The Kid bounds up the stairs from the basement, followed close behind by his speech therapist. She enters the kitchen, shaking her head and grinning. “I can’t believe it,” she says.

A professional, and she can’t believe it. But isn’t that how miracles work?

We start talking about all he’s doing, seemingly overnight–four years and overnight–and because this is someone who knows him, I can say it: that none of the labels have ever quite fit, that pardon my humble and biased opinion but he transcends them. That it’s just starting now, but I can see glimpses down the road–that he will continue to surprise us all; that he has been made a certain way for a certain purpose and he will do amazing things.

You know. Just some thoughts.

She tells me with tears in her eyes that she has the chills, and I think about how being his advocate, it has been in moments of screaming and crying and holding him down, but it has also been in moments like this. He peeks at us around the corner, smiling as if he knows.

I think he might.

The call comes after five on a weekday afternoon, and when she tells me she’s from the genetics testing center, I scramble for a pen and paper, taken by surprise as I always am when it comes to him, and she speaks the words as I write them. Chromosomal deletion. Variant of unknown significance. We haven’t seen this exact thing before.

I’m getting used to hearing that last part.

There are people in white coats with microscopes and thick, heavy books–I’ve been one of them–and they have explanations and diagnoses and reasons. And sometimes they don’t. The various forms of shrugged shoulders that we’ve seen and heard–not determinable, further testing needed, it’s a mystery–these words are supplied as though the reason is hiding in a microscope or a book or on a chromosome, a deletion that explains what is diagnosable as a mistake.

I have to be polite, have to wait until I’ve left the office or hung up the phone, then laugh along with the unexplainably healed, with the blind who got their sight back. Because this may be a lot of things, but it is no mistake. A piece of genetic material missing, a deviation from typical on a sliver of chromosome, and I’m done chasing down reasons when I already have an Answer.

Grace adds what is needed and takes away what is not. He was made this way, love writing the code for each gene as surely as I type these words, and so much more beautifully: a masterpiece with a creator. This story, changing people. Changing me.

Unknown significance? Only because the story is still being told. Only because so much remains to be seen. But not because we’re waiting on a microscope. We’re watching a life unfurl.

Three Christmases ago, sleep-deprived and hormonally assaulted, I gazed at his tiny face, so full of possibility. Over the trio of years I’ve wondered if those possibilities had diminished. If our dreams had become limited, our hopes unfounded.

Nope.

This year I see that same face and watch the mouth painstakingly sound out letters and words. This is not easy for him. Few things worthwhile ever are–easy, I mean. But it’s happening, one step at a time, each of those steps drawn out so we can see them. So we can witness the miracle. We are beholding him: a gift. And it’s just so undeservedly beautiful, how it has all started between his birthday and Christmas, this advent of words…and yet, how it started so long ago, with the advent of a different Word, of another boy who didn’t fit in and to whom labels would not stick. Words coming together beyond our sight, letters chaining in darkness until the light arrives, slowly at first, then so brightly and abundantly it’s just everywhere: the cracking of night to let the variations in, scattering and joining in patterns beyond what I could have ever imagined.

Dear Will,

The last half of my time in New York, Mondays were my day off. I would kick off the week with a trip to the corner bagel shop: flat whole-wheat sesame with bacon, egg, and gooey cheese. I’d take the bagel back to my apartment and eat it on the couch or fire escape, depending on the weather, and savor every bite. I can still remember the steam coming out of the brown paper bag when I opened my gift, can still smell the bread and taste the salty bacon. My Monday morning miracle.

Dude. What I’m saying is, you’re my bagel.

There are days when, as a parent of two small children, I find it daunting to leave my bed. Some call this a symptom of depression; for me, it’s a symptom of being alive. Life as we know it is exhausting right now. You require a lot of maintenance, still refusing to prepare your own food, wipe your own ass, wash your own clothes. Your brother was (is) the same way. And from the beginning, you’ve been my early bird, a quality I suspected from those early days fresh out of the hospital when you’d spend the last two hours before sunrise in our bed, in my arms–totally against the rules.

Oh, the rules. When your brother turned one–already having faced a more difficult road than you so far, with its physical therapists and x-rays and doctor appointments and impending (first) surgery–I wrote him a letter too. The next year, I took it all back. Because that letter was filled with all the things I would teach him, all the plans I had…in short, an agenda. We’re still recovering from that agenda, still sweeping its remnants off the floor alongside the Cheerios and nuggets, still unearthing the different and harder and somehow more beautiful plan. GB told me that the oldest child of the family pays for the parents’ mistakes the most, and don’t I know it. Once you came along, my illusions had already been injected with a hefty dose of reality. I realized, finally, that I was not in control. Not even a little. And so I let go, bit by bit, and while I rue the time it took me to do it (sing it with me: Sorry, James)–and the amount left to relinquish–I’m thankful that I’m being brought closer to the mother I was made to be, each day. I’m thankful that it means you’ll both get less of me, more of grace. (Another bit of wisdom from GB: we probably parent best when we parent less. Ha.)

So I’ve stopped reading books about discipline and I’ve started reading books about grace, about mercy, about forgiveness–one in particular. I try to watch more than I plan, so that I can really see. So that I don’t miss the beauty, the sacred, the miracles–the you.

Because you’re my Monday morning miracle. You’re the first one who makes a sound in the morning, and when I creep into your dark room, opening the door silently, you know. You giggle, and you sit up in your bed and grin at me as I turn on the light and scoop your warmth and joy into my arms. You are the final piece to the puzzle that is our family, full not of answers but of delights to be unwrapped each day: the way you gaze at your brother in rapt wonder; the babbling and cooing paired with an eyebrow raise; the laughter that fills our pre-dawn coffee and formula sessions; the no-holds-barred inquisitiveness and mischievousness of your every move. I remember the first night you slept in your own room and I switched on our new dual-camera monitor to see your big brother on one side, sprawled over his bed in his signature pose, and you on the other, tucked into your rock and play with your tiny face glowing. Two of them. I get TWO OF THEM, I thought, my heart overwhelmed with the undeserved goodness of it all, my exhaustion overruled by the gift of the pair of you, the difficulty of the days (and nights) usurped in that moment with my two boys, safe and sound down the hall and in my vision.

And GJ had told me that she knew I couldn’t imagine how I’d love this baby growing within me as much as I already loved the one growing beside me, the one with whom I had a history and a story being told, but that I would. That it would knock me over and take my breath away how much I would. And when I heard your cry in the hospital at 1 am that morning, after you had broken the water and made me puke, the tears ran down because I knew you. And I loved you. It was just that simple, just that beautiful. You had always been mine. Just like she had promised, my heart would be big enough.

Big enough, yes–but getting bigger. Painfully so. And these pains I’m having, this anxiety I’ve been feeling, it started before I can remember, before there was you or your brother or your daddy, but now it pulses and aches alongside you and at the thought of you because there is so much to love. It kicked into high gear the weekend I stopped nursing you, when I took your brother to the hospital for yet another scan, then thought it would be a good idea to try an intensive potty-training program a few days later. The turning of the page, six months into your life, the changing chapter and hormones and all of it, left me a bit more bereft than I expected, the highs and lows swinging about wildly. You’re the caboose, which means these milestones are each the last, and that makes them more beautiful–but also creates a trail of grief it would be unwise to either deny or remain in. I’m navigating that now, this postpartum, post-childbearing chapter of my life, in which I watch you grow as I debate whether to color the gray hairs now or wait. This is why the word bittersweet was coined.

But there is redemption. There is joy in the passage of time, there is learning from mistakes and receiving forgiveness for them, there is the second-time-around grace. There is the fact that I didn’t love being pregnant and I didn’t love not sleeping but that you’re here anyway, and therefore so loved before you even began, in that year of waiting and losing and praying, in that thirty-seven years without you until now, in this last year when you have completed our circle. And there is your name, Protector, which–like your brother’s, we never knew the perfect fit of until you came along and owned it. Your big brother, who alternately pats your head and tolerates you, will have you alongside him, and this will help make you the person you’re meant to be.

I think you’re up to it. After all, you were made for it.

To my once and always baby, I love you more than words can say.

Love,
The Ass Wiper

On Mondays, we smell like horse shit.

As a child I loved to watch episodes of The Adventures of Black Beauty with The Sis, after which we would spend hours speaking in Southern-stained British accents. I liked horses then because I had never met one in person–they were just an idea to me. Then I went to day camp and stood about twenty feet from where a horse, ass facing me, emptied his colon. A few years later, at a youth retreat with my church, I rode up a hill on a horse who had a death wish–he spent the entire hike clinging to the side of the incline while I sweated, cried, and prayed for it all to end.

I don’t like horses.

But the mother of the girl in TK’s class, the girl who began speaking shortly after starting horse therapy, who became happier and more social and more of everything you want for your child, she recommended the therapy as miraculous. And we’re always looking for a miracle around here, so I signed us up. And Monday, I walked through the gate with TK and into the barn full of horse poop and cats (I don’t like cats). They put a helmet on TK (he doesn’t like helmets) and sat him on a horse. He screamed his lungs out and tried to rip off the helmet, making the sign for “all done.”

It’s almost like someone is trying to change our minds about things.

TK rode around the ring with three therapists keeping him aloft, and after a while the screams died down and gave way to reluctant assent. They took him off down a trail and The Husband showed up and we waited. By the time they came sauntering back, TK was signing for more and TH and I were grinning like idiots.

“Faith sees best in the dark,” said Kierkegaard and Joe Biden, and this stretch of road without maps and milestones can feel just that: dark. And dark can feel mean. But I remember that good can also feel bad, and right can feel wrong. That once, I felt like a horse was leading me to my death, but now? One may be helping lead TK, lead us, to miracles. In the meantime, we step forward in relative darkness and realize with each movement that we are not alone, that this is not a mistake, that the stepping off ledges I thought I was done with years ago is just beginning.

I have given the divine such a narrow range within which to work in my life: signing off only on what felt easy, calling him good when what I meant was that things were good for me. “Why does it have to be easy?” asks Elizabeth Gilbert. “It’s MAGIC!” Light falls through the trees unevenly, and I’ve groaned so loudly I failed to notice that everything is growing exactly as it should. Fall sneaks in, temperatures cool off ten degrees, my mood is fifty pounds lighter, and the world reveals itself in colors that are lost in the haze of summer and the gray of winter. I have eyes that have not seen, and ears that have not heard, even with the sights and sounds all around me, but now the light filters through and the sounds echo. I hear the travel guide call Ireland a “terrible beauty” on the TV in the background and I think about how this road we’re on is the only way I could have learned that terrible and beauty do not contradict each other. I see the words on the page about how manna literally translates to “what is it?”, and that we can eat, live off of, mystery as our sustenance. And this takes my breath away, because each point and sound from TK lately is exactly that question: What is it? This question our manna, our bread in the dark.

The prophet on the plane had sat beside me at the gate while I debated whether to run away, screaming, but I had stayed and he had told me what he saw coming for me: swings and cameras. And maybe it’s a generic prediction, and maybe I rolled my eyes the whole way home, but now I’m standing at a swing set in our backyard, pushing Little Brother with one hand and snapping shots of TK with the other, and there may just be a chance that it has all led here, to this moment. To the next one. That life takes different shapes as it changes from our plans to the plan, as it moves from one season to the next, and it can take awhile to grow into those new shapes, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad; it doesn’t mean we’re in the wrong spot. Because later, I sit with the boys in a chair and read a story and while I’m reading, I see both of their heads next to each other, hear TH moving in the next room, and if all that’s fallen apart and come before has led us here–to this place I can finally see as everything I ever hoped for, this moment of completeness in the midst of the darkness and patches of light–then I can stop looking for answers and start gazing upon this mystery that is like the weekly table with the wine and the bread–enough. Which is, of course, everything.

Last week I loaded my phone with podcasts, peed as much as I could at home, and jumped into the car, backing out of the driveway while The Kid waved through his window and I waved back through mine. I headed west on I-20 and a few hours later had arrived, in a homecoming of sorts, on my counselor’s couch.

The last time I was here, TK was five months old and I was ravaged by his first few months: exhausted, intensely ambivalent, recovering from being split open in every possible way. After lying on the operating table, after months of lying on the doctor’s table, you’d think an hour of talking would be easy, comparatively. But opening my mouth? That’s another matter entirely, surpassing even the stirrups in its induction of unwelcome yet entirely chosen vulnerability. This visit, I pushed aside my typical nerves, my internal script-writing, the sweat gathering under my arms, and opened up.

I’ll leave most of it there, except to say that in the last few months I’ve convinced myself that my superpower is “causing symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder”, and that the hour was filled with tears and laughter and truth and stories. Time well spent. Its sense of homecoming lay in the hours I’d spent there before, hours that were drenched in despair, in posturing, in seeking. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” Mary Karr said, and I felt the poetry of my life echoing off the walls here: the growing up in Alabama, the returning South five years ago, the asylum I received on a tiny northeastern island in between. That history had been spoken here, even brokered to a degree, that afternoon of my last scheduled visit before leaving for New York, when I crumbled and said I was too afraid to go and was talked gently off that ledge–not onto the solid ground of familiar, but into the free-fall that became the life I was meant for. The life of faith, based not on maps but grace.

We ended the session with a moment of recognition, as travelers, of the beauty that shows up as gift, the passage and sands of time layering above it, disguising it within mundanity and routine until grace updates our prescription and corrects our lenses and we really see. And it took me back to the hour before my appointment, when I checked the map on my phone before realizing I didn’t need it, that although years had passed and homes had relocated, I knew by heart the way to the garden.

The garden. Where I had spent other hours drenched in despair, in praying and seeking. Where I had hiked through woods without a plan, without an endpoint, just hoping I would know when I got to the right spot–an endeavor I was so afraid to attempt in real life. I had seven minutes to wander today before being counseled, and I followed the old familiar trails, peeked into the rose garden, filled my lungs with the rain-soaked air. Thought about how I used to tour gardens as a visitor, and how now I tend them as a mother.

The light fell through the trees in uneven patches, as it often does. I found my way back to the main path, headed toward the entrance that is also an exit, the sidewalk where I had heard it five years ago, the voice whispering spirit to spirit: “Your heart is bigger than you think and stronger than you know.” I had had no idea what lay ahead. Today, I remembered the voice without hearing it. A fluttering sounded behind me, though, as if I was being followed. I turned and saw a leaf skittering along the ground, bounced about by a whisper of wind. Never alone.

Hours and podcasts and traffic later, I pulled into the driveway and waved through my window as TK waved through his. Returned to each other. He met me at the door, grinning. He’s giving out hugs and laughter now, farts especially setting him off, and who knew about the holiness in even that kind of wind? God in gas, and don’t for a second tell me He’s above it, because these moments are the best kind of beautiful, when TK whips his head around at the sound and pokes his butt out to push himself. My God laughs WITH us. Later we play in the front yard by the rose bush, where a butterfly has alighted on a leaf, and TK stares when I point it out–the boy an echo of the mother who gazed at the roses hours and years earlier. He asks us what everything is, and at the end of the day the asking takes on an urgent and prolonged whine and I grit my teeth even in the face of blessing, because I know that this is him being delivered to us, being uncovered and revealed. And I know, also, the irony in having to narrate everything for him, this lifelong discomfort I have with opening my mouth and keeping the words flowing out of it rather than a keyboard, and how grace has a sense of humor but also a deep kindness because this naming everything is making me really see everything.

The naming and the writing and the remembering, they make all the words and history echo through time, and there is a balance between calling a spade a spade and recognizing that where you’re standing is holy ground. Sometimes the words themselves are the spades that break up that ground, opening it up for something new to be realized down the path, where the light breaks through–in uneven patches–but still breaks through into a beautiful later, when the echoes reveal themselves not as interruptions but as the sounds of us all being made.

Until recently I barely even knew the signs of welcome, like the way a person plopped down across from me and sighed deeply while looking at me with relief: a shy look on someone’s face that gave me time to breathe and settle in. I didn’t know that wounds and scars were what we find welcoming, because they are like ours. –Anne Lamott

It’s the beginning and end of the day when my patience wears thinnest, when exhaustion hasn’t lifted or has just descended and every deviation from routine feels like a warning bell ringing in my skull, a scream against sanity. It’s the beginning and end…and, of course, the time in between them too.

Yesterday morning was such a Monday morning, with its unforgiving abruptness, its insistency on showing up and shoving the weekend out of the way. A dirty pull-up, a premature sit-down, and soiled shorts turned a brief trip to the bathroom into a wardrobe change, which on Monday morning, or any morning, or at any time, can feel like Just. Too. Much. I bent into the shit, hit my head on the door, punched it and swore.

I hate this. I hate the words that erupt, the anger that consumes, the undignified nature of it all, and what comes after–the lies that whisper into my ear: You’ll never change. What kind of a mother can’t hold it together past 8 am? And the worst: You’re going to ruin them.

We got cleaned up. I loaded The Kid and Little Brother into the car. I turned off the radio. Through tears, I asked for his forgiveness, not knowing how much he understood, then spoke the words I know he does: I love you all the time.

From the backseat, he smiled. Grace resettled in my heart. The lies began to whimper and skulk away. They’re just so undignified next to the truth.

I dropped TK off and had a parking-lot conversation with another mom about this journey, the hard and beautiful of it all, the shorthand that our particular carpool line speaks: unexpected twists, hairpin turns, shadowy valleys and breathtaking peaks. The parking-lot conversations that are desert oases, Monday-morning miracles. LB and I headed south, driving then for an hour to meet a stranger who was already a friend–my second such relationship brokered over email and bolstered by twin worldviews, texts that are prayers relayed without ever seeing each other in person. We sat on her floor, LB punctuating our conversation with emphatic babbles as we discussed our boys’ brains; the diagnoses being worked under and being reconfigured; the things the doctors got wrong and the ways we weren’t enough and the grace that envelops it all.

Monday morning miracles.

We drove back in the rain. I thought about our visit to the geneticist last week, when he looked at the history and the images and our heads and our sons and talked about chromosomes, about how apart from the syndromes and the diseases there are also tiny deletions and duplications and coding errors–you know, mistakes, and that one of these could have led–probably did lead–to the bone tilt and the MRI changes and the speech delay, and to find out we’d have to take some blood and then the approach wouldn’t change but there might be an answer, a missing puzzle piece set in place. There’s still a bruise there, though, so we’ll get the blood drawn later. But for now, in the time between the recommendation and the needle, the tilt and the test, I think about how this? This is no mistake. This boy who sees light and patterns that I don’t until he shows me, who draws compassion out of people who thought they had lost theirs (I chief among them), who pats his brother on the head before bedtime–these aren’t errors in coding. Not when they’ve turned us into fighters, not when they’ll make him who he’s meant to be. Not when they were written into him by love. No matter how crazy love looks any given Monday morning.

People will make mistakes about him, but nothing about him is a mistake.

And so while I practice saying yes, while I sit with hands open (trying not to punch doors), I think about how I am being given a “yes” in return. How he is. How that’s what it means to be beloved, to be welcome. How it’s the in-between time, the space from being written into being and taken to our true home, that’s the trickiest; the place where it’s hardest to remember who we are. How our similar scars and brain scans and valleys and peaks roughen us up and fit us together, like puzzle pieces waiting to find out that this is where we fit the whole time. That loving, and being loved, it means welcoming each other home.

Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. –Rumi

Last week the nurse pushed the mobile bed from our waiting/recovery room to the CT room. (Isn’t it funny how waiting and healing can happen in the same place?) The Kid and I rode together, he plastered all over my torso, where he had been for the last hour or so. After the realization that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. After the blood pressure cuff and the pulse oximeter and the thermometer, after the first attempt to get an IV left us with nothing but a black bruise on his arm and tears, so many tears. After The Professional showed up in the form of an IV nurse and her ultrasound machine and the vein was located and the skin punctured and the arm wrapped in a towel and taped up. After that, he passed out to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in my arms. Then puked a little. Then passed back out.

Now we entered the dim room with the massive machine and they pushed drugs into my boy’s open vein and placed him on the table. I waited to be told kindly to leave, but this time they offered me a lead apron and a chair. So I sat. Without phone or armor (but for the apron), I sat and watched as the machine spun and whirred around a sleeping TK, his eyes slightly open as they often are when he’s out cold. I watched and waited as silent pictures captured his cervical spine. I waited and cried, silently myself, willing the nurses to take their time coming back as I hate public displays of emotion, my own included. I cried and prayed.

I remembered one of my closest and dearest telling me about how she’d started praying recently–with hands open toward the sky, like a yoga pose for Jesus, and how it had felt different. Physically. How she had sensed a pressure in her hands, as though something was being placed in them. How that pressure had not let her go throughout the praying. I’ve run into all sorts of things: prophets on planes, people speaking in tongues, you know–the general weirdness of evangelical Christianity–and there are all levels of sincerity therein, from none to complete. My friend is the Real Deal. Not to mention the fact that I’m the one who has recently (with one foot at least) climbed on board the organic/biomedical/supplementation train on TK’s behalf, so I know me some weird. All of which is to say that, in that dim room full of whirs and spins and tears, I held my hands open on my knees and prayed.

Jesus didn’t show up and take a selfie with me. I didn’t see a fourth man in the furnace. The lions in the den didn’t whimper and skulk away. But what did happen next felt as natural as breathing: my hands, holding nothing, felt full. Felt held. Felt weighed down.

It was as clear as anything I’ve ever known or seen: TK and I weren’t alone in there.

The morning had been full of “no”s–mine and TK’s. His protests and cries, my frustration and resentment at this path, at how hard it is, how much it asks of us. But sitting there beside my boy on the table–not the first boy on a table–I felt one more thing being asked of me: Say yes. Say yes to the IV and the bruises, to the scars and the uncertainty, to the driving through the dark away from Kansas, to the machines and the scans. Say yes to it all, because it all has to be love. There’s no other possibility, not if anything I believe is true. And yes, it may appear to be a fucked up way for love to appear, and it sure as hell isn’t the version I would have picked from the catalog, but you know what? This also isn’t the end, here in this room. This moment isn’t where it all comes together; that moment remains to be revealed. This moment is the one where I say yes, where I may not know what the answer is but I know what it isn’t, and it isn’t that we’re alone in this.

My hands, open to the air, were starting to get sweaty.

The life I planned, the one from the catalog? That one fell apart a long time ago, the pieces scattering like ashes until they were no longer recognizable as anything remotely me or mine. Because that was never my life. The one I’m in, that feels and appears so broken sometimes, it’s like my phone, shattered by a drop from Little Brother in his high chair: fractured in a hundred places but held together in all of them. Like stained glass–a beautiful brokenness.

And I think about what that brokenness looks like when I really see it. How the UPS guy always slows down and waves because the little boy who lives here likes to play in the front yard to see the cars pass so he can hold his hand out and look at me, grinning, so excited, asking until I tell him: “Brown truck, buddy! Brown truck.” I see him ask for his tricycle for the first time in months, and with LB strapped to my chest I begrudgingly pull it down, knowing he’ll walk away from it like last time when I suggested he sit on it. Because of how I know everything. But he doesn’t. This time he smiles at it, approaches it, sits on it. From the catalog, I had picked the version where the kid jumps onto the tricycle and starts riding. In this version, that simple action is broken into so many steps, over so many months, until it’s like glass in my palm, and when there are more pieces to reflect it, the light is so much brighter. He sits, and I rejoice, and we smile huge at each other. And this moment isn’t the one where it all comes together either, but its pieces are so much more beautiful in the light.

Every night, the same thing happens. I double-wrap Little Brother in diapers, yank him into his zippered footie pajamas, and zip him into his sleep sack. I walk him the three long steps from the changing table to his rocker. And as we sit down together, he commences to lose his shit.

The bottle is waiting on the chair for us, as it always is. I quickly press it into his hands, as I always do. He greedily shoves it into his face, as he always does. But every night, he behaves as though this is the time I’m not going to feed him.

It’s frustrating. Annoying. Insulting. Hurtful, if it’s been a long day and I’m in the mood to make it personal.

It is so like me.

I remember going through something my senior year of high school and afterward, with all the wisdom that a few months’ hindsight and eighteen short years of experience garnered, wishing that I had trusted more that everything would turn out okay. Even then, rule-follower instead of grace-accepter that I was, I knew this was a truth that I should carry around with me, think about often, maybe even live differently because of it. I imagined that I would probably have some tough times in the future when faith could be a comfort and a strength, that I could probably use this awareness of its balm and its fortitude, of the way it could free me.

You know. Probably.

I”ve been thinking lately about what it would mean, what it would look like, to live every moment as though I really believe in the redemption of all of them. In the blessing of all of them, in the truth that grace soaks through all of them. I’ve been thinking this because there have been a few moments lately when I’ve felt a divine love pierce through clouds: a drive on the highway to work in the morning with my passenger, anxiety, in the seat beside me, and suddenly that passenger is made to look so ridiculous by the overwhelming presence of love on my behalf. The exposure of my fears for what they are–paper tigers–by transcendent joy. Joy not after everything turns out okay, but in the waiting, in the tension, in the struggle and pain. These moments of realization are sadly rare, but I don’t think that’s grace’s fault.

The thought that rises in the wake of these moments is that this is the way life could, should be: joyful relaxation into arms that are not my own. On-the-ground playfulness and laughter. Full release. The reins, after all, pull so tightly when my hands are holding them. Then I read what my dear friend wrote: “…for too long, I refused to commit to all the goodness I had in front of me.” This is the friend who tells me she loves our story, who reminds me of its beauty, and here I am picking and choosing what gets to be called goodness. What gets to be called desirable and pretty. Because no matter how many times I consider the truth or type it onto a screen, I still rail against any definition other than mine.

And it hits me with the force of divine love on a highway how much commitment can look like surrender. That they both acknowledge the promise and say “yes” to it.

The Kid is asking, asking, all the time, vocalizing and pointing, and I get tired. But I’ve found that he relaxes, his voice and gestures less urgent and more…playful, when I don’t wait for him to ask. When I acknowledge his need on the ground and start naming things, everything. Because everything does have a name, and he wants to know it. And this is how architecture changes subtly over time, so that we look back and see how we’ve gone from building on sand to building on rock, and everything has a name, and it is good.

Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. –Diane Ackerman

He was screaming in the chair, but this wasn’t my first time at the rodeo. I guess it wasn’t his, either, because when I told him that everything would be okay, he assured me it wouldn’t. “It’s always been scary and bad before.”

Maybe I’d be a better dentist, a better person, if I had always been so empathetic to these pleas. Maybe I’d be better if it didn’t take having my own kids for my heart to ache this easily, for my hands to reach out. For the news to be nearly unbearable, for images to sear themselves into my brain.

Then again, maybe I got here exactly the way I was meant to.

My reassurances aren’t as rote, but the words that came out still surprised me: “What if this is the time it isn’t?” It was a weird moment: Oprah in the operatory, dispensing inspirational quotes next to the drill? I let the words hang there, mainly because I wasn’t sure what to do with them or how to follow them up since I hadn’t planned them in the first place. We forged ahead, and by the end he high-fived me, said he hadn’t felt a thing.

I don’t imagine I’ll ever be so lucky. I’m feeling it all.

The Kid has been “asking” us things lately, though it took awhile to figure out that was what was happening–mainly because the questions come in the form of a whine, and the only wine I like is served in a glass, not from the backseat of a car. Or the backyard. Or any room of the house, at any moment, the urgent sound shortening my fuse. I thought at first that he was being defiant, then that he was tired, and then one morning in the calm of the backyard I realized it was complementing the sound of a plane overhead. That he raised his hand toward the sky. That he was talking to me. And didn’t I feel like an asshole before I felt the triumph?

And isn’t that maybe just the trajectory these days?

As TK gets older and the discrepancies between three-year-olds who talk and those who don’t become more apparent, I’ve had to broker an oft-begrudging peace with this unpredictability, this inability to live life by the books. I resent that we can’t plan our lives around milestones, even as I learn to reorient them where they should be: around a Rock.

But it still feels like a punch to the gut when another mom talks about her son starting lacrosse this afternoon. And during the children’s team meeting, when one parent makes what would have been a harmless joke–what would have been a joke I might have made–about how, come on, all four-year-olds are potty trained? That one lands like a dagger as we stare four in the face and wait for things to click. As a Monday afternoon becomes a literal shitshow when I run him to the potty, sit him there to finish, and when he signs that he’s done and dismounts and next thing I know he’s squirting fro-yo-style on the floor and stepping in it? I text The Husband and hand in my notice for this job.

But then there are the moments that wouldn’t have happened on any other road. It’s late afternoon and Little Brother is napping upstairs and TK and I are in the sunroom, and the clouds are gathering in the windows. The sky opens up, rain pelting above our heads and thunder pounding, and he turns to me, afraid. He leans on me, buries his face in my side and stays uncharacteristically still as I talk to him, rub his head. Then he places his head on my lap and falls asleep, the storm raging around us.

Sometimes this gig makes me want to jump off a bridge. Other times, on this particular path? I swear it’s arranged so that I see heaven more clearly.

And I read it a few days later, about answers coming out of thunderclouds, and soon after that, in a book I’ve read so many times, this: “Everything could make sense…love always deciphers everything.” Maybe whines are questions, and he’s reaching out there from the backseat, so that when I reply that “I’m here,” and want to follow it with a “but” because I’m going a little crazy here, grace stops me. Grace lets the “I’m here” be enough. For him. For me. Maybe whines are the precursor to speech and resentment is the precursor to empathy and maybe this is the trajectory that grace takes–that it can take anything, just everything, and make it beautiful. In the middle of every storm, and coming from every cloud, this possibility that maybe the wind and the waves aren’t battering us, but teaching us how to sail.

We only have about a million nicknames for our kids.

My family has always done that: growing up, hearing my full first name was a sign of being in trouble. In high school and college, The Sis and I garnered nicknames that have stuck to this day (so have all her friends, none of whom I address by their proper names. At The Sis’s rehearsal dinner, it felt so wrong to use her given name that I debated just letting all the “grown-ups” sit there confused while I called her Rash.) Even before we were dating, The Husband and I came up with nicknames for each other, and once we became full-fledged, the naming extravaganza took off.

Even on this page, I call everyone something else. Partly for some (unnecessary, probably–it’s not like we’re famous…YET) attempt at protection and privacy, partly because it’s fun to hear people ask how “TK” is doing. These substitute names have transformed into terms of endearment as people hear his, and our, story, and so there is beauty in the renaming.

When I took them to childcare at the gym yesterday, she called him by his real name. But as she went on, giddily telling me the story of how he came to her and told her–in his own way, without words–that the back of his toy car was missing and could she please help him? Her excitement was palpable, her enjoyment of his seeking her out was visible, and she told the story as the good news it was, knowing the good news he is.

Good news that comes after darkness, that often seems buried underneath difficulty, that requires abandonment of preconceptions and a release of my hands from their need to control? There’s another name for that. I’ve heard it called gospel.

There is the renaming that reveals true nature, and there are the misnomers born of lies, of dimmed perspective or willful blindness. I know we’ll encounter both with TK, with life, period, because I’ve done it when I’m the only one in the room. When I’ve turned away for one second and by the time my head whipped back, Little Brother was free-falling to the floor from the changing table. And time slows down in a way that makes you think you can intervene, you can prevent the thud and the pain, especially later when you’re replaying the whole scene in your head and calling yourself every bad name you’ve ever imagined. Thinking that now you’ve really done it, now they’re going to come after you–the Truth Police, who have been waiting for an opportunity to expose you for the fraud you are. What business does someone like you, after all, have being a mother? I’ve peered through windows at home, at work, in relationships, listened for their footsteps, these Truth Police, wondered how many people would be shocked when they found out who I really am and how many would nod secretly to each other, whispering that they’ve known all along. I’ve feared being found out for as long as I can remember.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was they who were the frauds; they whose uniforms were stolen and whose tactics lacked legitimacy. That being flawed, making mistakes, is not evidence of being a phony but invitation into deeper living, truer love, more forgiveness, abundant grace.

Different names.

Another day, and I’m hovering near the childcare doorway, prompting TK to stop taking others’ toys, wondering if I should step in, my body language revealing my anxiety, and she holds up a gentle hand. “It’s okay, Mom,” she tells me. “He’ll be just fine. He’s just like all the other kids.”

And I know this is grace she’s showing me, and that she’s right while also being wrong. Because none of our kids are just like all the other kids, but TK’s road has left this truth etched on our hearts in words that did not feel like good news when they landed: MRIs, CT scans, surgery, spectrum, therapy. Yet there he is, stealing toys just like all the other kids, and there will be moments when he will fit in seamlessly and moments when the other shoppers stare at us, when other kids whisper, when other parents judge. These moments break my heart already, the fissures already in place from my own story and his, but those fissures have good news etched in them too. Because they’ve made space, as she has, for the grace to flow into them, for the moments to have new names. This boy so full of challenges is also so full of surprises, of triumphs, of each moment being a new way of looking at the world. He sees light and patterns and lines that I never knew were there, and he brings out of people giddily-told tales and gentleness they didn’t know they had, strength they had to call on outside sources to receive. But when it showed up…oh man, did it ever.

The house is quiet now, TK in therapy downstairs and LB sleeping upstairs, and I’m looking at the list I made before our trip, the way I named my fears to send them up, to release them. To ask grace to show up in them. And now I see how they were renamed, from Fear to Blessing. From bad to good. From burden to gift. The way some may see a little boy just lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping, the bed of his toy truck, but when I sit next to him and follow his eyes, I see the light rising and lowering against the wall, all he can already see that now I can too, and how names change but truth endures.