that her son was just accepted to multiple colleges with scholarships. I had thought I was done, but we ran for two more miles as she told me our hopeful future and helped usher me into it, somehow hitting on all the worries of the week, all the holes and broken spots, and filling them with words. And as we kept pace with each other, years apart but living such a similar story, I thought about how the broken places start out so filled with pain…then somehow, when you haven’t even been looking, you turn back and realize they’re full of joy. That they were openings, the whole time, leading straight to grace.

“I love you because you’re you.”

I’ve been saying it for four years now, first to The Kid and now to both him and Little Brother. And damn if it hasn’t been tested, to the point that makes me wonder just how much of my love has been conditional, spinning on the axis of my own convenience and self-interest, waxing and waning based on the successes and disappointments of others.

I have not loved well.

There were so many rules before: before failure, before New York, before grace, before marriage, before kids. How’s this for a random sampling: Always eat your vegetables. Cups go in the dishwasher. No kids in the bed. Dirty socks into the hamper. But you know, it’s hard to make a nonverbal kid say please and thank you. I remember when we couldn’t even get him to sign it.

Now, every night at varying times, I hear the thud of his tiny feet as they hit his carpet, the patter of them as they run across the hall, and his quick breathing, often paired with a giggle, as he climbs onto our bed.

There was a time when I wondered if he’d ever be able to climb our bed, summit that peak that, like so many others, seemed insurmountable. It’s hard to tell a kid who keeps crushing his impossibles to back away from them. What I’m not saying is that we often have a kid between us. What I’m saying is that we often have our kid between us. And the difference between the two is the difference between Me then and now; between rules and grace; between conditional and unconditional. What it looks like at our house, anyway. And I’m learning to be okay with that. (Not with the socks, though. That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer.)

I remember talking to a fellow mom a few years ago, before our shit hit the fan and I thought TK was just being recalcitrant, about parenting. She didn’t eff around, I tell you: fruit was considered a dessert. She Tiger Mom-ed her way all over this terrain, I mean Baby-Wised the shit out of it. I felt so inferior: I was going to be that mom! I read that book multiple times before my son even came out! And here I couldn’t even get my kid to touch an orange food, let alone a green one, and don’t even get me started on nap awakenings. My failures seemed to be stacking up at a much faster rate than any successes.

This was around the time the scans started coming back. Around the time life–and grace–shattered what our milestones and “normal” would look like. That different was the name of our game. At first, it felt like a horrible joke. But more and more, it feels like utter freedom.

Because it turns out that as attractive as black-and-white can be, my soul longs for a more spacious residence. A more forgiving one. Yeah, I sleep-trained my kids, but guess what? They don’t stay trained forever. Shit happens, and it often feels like it happens almost every night. I need something more than rules, and the keeping of them, to keep me alive. To bring me to life.

This past Sunday The Husband and I kept the pre-K class at our church, which meant we got to watch TK in action alongside his spiritual colleagues. I was both excited and nervous: when it comes to this boy, I feel everything so deeply–even more, it seems, than if it were happening to me. What if he were the outcast? What if his feelings were hurt? I approached the day with even more than my usual anxiety, which is to say, DEFCON 5.

And I watched him. To be honest, a dozen or so three-to-five year-olds running around a room is a bit like last call at a bar: people running into each other, stealing things from each other, laughing then crying, just a lot of nonsense. All the while, my boy kept mostly to himself, often playing next to or near another kid, sometimes watching other kids tearing around, often pulling me to the CD player to tell me which number was on the screen. He was beautiful, being himself, and I found myself loving this demeanor with which I’ve done internal battle, this quietness of his that I feared was a silence, this studious examination of working parts and this surveying of the scene rather than total immersion in it. I loved it, and I loved him–for being him. It felt like freedom; this gentle humbling that consists of everything shifting into its rightful place.

Yesterday morning his therapist texted to cancel his two-hour afternoon appointment, and the panic rose up within me as my plans for the afternoon, the topography of my day, all fell to pieces. And during those hours, as LB slept upstairs and I should have been alone at my computer, I instead played outside with my boy, bouncing a red ball up to him on our porch as he dissolved into laughter and said, “More, mama. More, please.” This boy who was locked inside himself for so long, inching out here and bounding out there, and I see that this difference between What I Think Should Be and What Is–this difference is the terrain where grace runs interference, where my own falling short is reflected and erased, where my stubborn refusal to stop measuring myself is forgiven and redeemed. Where I am set free. Where I am being taught how to love, and be loved. Where we are all the beloved.

This past weekend was my first full one away from the kids without The Husband. My pre-kid self would be horrified, intent as she was on “getting the hell out of here” and “dropping the kids off somewhere” so that I could make every girls’ weekend on the calendar. She was kind of a bitch, though, and also not well-acquainted with the deep ambivalence, and complicated mechanics, that characterize my actual life–not the one I planned and prepared for and read up on. Turns out I have a hard time walking away from these boys. And a hard time sleeping in a bed that’s not my own (along with having a hard time sleeping in my own bed, but that’s their fault). And a hard time releasing (my illusion of) control long enough to leave my comfort zone and step into the unknown.

Which, a few days ago, looked like a women’s retreat with my church. We drove two hours into north Georgia and spent two nights at some cabins in the mountains. It’s been awhile since I’ve had to be a person apart from my family; after all, I’ve stopped working, and my writing relationships are mostly–and safely–virtual, conducted within the confines of an online presence that can be edited at will. It’s so much easier to be likable with a delete button.

So it was more for relationship-building that I went on the trip than for rest, knowing as I do that extended periods of time in anyone’s presence but my own (and maybe Jesus, though sometimes even he can get talky) can lead to emotional exhaustion and empty introvert tanks. I’m old enough to have learned how to be “on” when I need to, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t wear me the hell out. Not to mention that I am not old enough to have stopped caring whether people like me, whether my jokes land well, and whether I’ll be invited to whatever the grownup version of Sally’s tea party is.

I had a great time. And I am worn out. Not mutually exclusive.

I feel like my own neediness–which I can’t stand when I sense it from others–is revealed at times like these. A part of me will always be the girl who didn’t fit in and would rather be at home reading a book. That girl didn’t have wine, though, so there’s that now. And she also didn’t understand grace, like at all. And I’m…working on it.

On Saturday afternoon we had free time, and I went to the main lodge with my journal and books and internet devices and sat by a roaring fire, my cozy scarf wrapped protectively around me like armor since it was too early to start drinking. In the quiet–and I don’t mean of my surroundings, as the theme from Gone with the Wind blasted from the lobby speakers; I’m talking about the absence of that dull roar I typically hear in the presence of others that is just my fear over whether I’m performing adequately in this particular social environment–I felt the heat from the flames warm me, and the chair I was in hold me. And in that moment, I knew that I was being loved right there by the fire in a way I always am but seldom feel. There’s just too much noise in my head, too many doubts in my mind, too much anxiety in my heart that drowns out what is most enduring and real, tested and true. I considered that moving away from that noise–moving away from the person I used to be and still often am–isn’t so much a retreat as it is a step forward, a walk of faith, into what feels unsure and unshaped and unplanned and, therefore, unsafe. I’d so much rather provide my own analysis than let go and just be. I’d so much rather complain about doing the dishes myself than run the risk that they’ll be done “wrong.” I’d so much rather rule my world than cede authority to a more benevolent sovereign, whose movements are unpredictable and mysterious, and who calls me away from the safe and small world I prefer.

We talked a lot about death over the weekend, which may sound depressing but wasn’t. Because it revealed all the parts of me that are being asked to leave, gently but unequivocally, by a grace that loves too much to allow them to remain: loves me too much, loves my family too much. And that grace-full conversation isn’t so much the high school mean-girls interaction I let it become in my mind as it is a beckoning forward–away from something comfortable and toward something more. Growth looking like retreat; life looking (and feeling) like death. Prayer sounding more like anguished cries than self-assured recitations. And this is progress? Could it be true that we are always somehow walking forward toward both death, and life?

I came home and buried myself in laundry; there’s always so much to just do that the tasks can feel like the whole narrative, the moments by the fire lost in the noise. The next day I drove Little Brother to the same surgical center where The Kid had his first of several surgeries. I’ve driven there through the dark so many mornings I’ve stopped counting, but spring must be coming because the sun had risen and we made our way through the light. As the nurses and doctors gave their speeches, I wanted to stop them: “I’ve been here before. A lot. I know the drill.” But I didn’t know it, because this time was easier. I thought I was prepared, but this was something new. A surprise. Our last nurse did a double take–“You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” she asked, and I nodded, recognizing her too, and so the past wasn’t for nothing, this shared smile of veterans rising above the noise. Later that night, the kids in bed and each being made whole in their own way, I felt the exhaustion and aches of the day and weekend settle in. There was still so much to do, and I had been such an ass over dinner about the cleaning. Still, grace cut through the noise: You’re loved. Just be still and try that on for size. Conflicted yet sure, fearful yet bold, I stepped forward into the cross-shaped stillness.

In a word, there are many thorns, but the roses are there too. –Peter Tchaikovsky

Every night, there’s a show. And how often do I miss it?

Thursday afternoon I grabbed a Visitor badge from the front desk at The Kid’s elementary school and headed down the hall to his classroom. When I entered, the Valentine’s Day party was in full swing–all over TK’s face. His cheeks were dyed pink from cupcake icing and his fingers, orange from Doritos dust. This is not going to end well, I thought, recalling our shared stomach virus from just days earlier and considering the long road trip ahead. I wiped him down and loaded him into the car. Half an hour later, our family of four was buckled in and heading south on the interstate.

It was a narrow escape. Little Brother had one more day of the miracle antibiotic that was healing his ears but tearing up his stomach, and both TK and I were slowly regaining our appetites. A few days earlier and the trip would have had to be cancelled. Instead, we barreled ahead (and, through two construction zones, inched ahead while LB screamed from his carseat). We left the highway and began the last leg of the trip as the sun was dipping toward the horizon, and maybe it was because I was driving–not tending to the kids–that I noticed it. “Look at that,” I whispered to The Husband, because TK had nodded off and I was not about to threaten that development. To our right, the sky above a flat field was sprayed with pink and orange. I let it take my breath for a second, then got back to wishing us out of the car and this moment.

We had barely entered the front door when TK began gagging, and we got him to the bathroom before the pink and orange of his party menu were blasted all over the bathmat. The next hour was a flurry of cleaning, bath time, dinner, and bedtime. Some hours later, I heard TK jump out of bed and pad down the hallway to my parents’ room. The Dad escorted him back to us, where I waited, 2 am-confused, in a shirt that barely covered my ass. “Your mom’s sick,” Dad whispered in the darkness, and I tried to listen to the details while I pulled at my shirt and clasped TK’s hand. I failed, and after returning TK to bed, I spent the next few hours imagining what might happen next: The Mom, afflicted with a virus, would be unable to care for TK and LB and the next day would be spent heading back north on the interstate as a family of four rather than heading east to 30A as a couple of two.

It was just a cold. The Mom and Dad pushed us out the door the next day, and my ever-present ambivalence rendered me both giddy and tearful. The closer we got to our destination, though, the more giddiness took over. By the time we opened our hotel room’s double doors onto a balcony overlooking the Gulf, I felt the sickness and exhaustion of the past two weeks pour out of me like a valve had been released.

We didn’t miss the show for the next three nights: sunset as appointment viewing.

The alchemy of sand, salt, and water has always felt like a cocktail blended especially for me. My home base; a call to a deeper part of myself–so much different from, but with the same effect as, the city’s smell of exhaust and sound of horns. A part of me opens up and makes more room, so that anxiety either diffuses out or just gets overshadowed, and my lungs can fill again. As we stood on the sand one of those nights, I felt a whisper ride the wind alongside the salt: Stop. Breathe. Look how beautiful it is–your life. How hard and how beautiful, and YOU’RE DOING IT. And it’s okay that all of that is easier to see from here. Three other audience members, a couple and their toddler, watched the show from a few feet away. TH and I laughed about how different their night would look from ours. I felt both relieved and incomplete. I looked back at the sunset, glimmering magnificently on the water. A rebellious but true thought hit me: I’ve seen even better ones at home.

Five years and two kids in, a sunset splits me in two. Nothing will ever be simple again; everything is simple after all.

When we returned three days later, TK’s grin lasted longer than the pink cupcake dye I’d wiped off before we left. He pulled me to a bedroom and stared at my face while I whispered to him. He wouldn’t stop studying me, smile fixed. I felt concern leave him as if a valve had been released: there’s just something about being home. There’s something–beautiful, and hard, and beautiful–about being someone’s home.

In the car a few hours later, I glanced back between whines and cries, during a moment of quiet, and saw two tiny hands reaching for each other, unbidden by us, fingertip touching fingertip. A giggle from one and a grin from the other. These unprompted connections running through us but not created by us, these graces that keep showing up without my earning or, sometimes, even recognizing them. The sun set sometime between dinner and bath and bed that night, and I missed the show. But I won’t always.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when a woman thinks to herself about how well things are going, she must want them to fall completely apart. –not Jane Austen

When Little Brother and I took a tumble down the stairs a couple of weeks ago, I figured we were knocking out the worst part of our week early. I thought that, much like Charlotte crapping her pants, maybe I was done. But I was wrong. In hindsight, that fall resembles more of a foreshadowing. Because the last two weeks have been, in many ways, complete shit.

LB clung to a resistant ear infection through one round of intestinal-blasting antibiotics, screaming his way through the week and nights and sending me spinning back into what felt like the newborn period, all crying and clinging. Then on Saturday what started as mild nausea for me ended up shooting out of both ends all night long, alternating with The Kid’s middle-of-the-night hurling sessions in his bed. We woke up together there Sunday morning, all dried puke and poor sleep, and spent the next few days recovering–and, for me, praying everyone else would be spared–and not just for their sakes.

I was reminded of all that I’m terrible at: being patient, rolling with unpredictability, adjusting my schedule, not threatening to leave in the middle of the night but then standing in the garage sans pants or contacts and realizing it’s just too damn cold to go anywhere. And I was reminded at what I’m better at: executing multiple loads of laundry, operating in crisis mode, disinfecting the hell out of rooms and toilets…and in some small way, making a home for my family. A home that I occasionally threaten to leave, but still–a home. Finally, I was reminded what I am nothing at: running the universe, and saving us.

TK stayed home from school for two days, and they happened to be two of the coldest days of the year so far. My stomach still roiling, there was little pleasure or escape to be found outside our four walls, the three of us–my two boys and I–relegated to couch and floor, TV and toys, to pass the time. One afternoon while LB slept, I momentarily rued this forced indoor playtime and the intimacy it pushed us into. Then I heard him say, “more Mama.” I remembered when he could only sign “more”, and then I recalled back further when he couldn’t even do that. “More Mama.” I looked over and he grinned at me from under the dining room table, beckoning me to join him there. I could think of so many reasons to say no: discomfort, exhaustion, lint. This time, though, I bowed my head and crawled with him, back and forth, his laughter punctuating each trip. We practiced words, volleying them back and forth in what might not sound like a conversation, but was. I grabbed his baby book and sat on the couch, his head on my shoulder, and told him stories from his own life.

The next day, things were supposed to be better. He was supposed to be ready for school, and I was supposed to be able to go to the gym. Instead, he woke up lethargic and sluggish. I wrote out “home” and “school” and he pointed home. The three of us gathered in the room with the bay window while, outside, big and messy flakes fell to the ground. I felt cut off from the rest of humanity, from civilization. From my plans. From our schedule. A part of my heart peeked into it all and said that maybe this was all okay. Maybe, in fact, it could be beautiful. This was not the same part of my heart that banged my hands on the steering wheel later during our Drive to Nowhere while TK whined and LB cried in the backseat. It was not the part of my heart that sighed as if the world was ending when LB threw his tray to the floor at dinner. It was not the part of my heart that tossed harsh words around at TH and the boys before dinner, when I felt the weight of the day and sickness all in my shoulders. But it was a part of my heart. And it’s nice to know it’s there. And on a winter morning in a room with my boys, it allowed me to see that being trapped together can actually be a kind of freedom. We read books–the same ones over and over. I mediated fights. I rubbed backs and held hands. I read liturgy scattered throughout the day instead of in three clean sittings. We watched the snow fall.

There are the things we think we’re done with: the couple who’s done having kids but sees the two pink lines anyway. The couple who had a feeling this would be the last round of IVF and they’d be done trying to conceive, but the test said differently. The parents whose kids are sleeping through the night ALL THE TIME! And then they’re not. Ever. I’ve been done with so many of the hard parts only to find more of it around the corner. And I’ve felt cheated. Mistreated. It seemed unfair. Felt like too much. I wanted to complain to management, who up to that point I had assumed was me.

Then I turn back to the dark house with the crying kid and the sick four-year-old and remember that there’s a bed for me here, a spot of warmth on a winter night, and forgiveness. The car and the plans and the schedules look less important, less inviting. At the very least, they don’t look like everything. I head back to my place with my people. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do better, and maybe I won’t. Maybe it will be less hard, or not. Maybe we’ll be healed, or maybe we’ll still be sick. The day is not going to be what it is because I made it that way–it will be what it’s supposed to be. And these moments, the hard and the easy, the beautiful and the awful, they will never be over–I will never be done with them–because grace will never be done with us.

When you don’t often crave the company of others, it’s easy to end up feeling alone.

I get worn out by other people. No offense to them–well, not all of them, anyway–but I find social situations often harrowing, and small talk to be downright hell. And now that I’m staying at home for the time being, I find that the only companionship I suffer for most of any given day can be limited to two small boys and the contents of their undergarments. Which is usually just how I like it–but also can be…terrible. I mean, really: how much talk of trucks and ba-bas can one person stand? Sometimes I turn on the news just to hear an adult voice, then realize how rare those are during campaign season. So I plod along the sparsely populated path of the introverted mother of young children, ambivalent over loneliness being a virtue or scourge.

People creep in, though. My favorites? They do it seamlessly.

I keep running into my friend at the gym–the one who has a boy like mine plus fourteen years. Sometimes we just wave across the room at each other; others, I approach her or she approaches me. “How’s it going?” she’ll ask, in the way of someone who knows exactly what it is, and our conversations are edenic gardens scattered throughout my week, patches of understanding among moments of mundanity or difficulty (read: life): the nodding when I describe a victory or setback, the advice offered without judgment from a place of experience, of sameness. She gives me hope: a place to complain, or commiserate, or rejoice. An “I’ve been there” who holds up both a mirror and an eight ball, and the best news is that the outlook is good. “You’re over the hump,” she said recently, and from anyone else it would have sounded trite and false-positive, but from her it was a balm, and truth–because there will be many humps, but the tide is so changing.

We baptized Little Brother on Sunday, and I was nervous, naturally: we planned to take The Kid up there with us and, therefore, inject total unpredictability into the outcome. Before the service, an older boy with Down Syndrome whom we’ve never met walked up to TK and grinned down at him. Wordlessly, he bent his knees and embraced my boy in a bear hug. It was over as soon as it began, and as he walked away, I turned to The Husband. “Why…” I began, and he shook his head, but there was no question mark at the end. The way he reaches people, the hearts that react to him? It’s grace, opened over and over, this gift of knowing that he will affect the people around him, even change them. He’s changed me.

Later, our family of four walked to the front of the room and repeated the liturgy. TK stood beside me, holding his arm out for me to scratch it since we are nothing if not his personal masseuses. He looked down at the row of families and looked back at me, giggling. He ran his toy car over the table behind us set for communion, which I’m not sure but I think may be a desecration? Or maybe the opposite? Our two pastors, who know our story from both telling and experience and also go by the title friends, brought the water down and sprinkled it over LB’s head. He gave his best Elvis snarl, TK laughed, and I cried: our family of four together, all of us now washed by water both plain and sacred, among a community of friends.

Yesterday she texted that we should catch up since it’s been since before Christmas, for the love of God, and when we began talking it was right where we had left off. She’s read the updates but I got to fill them in, and they were somehow more real in the sharing. That afternoon, TK bounded up the stairs followed by his therapist, who gave a recap of his latest achievements. “I have to move on to reading because he’s learned everything else so quickly,” she said. “I mean, he’s basically typical,” she continued, using the jargon of our particular community, at which I felt both relief and another funny thought: Let’s hope not.

When she gave it to me, a simple magnet, she’d signed the gift with the title we’ve figured out because there isn’t an official name for what we are. The Sis’s in-laws? Too wordy. Friend? Too incomplete. “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly,” I read, and when I looked to her, she turned to TK. “Like him,” she said, and she couldn’t have known that later that day I’d read the boys the book with the same ending–“by and by, he became a butterfly.” Grace showing up in all these places as people.

I have been running so sweaty my whole life
Urgent for a finish line
And I have been missing the rapture this whole time
Of being forever incomplete

I keep telling the same damn stories.

I was listening to the Masterpiece Studio podcast the other day, as people do, when Mark Gatiss was interviewed. He’s the prolific writer and actor from Doctor Who and Sherlock, among others, and in case you haven’t seen either, allow me to assure you that he does some quality shit. He quotes a favorite author of his, Wilkie Collins, who wrote underneath a sign that read, “Make ’em cry. Make ’em laugh. Make ’em wait.”

I wonder now if he borrowed that idea from the author of my own story.

My younger years were spent in movement, flitting from one item on the list to the next: high school, college, grad school. Montgomery, Birmingham, New York. This relationship to that one to, mostly, not one. Scrambling to find myself, construct an identity, figure out this life. It’s no coincidence that a deeper understanding of grace has coincided with a less mobile period in my life, one in which I am staying put both out of necessity (two pretty cute and challenging little anchors) and rest: I don’t have to create a life, a self. I can be still. It’s already happening.

Bertrand Russell wrote that “a child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil.” I don’t know about the age specification, but it’s certainly true for me now, the whole bloom-where-you’re-planted thing. Since I came to the realization (kicking and screaming at first, death grip on my plans intact, then gradually moving on to acceptance and surrender–most of the time) that I’m not running this show or writing this story, I’ve become aware that my actual role–one of living it, and telling it–involves a fair amount of waiting. And watching, for themes seem to keep repeating themselves. Grace is a story told a million different ways and times.

Ever the student, I’ve begun studying the components of the liturgy that we hear every week. Like the ancient monastic orders, I downloaded an app to my phone that provides the three daily prayers and their scriptural accompaniments, which, in my often graceless hands, would just represent my attempt at trying to be “good”, at scrambling to secure my own righteousness. Cross another prayer off the list and get back to ordering my life. I mean, these prayers are hella long. That deserves some credit, right?

Funny how grace changes the alchemy of words read and offered up, of what is taken in and what remains behind, stirring almost imperceptibly in my heart and mind to create a moment of understanding: oh yeah, there’s a God. And he’s, like, in charge. And he loves me. Funny how these truths that I thought I always knew become new, go from known to now, both connect me to and free me from the present moment and send me into a deeper reality. It’s all such mystery: how much of faith feels like starting over, yet coming back to the same place. The first couple of times I read the prayers, I noted with annoyance that there was so much repetition. “Is this on purpose?” I thought irritably, ruing the apparent lack of efficiency when you’re rooted in the same spot, then noticing how being rooted in the same spot might just lead to growth, the truth unfurling within me now that it had room to move.

There is a beauty in the repetition, I am beginning to see, a wonder in the never-quite-complete that is constantly returned to, that has its fulfillment down the road in something bigger than myself. It’s like a promise always being kept, and one day being revealed. And this liturgy, these lines that could just be words said over and over, they are showing me the more that they are: showing me how little rests on me, how much is already held, how insufficient I am and others are yet how full of potential. They are giving me something to return to: a rhythm to my days that might have remained hidden.

Little Brother and The Kid and I are developing a new rhythm too, now that I’m embarking on a Stay-at-Home gig for the foreseeable future (more on that later), and mid-afternoons is when we head upstairs for diaper changes and potty time. I sit next to the toilet by TK while he peruses the iPad, and LB’s newest trick is to sit behind my and TH’s bedroom door and slam it shut. Next come the tears: this block of wood separating him from his people?! The inhumanity! So I open the door, explain what he’s doing, return to my perch by the pot, and hear the whole damn scene repeat itself. The door slams, The Kid doesn’t pee, and we’re sitting here doing the same thing every day while tiny changes occur without our seeing, movement toward the next thing, learning. The story unfolding as it is written to. All of it, a mystery.

What if I wrote the story? There’d be no waiting. There’d be no difficulty. There’d be no tension. There’d be no mystery. And, like Dean Young writes in his poem “One Story”, there’d be no beauty:

…I mean what
would you do if you had to create Beauty?
I’m afraid I’d start screaming, the most irksome
forms of insects coming from my mouth. I’m afraid
I’d come up with Death.

And the mystery continues every day, incomplete but with glimpses of its future full beauty: this same moment every day, when we climb into the rocking chair where I held them as newborns, and we read the same books, turn the same pages, sit in the same spots: one on my lap, the other beside me, doing the same things, waiting to be made complete even as we rest in our stillness.

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

It feels like the first Christmas without a deadline on the celebration.

Four years ago, The Kid was two weeks old on Christmas Eve. The next day was a blur of nursing, erratic sleep, and purple crying. I wondered–as a friend had wisely told me I would–what I had done. The next year, I rocked and sang him to sleep knowing that in six days, we’d wake up before dawn and lay him on a table while they cut into his neck. The year after that, I begged his neurosurgeon’s office for information, exchanged emails with the orthotic specialist and physical therapist, and prepared for the cutting of bone, days in the hospital, weeks in a halo. Last year, we wondered if words and answers would ever arrive while a three-month-old woke up multiple times a night and I cried regularly on the couch.

This year has been…different.

This year, he’s gone from sounds to words to short sentences in a matter of weeks. This year, the waitress handed me crayons and paper and instead of pushing them aside, he grabbed the crayon out of my hand and went to town, grinning at everyone around us excitedly, totally present. This year, we dropped him off at gym childcare and the son of my friend walked up to The Husband, pronouncing, “James was in my class last year. He’s my friend.” This year I talked to another neurosurgeon on the phone two days before Christmas and he told me that things are staying stable as TK grows–then asked how he’s doing.

I am the only limit on my own celebration this year–this year filled with so many firsts, with miracle upon miracle. With the coming of our boy into his own, into himself. To us.

But what a limitation I can be, with this life-long line I’ve walked along the throes of anxiety with a view into the neighboring land of depression, a place I didn’t feel I quite fit but always worried I would venture into, wake up one day and find myself too far gone. Maybe it was the not-fitting-in that was especially irksome, the feeling of being on the edge of one place, then another, without a clear answer or directive: take this pill, try this treatment. And I’ve walked that line now with The Kid, perusing the checklists and checking off boxes with numbers (as if numbers can tell a story) that always hovered on edges too, landing him near a diagnosis but not quite fitting in anywhere either.

Crayon to paper, he draws all over and outside the lines.

Now it feels like we’re crossing over, into a new place that makes me feel sad that I ever wasted time indulging hopelessness. A place that makes me realize how long we’ve been waiting for him to show up–and that now, instead of waiting on him, it’s time to walk with him.

And it’s not lost on me, thank God and his grace, that it’s all happening this time of year: the season of waiting and of showing up. The thing that comes next, what some call Boxing Day but for me has always felt like a steep descent into sadness: the un-decorating, the tearing down, the ensuing emptiness. I’ve always been great at anticipation; it’s the aftermath of arrival that leaves me bereft.

But this year.

I think about the nativity that TK loves so much, how he points to each of them: the mother, the father, the baby, the wise men. I especially think about her, this mother surrounded by glowing light in most of our present-day renderings, and how she might have described it differently: the quiet, clean waiting broken by sweat, blood, and tears–then all these damn people show up right after she’s emptied her body and all she has is some hay and cloths…and him. How the tableau we’ve come to recognize probably had a bit more of that not-so-fresh feeling that you can’t capture on canvas or in sculpture. But we’re told–twice, once right after he was born and once after he disappeared for a few days as a child–that she pondered these things, that she treasured them in her heart. Once he was back with her, she pondered and treasured–and I wonder if this is the secret to Advent and Christmas living on, into even January. I ponder whether crossing the line from anticipation into presence might just be the thing I’ve been missing for so long–the next thing that’s been waiting for me.

“I’ve been doing a new thing–don’t you see it?” grace asks, and as TK grabs my hand to pull me further along, saying–not signing, but saying “more”, I can nod through tears and whisper it back myself: yes. Finally–yes.