Where you’re healed is where you’re broken…God knows your native tongue. –David Wilcox

There are a couple of things that happens when a plan goes awry. Like how the truth is exposed that you had a plan in the first place. Then you react to this upending of expectations, typically by either fighting it or letting go.

I’ve seen both happen. I’ve done both, mostly the fighting, whether actively (scrambling to revert back to my plan, clamoring for change from what clearly has got to be a mistake) or passively (carrying anger in my heart like a weapon in my purse, growing resentment as though it’s a flower in a garden). I’ve watched as people who claim to believe in more than this world, in more than us, have their light slowly extinguished and rage against its dying as though all that they can’t see is now, suddenly, the enemy. I wondered if I would be the same until an explosion in midtown Manhattan sent me running down seven flights of stairs with a sense of peace I couldn’t explain. It surprised me more than anything, then comforted me–doubt and proof exposed simultaneously, reality revealed as a coexistence of the two.

But when the unplanned becomes the actual, what happens for someone who believes in the more is ultimately this, that the question must be asked: Did God fail me? And the answer to that question, that question that I seem to default to no matter how many times I’m given the irrefutable answer, is this: No. He freed me.

I think about the plans that went awry when I was single, pre-The Husband, pre-The Kid, pre-Little Brother, and especially the two-year period of pain I went through that led me to New York (and ultimately, all of them). And I have to say that was harder because I was alone for it in so many ways. I felt alone, experiencing the results of my rebellion and my failures staring me in the face as soon as I walked to the mirror every morning.

Now, navigating Holland with TH and TK and LB, I am most assuredly not alone–in life or in the bathroom, car, shower–and this is a balm. What’s inconvenient about it, though, is how my defenses have been knocked down by loving this much. By being, consequently, so vulnerable. It’s just so damn uncomfortable to feel this deeply in a world this broken. In a world with my children in it. I sit here typing this but already I’m on the plane tomorrow, imagining altercations and building arguments and fighting anxiety. Reminding myself to pack the Imodium.

Last week, TH and I went out with some people from church, which is so much better than it may sound, and heard live music–a rarity for us these days. And as the notes pinged against my heart and the words filled empty spaces that I hadn’t realized were begging for truth, for re-membering, I considered that feeling deeply–maybe it can be an asset. Because music, it had never sounded this beautiful before.

Maybe what looks like, what even feels like, our undoing? Maybe it could be for our healing.

A woman just walked by me now with her son, who has Down Syndrome, and I know they’ve seen some windmills up close. And there’s this: the conversations that I know people have had because I think way too much about what other people think (see: above about the plane), how they’ve shaken their heads and sighed relief that our journey isn’t theirs–and I know too because I’ve sighed like that, at the hospital and just here now where I’m sitting. But there’s also the call from a friend who knows our whole story, and unasked, she said this: how much she loves it. And I am re-membered.

So I go outside with TK, though it’s hot and steamy like Holland is this time of year (who knew?), and in the early-morning sun I see the flowers, how they’re just opening, how they know somehow where to turn to get the light. TK turns to me, gives me that look, and there’s a moment when I think it’s gone awry–because who am I, without a map to tell me where to go and sometimes even doubting where the light is myself, trying to get it to bend in my direction? But he points now, and he gives me the sign for more, which is one of the most important words of the language I’m learning, of the language that maybe I’ve spoken all along. So I let go and turn with him to the light where, somehow, we’ll both get all we need. And more.

Every time I was forced to write a thank-you note growing up, I wanted to set myself on fire.

(I may have been a dramatic kid.)

What I didn’t get at the time, though I’m sure it was expressed to me on multiple occasions, was that the note-writing wasn’t an exercise in empty Southern etiquette or an attempt for my mom to gather a few minutes away from the constant “Why“ing and hanging-on of her young daughters. Not just that, at least. It was an expression of gratitude, of appropriate appreciation. But I was a child of the law: I filtered everything through shoulds and have tos. I obeyed obligation. And it would be decades before that changed.

Now that I’m older and have had many more occasions to express gratitude–finding a husband, bearing his children, acknowledging the silver and linens that arrive with such events–I’ve had to squeeze writing notes in between more time-consuming and, dare I say, more important activities than bike-riding and swinging. I’ve bent over stationery while surrounded by moving boxes begging to be unpacked, or put pen to paper while one child poops his pants and the other screams to be fed. The note-writing, gratitude-conveying duties that complement adulthood can feel squelched of fun and, compared to what I could be–or want to be–doing, devoid of meaning.

It all seems like obligation, like law, when grace is a casualty of my busyness. Of my perceived self-importance. Of the laundry and the mundane.

Which is why it feels counter-intuitive to have landed ourselves in an Anglican church, where liturgy is the order of the (Sun)day. It could feel like we’re jack-in-the-boxes, bobbing up and down for hymns and readings and prayers with fancy-sounding names. It could feel like meaningless repetition, empty exercises with divine intentions slapped on for good measure. It could feel like law.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

Why?

Flannery O’Connor wrote, “I distrust pious phrases, particularly when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.” Beautifully flat. I wonder how much of my day, how much of my Sunday, how much of my life I could describe that way–resentfully, as though the flat were the only part that mattered, the daily rhythms reduced to monotony, and sameness becoming equated with negative. And yet she calls it beautiful, these repetitions and re-dos and returns that all look alike. Revisiting the same material, the same places, over and over.

It could all lead to a loss of meaning…or an infusion of it.

This time last summer, The Husband headed west for a trip and I headed south for a visit: I, round with seven and a half months’ pregnancy and a two-year old in tow. A two-and-a-half hour trip became three with a stop at Chick-Fil-A and a stint at the playground there, The Kid stepping gingerly around the structures and remaining resolutely on the padded floor. Our last night at my parents’, TK woke up in the middle of the night, punctuating my own insomnia with his cries, and I was debating whether to call my doctor because there were contractions and I didn’t know whether to drink more water (and ensure a night full of peeing) or just try to go back to sleep. I called The Mom for back-up and she curled into bed beside TK while Little Brother kicked at my belly and I tried not to worry (a fool’s errand). Last weekend, four of us made the trip, and at the playground, I fed LB on the bench while TH kept an eye on TK and a little girl with a lip blister kept getting too close and I tried not to breathe in as she lisped at me. TK climbed the whole damn thing, and LB kicked away on my lap. There were no sleepless nights, just one where I shared a bed with The Niece and she curled up beside me and migrated all over the mattress in her slumber and consistently took up over three quarters of the bed as LB slept in the pack and play beside us, breathing sweetly. It was…better. Sometimes similar. Sometimes harder. But better. It was more than it had been before.

The next morning LB woke up on Eastern time, and I padded through the dark house with him. He drained his bottle and we watched the sun rise together–one of many sunrises we’ve shared, day after day, after padding through one dark house or another. And that night, the fireworks show we had anticipated after last years’ experience–the one that  looked like this?

That show never came, because a different one happened: one with yard-drenching rain and pounding thunder and cracking lightning, and TK loved this one too–kept turning to us and grinning in delight, clapping his hands together and laughing deliriously. At the end of it, The Niece turned to us, and she said, “Well, that was a fireworks show too.”

The same, but different.

And I think about it, how it’s not that the notes or the words or the rituals become infused with meaning, but that I finally gain eyes to see the meaning they always had. How my heart gets retuned, one of the many saving works of grace, to gratitude and awareness and appreciation. How a trip through the backyard becomes an expedition. How a recitation of the liturgy becomes a formation of community through time. How I followed the rules back then, but I didn’t feel the freedom. How I cursed less, but was more of an asshole.

How all things, even the old–especially those–are made new, even in their seeming sameness.

How I’ve always known that grace meant love, that of course if there’s a God he loves me, but on that anxiety-fueled ride to work yesterday, as I allowed my mind to stretch from the present moment to next week’s cross-country flight and the trip after and the day ahead and even this school year and past that–how, in a breath of a moment, I felt the love: felt it like rain on my shoulders, and with it the thought that capsized all the fears: If you’re really loved this much, then how can you worry? How can you feel anything but joy?

The words that I’d heard over and over, becoming life. Becoming real. Becoming, as he makes all things, new.

Maybe this is exactly where I’m supposed to be right now. Maybe this, right now, is making me a better person. –Piper Chapman

No, I’m not comparing parenthood to prison. That would be unfair–I mean, they let you watch TV in prison. And pee behind a door, right? 

There are days, though, when the boundaries of your circumstances feel to be closing in, when your shoulders are stooped and your back is aching, and on these days–in these moments–it’s hard to remember that you longed for this life. That you prayed for it. That you celebrated its arrival. It’s hard to remember all that when the day kicks off with a blowout that leaves you and The Kid covered–covered, I say–in shit, and Little Brother is screaming a few feet away because no one is holding him, for God’s sake, and the speech therapist rings the doorbell and you just have to answer it with poop in your hair and a baby on your hip and a half-naked kid running around in a Pull-Up. A clean Pull-Up, thank you very much.

It’s easy to turn the blessings into burden. It’s easy to look around at everything and feel like it all adds up to a lot of work, and not much glory.

And we do what is easy. We love what is easy: traffic-free drives, no wait for a table, uneventful doctor’s appointments, flights without turbulence. No diagnoses. No nanny quitting after three months and leaving you scrambling to find someone new to trust. No tantrums with transitions. No pureed food on the floor. No shit in your hair.

And because sometimes, on these days, I’ll be damned if I listen to nursery rhymes one more time, I took a few minutes to listen to the poet Mary Oliver instead. And she said this, there in the alternating calm and chaos (coordinated with traffic lights, natch) of my boy-child-populated SUV, as I tried to remember what the therapist had told me about holding my back straight and pushing my shoulders against the seat like there was a water bottle between them because this would help with the knots–she said this into all that:

“Lucretius just presents this marvelous and important idea that what we are made of will make something else. Which to me is very important. There is no nothingness. With these little atoms that run around too little for us to see, but put together they make something. And that to me is a miracle. Where it came from, I don’t know, but it’s a miracle. And I think it’s enough to keep a person afloat.”

And what I heard was, it all adds up. These moments in the car, the moments in therapy (his and mine), the times I tell him I love him, the minutes and hours and days watching videos and adjusting diets and modeling behavior and breathing grace–they all add up. They have to, right? Otherwise, what’s the point?

But there’s more to it than that. There’s more to it than reaching an endpoint or attaining an outcome. Because this life, I have come to begrudgingly admit, is not a steady diet of met expectations or a valiant journey of victory after victory. It is stops and starts, fits and pauses, progress and setbacks, and for so long I only let it be one thing–the “good” thing–and fought to label the other as anomaly, as aberration, as an obstacle to cross. When all that time, grace waited in those moments. Thanksgiving lay in those crevices, gratitude in those valleys, and I would have missed it if all sorts of things hadn’t consistently, gloriously fallen apart.

Because this, as it turns out, is the arithmetic of grace: weak plus grace equals strong. Defeated plus grace equals victorious. Despairing plus grace equals hopeful. Broken plus grace equals whole. Now. The arithmetic of grace is that there is always more.

There’s nothing like finding gold
within the rocks hard and cold
I’m so surprised to find more
Always surprised to find more

A day stretches before us, and I wonder if it’s one of those days. As the hours wait to be filled, I fill–with anxiety, with fear, with guilt over what hasn’t even happened. And I realize that this thing I do so easily, this blessings-into-burden equation, is one I calculate without figuring in grace. I realize that the weight of the day rests so heavily because I am afraid. Because I know that every minute holds an opportunity for me to make a mistake. To mess them up. To hurt them. They are not the burden. I am–my cracks and fissures, my rocks hard and cold.

What can be done? What can I do?

Nothing, grace whispers. Wait.

The potential nanny calls me back, and I tell her the details, tell her the diagnosis, and she tells me her son had the same. That it was reversed. “So just let that encourage you,” she says, “whatever happens.” She knows. Vulnerability plus grace equals connection. Then I get to work and the office manager shows me a book she’s reading, tells me about how worked up she gets and how this is helping, and I recognize the cover from the last hands I saw holding it–from a friend in New York, and I see it now, eight years later, grace whispering again. And later I’m at home with the boys and LB sleeps upstairs, his image in my hand on the monitor screen, while TK and I wander the backyard. This could be a chore, a bore–this stomping through the same grass, covering the same terrain over and over. It could be me aching for my phone, fifty feet away, planning a to-do list in my head, counting the minutes until we can do something else.

It could be.

But today, it is a joint expedition. I ask him questions, and he answers them as only he does, as only he can, and we laugh together, and he occasionally takes my hand to lead me somewhere old, yet altogether brand new. These moments, scattered around like dust or like gold depending on your vision, waiting to be held and seen and lived, adding up one after the other into redemption.

He means to fill our emptiness with song.

It’s one of my favorite sounds: his bounding up the stairs, coupled with the “Ooh! Ooh! OOH!” proclamations of excitement that mark the end of another two-hour basement therapy session. Then he enters the kitchen (where I am, because I’m a woman and I know my place) and races up to me, halting at my knees and pointing his chin to the sky so he can stare into my eyes, two and a half feet above him. And as we greet each other according to our custom, his therapist enters the room and gives her report, the initial surprise at his achievements having given way long ago to the “just as I thought” repetition of expectation: but for the verbals, he takes whatever she throws at him and aces it…operating at a five-year-old level…and I have to smile to myself as she takes some ownership of what I told her from the beginning, what I tell plenty of people who know better until they don’t, until he proves them wrong, until they know him: that he’s not what you expect. That he defies categories. That, much like Baby, you can’t put The Kid in a corner.

Because this is how it works with him: he has to be found. I remember telling The Husband, a Pacific-dweller for much of his life, about a far-off place called the Gulf of Mexico, about sugar-sand beaches, about clear water and none of this ice-cold nonsense with wet suits and earthquakes, and he assented because, though it was our wedding, he’s a man and he knows his place, and now he wants to go back every year. (Don’t worry–I allow him every opportunity to thank me for enlarging his territory and improving his life.) And, like the shores along 30A, TK waits to be discovered, not handing himself to you on a platter but waiting: a gift to be unwrapped over time, stones to be unturned on a journey.

Which is all well and good when I’m in a trusting, idealistic mood. But then TH takes a day-trip to Canada and the nanny decides to move across the country next month (it’s not a job you can do long-distance–believe me, I’ve tried) and just like that, I’m not sleeping and the knots in my shoulders are back and I’m acting as though worry is a survival technique and I’m engaging fear more than life and when all that is going on, a shroud drops down to cover everything and the dark thoughts show up with it: What if he never talks? What if he disappears? What if Melvin was right?

Then it’s one in the afternoon and I hoist Little Brother up on my hip and we see TK through the door and he runs to us. And one teacher looks at the other and asks, “Did you tell her about the blessing?” and they both turn to me and here’s the real story: that every day at lunch, when the blessing starts and the other kids recite it with the teachers, TK sings alongside them, his own tune and words, and stops when they stop, and over the next few hours this seeps into the dark places, into the knots and the unspoken fears, into the spaces where I’m gripping onto my illusion of control.

Because there’s this: where others have words, he has music.

Neil Gaiman wrote about stories, about words, that they “can furnish you with armor, with knowledge, with weapons, with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better…It’s a real escape–and when you come back, you come back better-armed than when you left.” And they’ve done this for me, plus they’ve been therapeutic and enlivening and, sometimes, a life preserver in a storm. So of course, even beyond the talking, I’ve wanted that for him–I’ve wanted him to know words like I do. But maybe I had it wrong (that’s happened, after all, once or twice): maybe he doesn’t need armor so much right now as he needs an anthem. Words, I am sure, will one day be all to him that they need to be, that they can be; but for now he can use mine. For now, he has music.

And right now, maybe that’s what I need too.

Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss, except that they have no tongues, could lecture all day if they wanted about spiritual patience? wrote Mary Oliver, and I wonder about all the words I’m missing from those who don’t speak. From those who, instead, wave in the wind, crash on the shore, or…sing their blessings. And there are a thousand different ways this story could go, and I am not writing it, but when the shroud lifts I see a few of those ways and they are no longer threats but possibilities: that the two of them, TK and LB, could learn to talk together, to teach each other. That we may yet fulfill our dream of living in London and raising boys with not Southern, but British accents. So ridiculous as to be sublime. Because who really knows could be not a fearful shout but a laughing anthem: his voice filling the stairway and then the kitchen while I hear the chords of grace in his song.

When I was younger, and more an adherent to the rules of morality than the freedom of grace, I would refer to God’s sense of humor with a cynical edge. I would wonder, underneath the faux veneer of playfulness…well, basically, how he would screw me over this time. With his “sense of humor.” How he would defiantly refuse to consent to my plan, the one I had painstakingly and wisely crafted from the shallow mine of my own experience and perspective. As if he were the uncooperative child.

It’s no secret, given the title of this blog and the voluminous personal sharing that’s occurred within its margins, that my formerly iron-clad plan has lost some authority. Some integrity. Some weight. Which is to say, it has been gloriously shot to shit by the uncompromising ends of love and grace and redemption. Also in the “no secret” category: my preference for solitude, my penchant for personal space, my personality of introversion. I am an expert boundary-placer, a gold-medal limit-setter. If you aren’t one of the Four who live in our home, there’s an invisible and silent timer that starts the moment you walk in the door, and that’s just fact. Depending on whether you bring chocolate or wine or jokes with you, that timer may be extended, but what I’m saying is that we likes our “us” time, y’all. We need it.

So, back in my “rule-keeping” period, I would have looked upon the parade of therapists who darken our doorway and inhabit, hours per week, our basement with The Kid–I would have looked upon them as an exercise of God’s sense of humor. And, fake smile and moral fortitude intact, I would have secretly viewed them as threat. Or punishment. Or both. Now, I have no choice but to see them as gift. As blessing. As agents of redemption–for all of us.

As, in a strange way, friends.

That’s what I tell TK when one of them is set to arrive: “Your friend so-and-so is on her way!” These “friends” who encourage and drill and test and make demands of him, who set goals and make charts and give me reports. I hear him laughing, vocalizing, whining, crying, jumping, refusing, assenting. I hear him cover a gauntlet of actions and a range of emotions, and then I hear his tiny footsteps on the stairs and I wait for him to cross the threshold and enter my arms. A homecoming–it always ends with that.

Yeah. The metaphor isn’t lost on me either.

I remember going on a summer trip with my youth group when I was in high school, and one of the counselors–a college student, who therefore must know everything because, you know, college and age–said that she had figured it out. How to do the Christian thing. And I was all ears, because that was the kind of information that really got me excited: how to do things. Not how to receive them. But how to do them myself. How to control them. Because it was all about me.

She went on to reveal it, the secret to everything: “Just love God. Just love him! That’s it.” And I thought about how nice that sounded, and also, What the hell? How do you “do” love? How do you just make yourself love someone? What does that even mean? Something about her words bothered me, but I wouldn’t understand why for a dozen years or so. I’m still understanding.

I didn’t understand how much of love is letting go. I don’t think she did, either. How much of love is letting go of the me part.

I’ve realized recently that despite an objective awareness of the dangers of fear and guilt when it comes to parenting, I tend to, by default, parent from exactly those places. I’ve come to see that so much of my frustration with parenting, with mothering, with my kids, has to do with refusing to let go of whatever plan I’m clinging to more tightly than grace at any given moment. How tightly I’m clinging to any love that isn’t the biggest kind. The bigger-than-me kind. The perfect kind, which never–ever ever ever–comes from me. I’m being shown how much of what I see as the burdens of parenting are actually my fears of getting it wrong: of messing them up, of being too present or not present enough, of missing opportunities. My days with them cover a gauntlet of actions and a range of emotions and by the end of it all, I wonder how much of the exhaustion is tired arms and back and legs, and how much is my tendency to make it all harder than it has to be. Of making it all so reliant on me. 

I need a homecoming.

Elisabeth Elliot died this week, but her words live on, and here are a few that a friend posted: “He had promised, ‘When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shall not be burned, neither shall the flame kindle upon thee, for I am the Lord thy God…Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honorable, and I have loved thee.’ How could we have proved the truth of that promise if there had been no waters? And what rivers could overflow but deep ones? And so, to show us that he meant what he said, to prove to us his love, this was what he sent, this thing which each of us had been sure she could never endure…”

And here, all this time, I thought that I had to teach myself to swim. That I had to fight the currents that were sent to save me.

Loving is letting go. And it’s letting in. It’s opening the door and trusting that what is on the other side is always a gift.

It’s letting them in past my plans, to the deeper part of me that is raw and afraid and will, let’s face it, just get a lot wrong. And it’s muddling through all that together. The waters, the rivers, the fires–they haven’t been, they aren’t, evidence of a twisted sense of humor or discipline techniques. They are love. And all I can do is respond. All I can do is open my hands and say Yes. All I can do is let grace in.

The end of another day arrives, and the sore arms and back with it, and if I’m being honest, I’d rather just stare at my phone. But I head toward them, the man pushing the boy on the swing. There’s an empty one beside them. So I take the seat that I know now was reserved for me–which is, I think, more of what love is than some decision I willfully force myself to make–and I pump my legs too, and after a minute we’re on the same arc at the same time. And it’s been so long since I didn’t ask for directions, since my stomach dropped terrifyingly and wonderfully and I just let myself fly.

But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship. –C.S. Lewis

Invisibilia is, the website states, “a glimpse into a world you can’t see.” It “explores the intangible forces that shape human behavior.” I’ve listened to the podcast a bit, most recently the episode about fear, natch–it’s sort of a topic in which I excel. And it begs the question: how much is going on without our knowing?

Something’s happening with The Kid.

In a very (un)scientific manner, we threw everything at the wall to see what would stick: more speech therapy, discrete video modeling, listening therapy, ABA therapy. Even diet changes and nutritional supplements, for the love, and I used to be the one rolling my eyes violently at people who thought such nonsense would make a difference in behavior. Cut to me reading emails from a friend who cares, checking out the embedded videos, jumping onto Amazon, and sneakily dumping powder into TK’s water then silently cheering as he drinks it down.

Oh, and prayer. There’s been a lot of that.

So you take all these things and you mix them together: you drive to the appointments and you turn on the video and you put on the headphones and you listen at the top of the stairs to the discrete trials punctuated by his stubborn wails and eventual progress and you breathe. You breathe in and out the day-to-dayness of it and you wait.

You get used to waiting. So used to it that it might take a trip overseas and the better part of a week away before you get your new eyes. And that’s when you go from waiting to seeing.

Seeing that he’s changing. That he’s coming back to us.

It’s a return that makes me realize, profoundly, how much his absence impacted me: how much I longed for the eye contact and the affection and the joy, the presence, that had seemed to fade away. How much the absence of it had left a part of me withered, empty, hurting. How many parents have to experience that daily, without knowing if it will ever get better. It opened up my heart to a hurting world, and it opened it up to him.

And like a tide, he’s creeping back up, coming back in. He’s putting his head on my shoulder, demanding to be chased, babbling incessantly, laughing uproariously, exchanging communication every way he can. He loves his brother. He puts puzzles together faster than I can, knows things we’ve never taught him, and waits for our applause. Then joins in. There’s a lot of applause around here. A glut of celebration.

And yesterday, he somehow found Luther Vandross’s song “Dance with My Father” (which I hate, sorry Lu) on iTunes and kept playing it and Little Brother took a too-short nap and I wanted to scream or run into the bathroom with a bottle of champers or both and so I breathed. And while I did, TK grabbed the PEC that is a picture of me and brought it to me.

I want you.

Sometimes things take forever to change. And sometimes everything changes in an instant.

I held him for awhile.

I feel how these tiny changes and big ones shift us along the path planned for us, how they get us where we’re going, and how they wake me up to the life I’m meant to live. My own changes–the movement from law to gospel, from lists to narrative, from rules to mercy–they are happening so slowly, it often seems. But they are happening.

The thought strikes me that, if I were to see the beauty that grace is making out of all this, if I could read the story the whole way through, I would never stop wanting exactly what I have at each moment. I would never stop saying thank you. Which leads to the next thought: that when you start living this way–when you start believing that it all matters, that nothing is wasted, that redemption is in every moment–when you just start believing–that nothing is invisible, really.

*or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mom

Some days it feels like I’ve experienced a lifetime before 8 am.

This is the nature of parenthood, especially the early years of it, or so I hear from people who proclaim that “the days are long but the years are short!” And the days, they are long–especially when I’ve wiped two asses multiple times prior to breakfast. The years? I’ll get back to you on that one.

Edith once told Carrie, “That’s the key to having it all: stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like,” with more than a hint of defeat. And I think it’s hilarious–in a terribly sad way–when women talk about having it all. As if anyone can have it all. But I”m learning that what I do have, it turns out, is saving me daily. Just not in the way I planned.

These daily salvations don’t resemble heroic rescues: no pulling me back from the edge of the cliff, no airbag deployments or ripping of the shirt to reveal a bulletproof vest. Not even any of the drama-drenched moments of singledom–the dodged bullets of bad guys, the aha!s and guttural sighs of relief accompanying the final throes of a bad relationship. These tiny rescues are quiet, often tedious, and mostly dressed as monotony: sitting on the bathroom floor waiting for him to poop; a gurgle from the monitor signaling the end of my alone time; standing at the ready with applause when he puts the puzzle pieces together; shrugging off the glop of spit-up on my shirt; having two constant witnesses, there in the backseat, to my every outburst and expletive and steering-wheel-palm-bang.

And this: having two constant witnesses, there in the backseat, to my every burst into song and exclamation and dance move. So there’s that.

Salvation.

I live in a danger zone, and it looks like this: the threat of tackling life as a list rather than living it as a a story; of calling burden what is actually blessing; of being too damn precious with myself. I never wanted to take myself less seriously by way of hands smeared with poop and walls smeared with baby food, but here we are anyway: two deep breaths away from insanity or transcendence on either side. Grace gently nudges me in the right direction despite my protests. Grace is showing me a new way to see, and I’d like to think that I’m complaining less about how the light is coming in and just…seeing it.

There were trees on Whitehall in London that my audio guidebook told me are suited to withstand the city’s pollution: clay-digging roots, self-cleaning leaves, regenerating bark. As if they were designed to meet their daily challenges, even thrive in them. Meanwhile, the chaos of morning gives way to the chaos of evening and I find myself literally washing feet as a shaft of light falls through the window and I wonder how I forgot that light can be holy; that washing feet can be no less an act for them than a gift for me. That bedtime is soon, and in that and in the flow of water there is the regenerating power of grace.

I watched a movie in segments, like we do now, and in the final leg, while Little Brother slept upstairs and The Kid and The Husband rolled around Publix and I sat on the couch sobbing, the final question was, I think, this: How would you live your life if you knew everything would ultimately be okay? If you had to move from controlling to hands-off, if the hard stuff were unavoidable, but in the end, it would all turn out the same…and be all right?

Would it feel like this?

...there’s nothing like releasing fears and falling into peace. It terrifies, true. But it exhilarates. This, this is what I’ve always wanted and never knew: this utter trust, this enlivening fall of surrender into safe hands.

Would it feel like falling in love?

And I see that this is the trajectory of my own life: this slow uncurling of my fingers from my fate; this release from the bondage to self-pity and self-importance and just self; the often-painful enlargement of my vision, of my plan, to include all the unknowns and uncertainties and possibilities that just don’t have a home in a calendar or on a spreadsheet. I’ve never liked the wind in my hair–messes it up–but maybe I could learn to? Maybe grace could teach me the virtue of getting messed up, becoming gloriously unkempt. After all, I’ve got a head start–I don’t remember the last time I wore an article of clothing without dried food or snot on it.

It could be that the moments bent over a tiny butt, scraping food off the floor, blowing the bubbles to lightheadedness, these are not karma teaching me a lesson or God testing me but grace ushering me into love until I see that it’s not a room I’m trapped in but a home where I’m fully alive. This is regeneration and redemption and falling in love, day in and day out, never letting up, never giving up. Grace as a constant.

We wait at the traffic light, I and my two constant backseat witnesses, and neither of them likes being still. I bristle as though I’m any different, as though being still and knowing has ever been a personal strength of mine, and just as their protests begin to ramp up I remember what worked last time: how we turned it into a countdown, into a game. So we play. The tedium becomes adventure and the words become song and it could be either a detail or a miracle, it could be the fall from planning and into loving, that we’re all laughing when the red becomes green.

Five years later, the city looked the same. And different.

The first time I went to London, twenty years ago, I was with a mission group sent to Liverpool by my church. To save all the white people. We stopped in London for a couple of days on our way back home. I remember visiting the Wesley home (because it was free, and the Tower of London wasn’t, and these were my choices), seeing Les Mis at the Palace, and capping off the trip with a dinner at a local place called the Hard Rock Cafe.

Fifteen years later, The Husband (then The Fiancé) took me to a wedding in the English countryside. Which was helpful in preparing for ours on the Gulf Coast, a location similar to Somerset in no way whatsoever. We also hit London to take in a show at the Globe (I fell asleep, sue me) and hit the tourist spots that I had missed before: the Tower, the Tate, St. Paul’s, Hyde Park.

But this trip…this trip was about TH working, and about my exploring the city sans tour guide, sans anyone but me. I navigated all the terrain on foot, explored the nooks and crannies and side streets, took shortcuts and ducked into alleyways, weaved in and out of crowds. I saw the city, the familiar sights, in a new way. I left the diaper bag and Wet Ones at home with the kids, four thousand miles and five hours away, and wandered through Hyde Park and past Buckingham Palace, around Westminster Abbey and down Whitehall, through Trafalgar and Leicester Squares and Piccadilly Circus and Soho. My feet met concrete the way they did in New York: mildly goal-oriented, at their own pace, freely. Even Les Mis looked different, and not just because it’s no longer playing at The Palace. I’ve learned all the songs, lived my twenties and the better part of my thirties, gotten married and had two kids. As a high schooler I felt like maybe people should let up on Javert–he was just following the rules. Now he is such a dick. And I used to be so much like him.

“I am shy in ordinary social contexts; I am not able to ‘chat’ with any ease; I have difficulty recognizing people…Given all this, I tend to retreat into a corner, to look invisible, to hope I am passed over,” wrote Oliver Sacks. I hear you, having been someone who, for most of my life, has fought to avoid being seen. But marriage and children open you up to examination on a daily level: your side streets and alleyways are suddenly fair game, open to foot traffic, explored with abandon. I rarely pee alone, is what I’m saying. Nor do I kick trash cans or raise my voice or lose my temper alone. It’s all very inconvenient for someone whose preferred orientation to The Radar is “below”. It’s all very uncomfortable for someone who has things she’d prefer to hide.

“You really put it all out there,” people have said about my writing, and I have to laugh when I hear that because it has been equal parts compliment and complaint, but what it definitely is, is fact. Fact born from decades of hiding, of not putting it all out there, and there’s this:

It’s a wonderful thing, to not have secrets. To not live under the weight of them. To be seen.

Sacks didn’t do so well below the radar. He has written multiple books, had movies and documentaries and even an opera based on his work. “I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts,” he also wrote. And the more I allow myself to be seen, it seems, the more I am able to see. The more I recognize as familiar, as recurring grace woven throughout the years. I see, also, the difference between who I often am and who I am meant to be. “Who you are at home is who you are,” I read recently, and thought, I hope to God not. Because there is a gulf, daily, a breach that seems impossible to cross between the worst of me and the “me” that grace makes of me. The Javert and the Valjean. I see that gulf and immediately try to think of ways to cross it, and if not cross, then to hide it.

But the cross has already been completed.

And this is why I can write, can tell, can put it out there: because who I am at home is not who I am. Who I am made to be is who I am, because grace makes the gulf between the two not a distance to be crossed but a journey to be lived, with the cost of travel already paid. And when I look back at the road already traveled, I see the connections.

He told me he can see now how hard it is every day, how the struggle with two young ones can wear you down, and as the recipient of half his genetic material, I know how we see things similarly. He said that you need so much patience, and he just doesn’t have it. And I laughed, because none of us do–not enough, anyway. “But…” he continued. “Just being there, it helped me. I can see how it helped my own patience.” And with that, I watch the lines connect from my parents to me to my own kids, the struggles that become gifts we pass on to each other, beyond baby-sitting and break-providing and dinner-preparing and on to wound-healing and soul-patching and heart-sewing. How our own histories are changed by our now. How when we put it all out there, we are given the gift of sight. Of recognizing the us in each other.

The moment we walked in the door, The Kid whipped his head around, ran to us, held on longer than usual. There is something different, and I see it. I’ll be writing it. But that night, he came into our room no less than a half-dozen times. I felt the familiar impulse to irritation…but something was different there too; like that impulse had weakened. “It’s like he wants to make sure we haven’t left–that he can still see us,” TH whispered through the dark, just as a voice within my own head/heart whispered, Let go. This is how tonight is supposed to be. And so, a half-dozen patters across the hall and into our room later, I felt the me that I am: annoyed, and the me that I’m becoming: eyes open to the boy standing beside my bed whose grin lights up the night so I can see, and share, it.

The best part of a bad day is knowing it’s okay.

The slip of paper sat on the counter for a couple of days, daring me to do something about it. The mom of one of the other kids in TK’s class at his new school had rushed over to my car, passing it to me through the window at pick-up. This was a few hours after drop-off, when she had seen me in the lobby and introduced herself. Her daughter had apraxia, she had said. I had responded that TK does too. We think, at least? I had wanted to make a quick getaway: my sunglasses and I had an appointment in my waiting car, where I would drive home through tears (okay, sobs) and gulps of air and grace. She could tell. We should get coffee sometime, she said. There was lots to discuss.

I smiled, agreed it was a great idea, then ran to the car and commenced grieving over this latest change, its required adjustments, the coming hours away from TK and how he would respond to it all. When I returned to collect him, she gave me the paper. Her name, her daughter’s name, her phone number and email. She asked how TK had done. She asked how I had done. I told her about the crying–she seemed to know anyway. She seemed to be one of those people who sees. She nodded and smiled, affirming my guess. We arrived home and I placed the paper on the counter.

For all my telling and writing, I still don’t want to be really seen. Besides, I thought, we’re just passing through here. Taking her info? Putting it into my phone? It would be like accepting something I didn’t ask for, didn’t necessarily want. We’re not here to stay, I needed to explain.

Acceptance brings peace was what I had heard in a sanctuary at a women’s conference in Birmingham from one Elisabeth Elliot, whose first husband had been killed by the South American tribe to whom he had been sent as a missionary. Her second husband died of cancer. She told this to me, one woman among hundreds, one woman who was in the middle of a series of personal and professional failures during the hardest two years of her life thus far. One woman who was falling apart. She had some nerve, to see me like that.

Things have felt crumbly again lately–not like they did back in Birmingham, when I knew I was misplacing myself. Now, I’m right where I should be. But you can still be lost there. You can still feel like you’re slipping away, becoming a version of yourself that isn’t…you. Not who you’re meant to be, at least. And when I dared to speak the words to a trusted few, those words were accompanied by the characteristic throat-thickening and tear-spilling that always accompanies deep truth, and I knew something would have to be done.

I’ve always been high-strung. This is a sanitized way of saying that I’m a control-freak, Type A, in my own head, anxious individual. It’s been passed down through the women in my family like salad forks and monogrammed towels, this need to carry everything at once on arms too tired, to shoulder unnecessary burdens, to pop up like a jack-in-the-box throughout the meal because there’s one more thing that needs to be done. Worrying, though, is not a badge of honor. And if I’m going to be a martyr, it should be for a better cause than my own ill-founded fears. But I’m used to the feel of the frayed edges wrought by anxiety on my fingertips–they feel oddly safe, familiar. Lately, though, they’ve been tearing.

Things were supposed to be getting better, like they did when TK was six months old. We had moved to bottles, freeing up time and chest real estate. My old clothes fit. I was running. Little Brother was crying less, sleeping more, getting a personality. But I kept slipping into patches of sadness, and I blamed hormones leveling out. Maybe rightly. So I would give it some time. But my own sleep kept getting worse, and though the pendulum swings often for mothers of young kids–for all of us, in some ways–it was swinging way too often. Too fast. Between overwhelming joy and deep anxiety. Between wanting to hold them close and wanting to jump out the window. My fuse was too short. How long to wait?

Parenthood leaves marks on us all. All deep love does–ask Lily Potter. Some are prone to stretch marks. Some give up careers. Me? My already overwrought interior life becomes denser than ever, and the weight starts leaving marks of its own.

We were finishing dinner, TK getting wiped down by The Husband and LB on my hip, and it took one swipe of a baby’s arm for my Friday-night champagne glass to fly through the air and shatter on the kitchen floor. It might as well have been me, for all the pieces left down there, and I felt something inside finally whisper truth: You’re not just passing through here. I looked at them, the men in my life, and I knew that I did not want them walking on eggshells, on the broken pieces of me that could litter the floor if I didn’t just ask for help. If I didn’t accept it.

I’m not particularly interested in labels, as you may have guessed from my diatribes on TK. So I’m not going to diagnose this as generalized anxiety or mood swings or hormonal changes or postpartum depression, because what matters most is not a name but that I open my eyes to where grace will show up in this part of my story. Because show up it does, for all of us: whether it’s during coffee with a friend, drinks with a spouse, weekly counseling sessions, a pill taken daily. Grace shows up in the places we’d sooner die than end up and admit to our father we’re in that neighborhood and need a ride home. Grace is all over those neighborhoods, all over those places. Grace is there, and it’s in the ride home. I’m calling for a ride home.

Leonard Bernstein wrote a musical, and Henri Nouwen wrote about that musical, and both men knew about brokenness. The priest in the story, shortly after riding the wave of human approval, watches his glass chalice fall to the ground and shatter. He follows. Children’s voices are heard, singing, “Laude, laude, laude”–praise, praise, praise. As he walks among the shards, the priest gazes at them and says, “I never realized that broken glass could shine so brightly.” And so I lift my own hallelujah–a cold and broken one, but still a hallelujah–and consider that maybe sometimes our broken places can reflect light most brilliantly.

My own shards are gathered a little while and a team cleanup later, and I sit outside on a Friday night and watch TH blow bubbles for TK. LB sleeps peacefully upstairs. Breathing forgiveness in, redemption out, I enter the mom’s information into my phone and press save while holding a new, whole glass in my hand.