So raise your glass if you are wrong in all the right ways.

I keep thinking lately about how the heroes of all the good stories don’t know what they’re really made of until well past the first chapter.

***********

I’ve been struggling with how–and whether to–write this post. But when I considered the reasons not to, they all came down to one word: fear. No, this is not just my story–it’s The Kid’s too, primarily even, but this blog has been a place where love for TK has been born within people who’ve never met him; it’s a place where people who’ve never seen him in person him have gotten to know him. This is his story, but it’s mine too, and really? It’s everyone’s, one way or another. So let’s keep telling it.

The developmental pediatrician, after a two-hour appointment halfway through which TK fell asleep, tired and ill, on my chest, diagnosed TK as being on the spectrum. You know the one I’m talking about–the one with words and letters like autism and Asperger’s and PDD/NOS. The one with a hundred different delays and a thousand different behavioral quirks and a million different ways to be, all summed up in a science informed by questionnaires and observation and best guesses. This is the place where TK resides, as far as one doctor sees it.

It’s a diagnosis surrounded by doubts: mine, the speech therapist’s, the occupational therapist’s, the physical therapist’s, the caretaker’s who is licensed to diagnose these conditions herself. And those are just the experts. (Yes, I consider myself an expert: on TK, as his mother, and, to a certain degree, in this field, as a pediatric dentist who is trained to treat special needs patients and has worked with hundreds of them in the dozen years I’ve been practicing. Also, I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.)

I don’t bring up the doubts to act defiant or be sassy (sanitized form of bitchy) or imply that we don’t want to join that club or be one of those people. There are no those people anymore, and not ultimately because of a diagnosis but because of grace. There is room for mystery here, though. So what I’m saying is that between the experts who have met him more than once and the medical issues that have plagued him since birth that have only recently, and partially, been resolved (shout out to wonky vertebrae and tilted heads!), we’ve got a lot playing into his speech delay and his unique way of looking at–and dealing with–the world. And then there’s the small matter of the trajectory of my story, of ours, thus far: the way of things not always being as they appear, of there being more beneath the surface and beyond the initial diagnoses, of there being just more, always–and here you have us, embracing whatever Now brings while letting More be what defines us and leaving room for Yet.

That might all sound like a bunch of flowery language for what ain’t just a river in Egypt, so allow me to provide assurance that the practical details are being attended to: multiple phone conversations with our insurance company to determine coverage, email exchanges with therapists new and old to decide upon beneficial treatment, research into early-educational environments that best suit TK’s needs and style of learning. We’re embracing this diagnosis for the doors it opens–doors to interventions we might not otherwise have access to. And we’re embracing all the parts of TK that aren’t defined by a diagnosis: the way he scrambles to greet and hug us, the way he laughs at my jokes and my driving, the intuitive tenderness shown in the way he interacts with Little Brother, the way he looks into my eyes when I tell him I love him. Regardless of which labels fit, none of them would ever be our answer because he is more than the results of a questionnaire or a folder handed to me at the end of an appointment. We are no more running scared from this diagnosis than we are allowing it to be the bottom line of our story; we’ve already got a bottom line.

All great things are not fully knowable, this I have learned: love, marriage, divinity–they aren’t summed up by the laws of science as much as they are partially captured in verses of poetry and strains of music, enigmatic and immeasurable glory. I’ve learned to make space for the mystery rather than resent it; to recognize it as beauty and treat it as a gift, as part of every great story: the slow unfurling of grace over a lifetime, this telling of stories in moments that roll into years. We pitch our tent now on a spectrum but our permanent citizenship is in the land of grace, in the spaces between Now and Yet and Partially Known and Fully Known, in the love that calls us by name, not diagnosis, and fulfills everything in its perfect time.

Whatever it is or isn’t, don’t be afraid, my friend wrote, the one who’s been through it. Don’t worry–it will be okay. Also, have some wine. And The Husband’s work colleague wrote the same: Don’t worry, he echoed. This is more of a gift than it seems.

Which took my breath away in its unexpected, work-email reminder of what I know to be true but can always use help remembering. High school friends and finance guys and there, in all of it, the language of grace: all is gift. THIS is gift. How can it be anything else, when the one writing the story is perfect love?

I had prayed going into the appointment that whatever happened wouldn’t wreck me, that I’d remember what is most true and not lose sight of that, not become unmoored from what I believe. And as TK’s tiny hand grasped mine and we walked to the car, I looked down at him: my boy. The one called TK, James, son, brother, grandson, cousin, nephew, friend. The one called fearfully and wonderfully made. The titles that matter most, given by the people who know him best. By the one who designed him. And I felt the relief flood me: nothing had changed. I was walking out with my boy–the same one with whom I had walked in. He is the mystery that is constant gift, the always-reminder that grace makes us recipients, not victims. I look up and I see the source of hope; I look down and I see holy ground.

So here’s to letting the story unfold in its own time; here’s to the beauty of not knowing everything, yet knowing it can’t be anything but gift. Here’s to grace in arranged blocks and a voice waiting to be heard yet speaking to our hearts every moment.

Here’s to you, The Kid. (*Raises glass, drinks ALL THE WINE.*)

I don’t know if it’s irony or a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for, the aching in my introverted heart for my three-year-old to start talking to us. I’ve always been thrilled at his ability to entertain himself, whether in his exersaucer at six months old or among his blocks at two years, while I cooked dinner or wrote posts or…lingered over that month’s copy of InStyle. Now I try to draw him out, clapping for every sound as though I’m in the audience at the Metropolitan Opera, and he loves being applauded. But he’s a watcher: he takes everything in, studies each aspect of his environment, and he’s not letting us in yet on what he thinks about it all.

On our 2015 Screening Tour, we hit up a speech school here in town last week. I knew going in that he wasn’t having it–the screener’s tiny office, close walls, limited toy selection. I sat in the lobby with Little Brother and thirty minutes later, The Kid emerged through the double doors. “He…struggled,” the screener began, and I wanted to tell her that after merely thirty minutes of watching him, she didn’t know from struggle, what this boy has endured. But I listened instead as she told me that he doesn’t speak enough to qualify for their program. Their school for kids with speech delays. And I hustled back out into the fifteen-degree temperature with TK on one arm and LB on the other, arranging everyone into their seats and climbing into mine, caught between laughing and crying at the ridiculous waste of time.

Then the tugging on my heart: What if you saw it as a gift? What if you gave thanks?

I had prayed the day before, the night before, the hour before, for clear direction if this was to be the place for him. And if it was not. Clearly, it was not. So…answered prayer, there. Answered through a frigid journey and a $145 dollar check and a thirty-minute ordeal for TK, but still: answered. And just because no falls harder than yes, is it any less a gift? Any less a hand directing us along the path for which we’re meant? 

I kept driving, because the two of them are captive while we’re in the car and the little one falls asleep and this is when I can breathe, think, pray. The closed door behind us, the apparent dead end of the morning, I thought about it and about the reasons it upset me rather than inspiring gratitude. I admitted the fears that come with not having the answers yet, the difficulties that would be allayed if he began speaking in sentences today, the frustration that would cease if we all spoke the same language. One thought broke through: I just wish someone would really understand. My introverted heart, it wanted to feel less alone. Irony?

The next day, a friend of a friend on Facebook and a comment over email and the following words:

he is still who he is and we should never assume that there is any limit to how far he can go.  If there is a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum…so what…(I think we’re all on it somewhere!)

this is what I see: a child full of life and joy, learning how to live and be in this world, and filled with potential for contributing to the world things no one else can contribute. I fully believe there will be a depth of “knowing” in him that enables him to see and feel deeply, and respond to others in ways the rest of us wish we could.

The day after that, and the woman who lights up when we take him to childcare at the gym, she smiled at me: “I just have a special place in my heart for him. I look out for him. He is so easy to love.”

They were seeing him, really seeing him. He was understood. I was never alone.

And I realized that communication can take a million different appearances, can sound a thousand different ways, but grace speaks a language that transcends them all. Grace takes everything we’re given in the moment–the no and the yes and the sound and the silence–and makes it enough.

A few days later I hear his tiny footsteps pad into our room, before LB has awoken, before The Husband has stirred, and I tiptoe over to him in the early-morning darkness. He grabs my hand and we walk silently to his room, climb on top of his bed, and I put my face next to his and rub his back. This is our moment, so empty of words and yet so full of everything. A few minutes later and the other two are awake, the alarm has sounded and the day begun. As we move through it, I watch, and I listen, and I see and hear the language spoken here: the language of bubbles at the breakfast table, of foot-grabbing while I nurse, of toothless smiles, of arms encircling a leg, of purest laughter punctuating so many moments. Deeper than words, this language speaks love. After words, it still will.

And then, stripped of my agenda and open to grace, I sit beside him on the couch and say it–the fact, the promise, the words: “I love you.” He turns to me, holds my gaze. “Ah la,” he says with purpose, then grins and turns back to Mickey.

Tears in my eyes. We’re speaking the same language.

He’s at it again, placing the boxes next to each other in a pattern only he can see. After this, we’ll head upstairs and he’ll do the same with the farm animals, and here’s the thing: there was a checklist I read one time about how this type of behavior is something other than “the norm”; how he should be stacking the boxes and, I don’t know, making the cow and horse moo and neigh at each other? And that checklist upset me, naturally, as most things do that reduce a person to a sum of numbers. Because I felt then that there was more going on here, more than a list could address or diagnose. And now? Now I know there is. Now I’m seeing the patterns too.

We’re in the middle of a couple of weeks full of appointments, screenings, tests. There was the thirty-minute drive to the preschool diagnostics center last week, The Kid singing in the backseat the whole way while my insides roiled at the traffic and at what we were headed toward: another room, another bunch of toys, another person watching him and questioning me. Further testing needed, they said. Ha, I thought, bitterly (oh yay–we get to do this AGAIN) and triumphantly (good luck fitting this guy into a box). Then I sat across from the developmental pediatrician’s nurse, sans TK, and answered her questions a few days later. I think she heard the things I wasn’t saying, because she didn’t refer to a manual but quoted Michelangelo. And to be fair, we’re paying her and not the others, but still: here was someone who understood that we’re hunting for the beauty here.

That we’re unraveling a mystery.

These appointments are exhausting, and not because of their length or distance from home, but because of the emotional component involved. We’re on a mission to define my child. Since I was a kid, so many diagnoses have changed and medicine has broken into little subspecialties that didn’t previously exist, and I wonder sometimes if I would have landed on a spectrum or into a diagnosis myself–I mean, I had some weird tics and antisocial tendencies (some of which I’ve maintained and chosen to refer to as severe introversion) and I always felt out of place. Now, as we try to find TK’s place, I find the journey is fraught on my end. The things I thought would be difficult about parenting (sleeplessness, tantrums, date nights) are–and then there are the things I never expected: the fact that he’s three and not speaking, the tilted vertebra in his neck and the surgery to fix it, the arranging of blocks.

I left the pediatrician’s office and climbed into my car, immediately noting the solitude I’ve been craving. I used it to burst into tears. I’m so tired, I thought, and it’s not so much lack of sleep but the weight of this journey on my heart, the not having all the answers, the long and slow unrolling of this scroll with TK’s name and story on it. And I remembered a moment in Birmingham’s botanical gardens at least a decade ago. I was alone then too, but felt it more, which was the problem: I wondered if I’d always be alone. That was when the voice (tic?) spoke into my heart as clearly as if it had been inside my ear: Your heart is bigger than you know and stronger than you think. I may have laughed a little bitterly then, thinking, That’s not saying much. A few years later, I would swear my heart was broken (it was) and that it would never recover (it did). The waiting of a year between confession and fulfillment between me and The Husband was enough time for my heart to harden (it didn’t). Something kept it alive and willing and ready for the right time, for the unfolding of the story as it was meant to be.

And now, in the car, I consider that TK’s story is also mine, and mine his, because this period of waiting in the not knowing and for the mystery to be unraveled–I’ve been here before. Sometimes the weight, and the wait, on the heart breaks it in order to tend it, to recreate it. Bigger and stronger. It is where we’re broken–that’s the place where the stories are born.

I pull into the garage and TK’s face pops into the window. He meets me at the back door and wraps his arms around me, and I remember another phrase spoken about me, about him, about all of us: fearfully and wonderfully made. These are the labels that matter, that don’t change, that speak beauty into the mystery and tell our stories, and I bend down to wrap my arms around him and watch the unfolding of patterns only we can see.

In a few weeks I’ll go back to being called “doctor”–part-time, at least. For the past year and a half, “mom” has been my primary title.

It’s going to be an adjustment.

There may be days coming when I barely ever say, “Don’t eat your shirt” or watch multiple episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. My back will hurt from leaning over other people’s children while someone else watches mine. I’m…ambivalent about it. But I’ll return to the work force, to the world outside our home, a different person than when I left it. The Kid and Little Brother have left their marks all over me.

I think sometimes about who and how I used to be, before two tiny people were yanked from my abdomen. How going to the grocery store was a pain, but not an Olympic event. How I almost dozed off a few times driving on the interstate because I didn’t have a screaming occupant in the backseat to jolt me awake. How eight hours’ uninterrupted sleep seemed barely enough. How dinner conversation covered politics and current events instead of being consumed by, “YOU HAVE TO EAT YOUR CHICKEN BEFORE YOU GET A CRACKER.”

So there’s all that.

And there are other things.

There is the fact that a job interview–something that would, in my former life, have drenched me in anxiety and kept me awake and resulted in major digestive issues–is now a bullet point to fit in between feedings and pickups. Administrative tasks have displaced my worry; exhaustion has drained it off. (#blessed. Really.)

There are the logistics of getting from Here to There, and then there are the logistics of getting from Here to There with a pump attached to your chest as you drive down I-85 with one eye on the clock and the other on the road. Oprah calls it multi-tasking.

There was the moment when LB first looked at me with that recognition: Oh, you. You’re HER. And the smile he radiated from that realization, that smile is rewarded to Mom alone. (And she has EARNED IT.) That smile took at least six weeks (plus nine months) to arrive, the one that starts at his mouth and goes straight up to his eyes and just recently began to be paired with a soul-healing laugh.

There’s the way TK likes to shake his head back and forth when he walks toward me because it makes me laugh, and how there’s no way he could know that it looks just like the move I had to master when performing as a gingersnap in The Nutcracker a few decades ago, but that the similarity–one of so many–lifts me from end-of-day exhaustion and tantrum-bred frustration and reminds me that sometimes he just wants to play. And that sometimes I just should.

There’s the moment when he stands up from his bath and catches my eye, grinning, and jumps into my lap, overwhelmed with laughter, and it has a way of making the fact that I had to chase him down and use One, Two, Three five hundred times and talk myself out of screaming–it has a way of making all that disappear into our reflection in the mirror and letting the day’s last moments outshine the tougher ones.

There are the runs I go on now, and I’m more tired than I was then, so they’re often shorter. But when I stop early and slow to a walk, I look down and see a sidewalk scarred by leaf marks–they must have fallen in as the concrete was setting, before it could fully harden–and I wouldn’t have noticed them if I’d stayed full-speed. I think about how easily they could be taken for imperfections, but how at this moment, they look like areas of added depth, as though an artist rendered them. They are landmarks that point the way home.

I think about how I see everything differently now.

And I stop cursing the slow pace that last night’s shortened sleep brought me because there were marks left on me before I was allowed to fully harden. There was the idealized version of myself that I’d planned to be, and there is the real me–the one I am because I am their mother, and his wife, and the beloved. There are the thousand ways my schedule has changed and countless ways my priorities have. And the marks, they don’t look like imperfections, but an artist’s rendering that leads me home.

The nights around here lately have been…mixed.

Little Brother has taken to sleeping through the night about half the time, which is wonderful because it means he can, and the opposite of wonderful because my body is still on his old schedule, the one where he wakes up halfway through, so I wake up then and lie there, anxious and sweating, wondering…Will he or won’t he?

Is there a book on how to sleep-train moms?

And The Kid. Well, he has chosen a few nights lately to scurry into our room, scaring the sh*t out of us (or The Husband, really, because of the aforementioned vigil I keep) and demanding (wordlessly, natch) a chaperone back to his quarters. Either that, or he’ll cry out in the night until one of us (TH, because I’m on LB duty what with the dairy farm and all) calms him down.

Oh, and he crapped the tub.

Last night, though, was an all-out extravaganza: I woke up for my vigil and was thisclose to falling back asleep when TK shuffled in and I nudged TH, who was all, “Huh? I live here? Who is this small person?” Once TK was back to sleep and I was thisclose again myself, LB cried out just vaguely enough to make me wonder if he might not really mean it. Long story short, he meant it, and an hour later we were all back asleep. Two hours after that and time for the day to begin.

It’s true what they say, that it’s darkest before the dawn: I know because of the blackness in our hallway at First Wake-Up, when I tiptoe through the inky dark to scoop LB out of his crib while praying that TK won’t hear. Amazing how quickly the eyes adjust to whatever light is given, though, and how well a body knows its way around home. We always make it downstairs, LB and I, without injury, and onto the couch for his breakfast, and then back up to his room a bit later to put him down for his first nap as the sun is rising and it’s time for Second Wake-Up: TK Edition. The light changes, but the story never does. And there’s this: the sun, it keeps rising every day.

I remember the time when it always felt like night–the time when parenthood first arrived in the form of TK and it was not the fairy tale of golden moments and blissful-falling-in-love like I had expected or maybe hoped or maybe just had been lied to about. Because it was more of the everything, as real falling in love is apart from The Bachelor. It was complicated, like Nancy Meyers might attest, the shock of the erratic schedule and unpredictable awakenings and general soreness and unyielding demands of it all. Our love–mine and TK’s–was the pock-marked kind, moments of euphoria mixed with moments of despair, as we were both learning to be what we were, mother and son, and having not the easiest time with it. Then there was/is the whole wonky neck thing and absence of conventional words and waiting in doctor’s offices and feeling guilty about not knowing his pain and, after a couple of years of all that, it was this: the moment of looking across at each other and really seeing each other and knowing, finally, that for me it was him, and for him it was me, in the trenches all those days alongside each other, fighting to get to this place where love is conveyed with a touch and a look. And here we are.

With LB, there is the touch and the look now, the adoration-induced euphoria that comes with his glance and grin at just my presence, and I cling to it because I know that the two of us, if we’re to truly love each other too–in all the fullness of love–we’re going to get our pock marks too, our euphoria-less days, our own trenches. There will come a time when it’s not this simple, but it will be even more glorious because of that. More beautiful because of the scars. More real because of the everything.

That’s what happens when the mundane becomes holy; when sacrifice goes from feeling like a burden to a gift. “A sacrifice is, by definition, not an easy thing–but it is a sacred thing“, I read, and there is no way to stay in the one place–the easy place–and no curse that condemns us forever to the hard place. There’s just this, which is the all: Miranda bent over Mary in the bathtub with Magda telling her, “You love.” The cramped back and half-sleeping nights. The runs that are several miles of pain or the same distance of an awesome playlist. The pizza delivered to a celebration or ordered because I just can’t after this day. The same home, holding it all, this collision of what love really is: the everything, the “good” and “bad” smacked together and exploding into the four of us, what is meant to be.

And is it meant to be, that I accept it all like that, the way it is, with the same heart and the same attitude no matter how it looks? Because some moments I want to scream and others I am overwhelmed with joy and how do I accept them both as gift, as grace, when they come as packages wrapped so differently? Could it really be that I just choose to?

I think about it, and it seems as good a place as any to start. Because the thing is, if it were the choice and the follow-through, if it were all on my shoulders to hold up this life and make it beautiful with the toolbox I have, then we’d all be in big trouble. But…but. That’s not how it works, is it? It works because grace collides with me, my rough edges against its smooth and my incompleteness next to its wholeness. So I put my shitty little toolbox away, and I choose. I choose the grace, and the more, whether it feels like climbing a mountain or as natural as breathing. I make a choice like the one the four of us make to keep showing up, like the sun, every day–to choose each other, over and over. And so I walk toward the mountain and breathe in grace and wait for it to fill me and come back out.

We were sitting around the kitchen table, the four of us: The Husband and I opposite each other for maximum eye-rolling/grinning visibility; The Kid between us on one side of the square, moving toward his big boy cup only when bribed with his favorite foods; and Little Brother on my lap, fresh off a catnap in his swing that he alerted us was over by way of a crying jag. My back hurt, my arms ached, my eyelids threatened to “rest” for a minute, and bath and bedtime still loomed ahead, along with the nightly kitchen cleaning, and I felt the weight of it all on my shoulders, which tensed under the pressure.

I cast a glance toward the window beside the table, the glass that gives us a view to our backyard and our neighbor’s. Tonight it afforded me a corner of sunset: pale blue sky and bright pink clouds. And then, our neighbor himself, The World’s Greatest Granddad (so his sweatshirt says), who lost his wife to Alzheimer’s two years ago and now lives there alone in the sunset of his own life. He puttered around his backyard garden before making his way inside. He doesn’t invite pity, with his warm demeanor and constant smile, but his solitary figure did inspire gratitude within me where, moments before, there had been frustration and exhaustion and a distinct lack of perspective. This table full of life and love and I hadn’t even felt past the tightness in my shoulders.

I wondered what we looked like to him as he stood there in the shadows of his garden-yard with a view into our picture window, our four-sided and full table. The thought overwhelmed me instead of burdening me, and just like that I had new eyes and shoulders.

A few days later, TK greeted me at the door as I came back from a run, and, feeling charitable due to the endorphins coursing through my veins, I beckoned him off the porch and into the front yard. The sun was shining and promising a balmy January day. We spent the next half-hour chasing and being chased, and after a few minutes I noticed that we was paying less attention to me, staring instead at something on the ground. I realized he was noticing his shadow–not for the first time, but playing with it now. As he and his shadow ran alongside each other in the bright winter sun, TK laughing gleefully, I made a mental note to save this one in the archives–this Moment with a capital M. So much of my day involves getting from one moment to the next, scheduling the moments, managing them.

This was not a moment. It was a Moment, one not to manage but behold.

I have a friend who wants to believe in more, who wants to call that “more” God, but is held back, and expresses a desire for the return of miracles–obvious moments that are easily attributable to Someone, Something else. I’ve half-jokingly responded to that with, “What you’re looking for is a magician.”

But maybe the miracles and the magic aren’t that far apart after all.

There is the miracle, after all, of a three-year-old who speaks his own language and holds his head straight and runs, this year, unencumbered in the sun where last year he tiptoed, top-heavy, in the snow. There’s the miracle of the occupied swing in the red room, the fat-cheeked baby inside looking like his older brother’s twin. There’s the magic of feeding Little Brother while TK stands beside us, always one hand resting on me as if he knows he’s meant to be a part of this. There’s the magic of LB’s first laugh, and of a boy who runs the length of a football field to try and catch his shadow.

Because I’ve spent much of my life running from shadows, terrified of specters called “mystery” and “uncertainty” and “anything other than my own agenda”–all of which have populated the past three years in spades. But where they appeared, so did grace, and its watershed Moments: realizations that the opportunities to run scared, to fear, are also the  opportunities to trust. Aren’t all the Moments the same, really? Choices between practicing fear or trust, living from brokenness or wholeness, offering indifference or love?

Seeing mundane or sacred?

I’ll admit I haven’ t watched water literally turn into wine (note to self: business idea!), but I have seen hearts change, countenances soften, shoulders loosen–and that’s just me. I have learned all that can be accomplished from the pit of exhaustion and all that can be yielded from a place thought empty. I have seen flashes of the divine while changing a diaper and been nearly blinded at midnight by a tiny grin. And there’s this: I have regularly taken it all for granted, have wished it would speed by, have nestled into ingratitude and indignation, and yet here we all remain, with grace showing up anyway. Never stopping, never not here, never not offering forgiveness and redemption and beauty and if this isn’t a miracle, I’m sure I don’t know what is.

TK sits beside me as I type, which is hard to do while Mickey Mouse Clubhouse fills the room–even harder once he hops off the couch and tries to ride my leg (his newest hobby). But there’s that laugh that gets me, those eyes giving me a sideways glance paired with a knowing grin, and though I know there are moments I will mess up in a hundred ways, I also know there are Moments that are too grace-filled to be broken. Moments that take the fear out of shadows and the tension out of shoulders and the drudgery out of days and look as miraculous and magical as I let grace reveal them to be.

I am currently addicted to two chemicals: oxytocin and endorphins. The thought struck me like Chris Brown the other day, that these two buddies will not remain mine in abundance forever. After I stop nursing Little Brother, for example, I won’t feel the hormonally-amplified rush of love that accompanies a feeding session. On the other hand, I’ll fit into my shirts. And once my knees and ankles hand in their resignation notices, I’ll hang up my running shoes and say goodbye to my days of runner’s highs, as well as the blisters and cramps that come with them.

The notion of the eventual absence of two of the things that keep me going? It slowly started filtering into the rest of my moments and alerting me to the fact that–SPOILER ALERT–this, too, shall pass. All of it. These days are vapor, really, and when these days are actually nights and I’m stumbling toward LB’s cries, the idea that This Won’t Last Forever is good news. When The Kid is pitching a tantrum on the floor because I tell him it’s time to wash his hands and eat the food I made for him with love, the idea that This Won’t Last Forever is good news. The problem is that I’ve been focusing on all those things–the things I wish would pass–as hurdles to be gotten around and left behind. I’ve turned good news into a Coming Attraction with a countdown. So, lately, I’ve tried to allow these moments to be highlighted by their transitory splendor just to see how such a filter changes their appearance.

Answer: there is so much beauty I’ve missed.

When The Husband and I picked the boys up from gym childcare last weekend, TK’s teacher said, “I need to talk to y’all about something.” Not this shit again, I thought. She went on to let us know that TK had, during his visit that day, systematically removed toys from the other kids’ hands so that he could place them on one particular patch of carpet, where he was arranging a centralized toy station. TH and I smiled at each other because we’re no stranger to this activity of his. He almost daily transfers his toys from toy box to couch cushion, handfuls at a time, trip after trip across the family room. On Christmas Day, with company present, he took to arranging people, pulling at hands to get us all in the same room. What looks to be some kind of spectrum-y quirk to those who don’t know him is likely, his occupational therapist told me yesterday, his way of asserting independence and control over his environment since communication isn’t really cutting it presently.

It makes sense. I mean, I still do the same thing all the time.

And then there was the well-meaning woman accompanying her grandson to the speech clinic yesterday, who watched TK running around the waiting area, whooping with excitement as he does because he’s not currently capable of exclaiming, “Why, hello, Children’s Hospital Rehab Services! How delighted I am to greet you today!” She turned to me with a knowing smile and asked, “Is he autistic?” I resisted the urge to tell her that yes, he loves to paint, just to throw her off, but I just smiled back and replied that no, he has not received that diagnosis. I wanted to go on and explain, because I’ve been her before, been the person hearing No but thinking Yes and feeling pity for the mom in denial. I wanted to explain to her, in the most snottily technical terms possible, that TK’s diagnosis is actually apraxia, likely due to a generalized motor planning problem that in turn may be associated with his Chiari Type 1 malformation, the cerebellar tonsils extending slightly below the foramen magnum, but who really knows because he also exhibits in scans a tilted C1 for which he underwent a laminectomy but only after he tilted his head for the first two years of his life, probably because of nerve impingement by C1, so it’s really a crapshoot isn’t it? I wanted to either say that or stomp my feet and throw a tantrum myself  because I’m so tired of people assuming things but then she told me her six-year-old grandson has autism and he’s not talking either and I remembered it, the fact that everyone has a story and sometimes they overlap and sometimes people are just looking for someone who understands theirs. So I settled into our currently overlapping narratives, the community they provided us that I never would have chosen but was placed into because of grace, and we had a lovely conversation.

People might not always be asking questions. At least, TK’s speech therapist tells me that because we intervened early, he will eventually crush the apraxia like he did the halo (hopefully sans muscle spasms afterward) and be talking our ears off. He won’t always steal and arrange toys, and he won’t go off to college wearing diapers and drinking from a sippy cup. And for his part, LB won’t always cry out for milk at 1 am or demand to start his day at 5:30 or refuse to nap without being swaddled like a burrito.

But he also won’t always talk angelically to himself in his crib in those few minutes before crying out, either, and he won’t always gaze at me like I hung the moon while I’m feeding him. TK won’t always hum the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or lead me by the hand to the fridge to get his water. Someday, our house will not have each bedroom occupied by a male whose eyes tell me he’s in love with me (TH will still be here, God willing, but that look may come and go).

At his physical therapy visit the other day, I watched TK and overheard another mom’s conversation with her kid’s therapist. Both had babies a few months old, and the mom told the therapist, “All I wanted was a chance to enjoy my coffee in peace and quiet and who knew that going back to work was the answer?!” I hear you, sister, I thought but didn’t say because eavesdropping is creepy, and laughed to myself at how we would all just love to watch a movie or drink our damn coffee, and then I looked down and saw TK victoriously accomplishing a task and then running to me, eyes squinted in his quirky little funny face formation. He placed his head in my lap and let me kiss him before he ran off again. There are seasons of life, seasons of parenthood, and one day I’ll look back and see the beauty of these with the rose-colored glasses of hindsight. Or are they corrective lenses? Whichever of the two, grace lends me a pair of them now, and when I look through the frames everything changes. Filter ON.

The joke was on me. After 2.5 weeks at home, 2.0 of them plagued with cabin fever and epic tantrums, The Kid was all dressed up and ready to go back to school on Monday. I kissed him and The Husband goodbye and watched them back out of the driveway, then I headed back inside to where Little Brother waited for his morning meal–which I would be giving him as we both sat on the couch, Season Five of Downton Abbey unspooling in front of us.

But it was not to be. Within minutes, I received what I vainly hoped was a prank text from TH informing me that school resumed tomorrow, not today. TK arrived home shortly after, his winter coat making a mockery of both our plans. I resigned to my fate: no upstairs/downstairs drama for me. As TK pitched another mind-blowing fit on the floor, I bitterly switched the DVR to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Meeska mooska, bitches.

All was not lost, though. We just joined the gym at the local church where TK attends preschool, and they have childcare. So it came to be, at midmorning on a day that could have been a wreck, I decided to cut my losses and hand my kids off to strangers so I could run–if not from my “problems”, then around a track at least. I returned to the nursery an hour later to reclaim my baggage, and TK’s teacher informed me that the director wanted to speak to me. Fear struck my heart–I felt like I was being called to the principal’s office, which for someone who in school was never actually called to the principal’s office is a terrifying prospect that doesn’t diminish over time. The older lady said hello, then mentioned TK’s speech delay. And that’s when I realized it.

People are starting to ask questions.

Back when I worked for a living, I was one of the question-askers. So I know what it means when someone says, “Is there anything else we need to know?” or “I’m just trying to figure out ways I can help him.” These questions, with their dual nature of good intention and curiosity, seem innocent enough to the asker but fall like a bullet on the heart of a mother, because this is what I hear:

What’s wrong with your kid?

I can barely handle a question with implications like this, my defenses raised and my ire piqued and the fact that I want to scream it from the rooftops, that he has been through hell and back and is sitting here smiling and that is what’s RIGHT, what is beautiful, but not everyone in the world has been walking this road with us or reads my blog (unacceptable) and so I give her TK’s Bio: The Cliffs Notes, and at the end I know she’s still batting words like autism and spectrum around her head because of how he’s not talking yet and he likes to sit in one particular spot on the carpet and gravitates toward the same toys and I know that I will be answering questions for a while. Including my own.

Heading to the car with TK and LB, I felt a tidal wave of emotion approaching–the fears that stretch out in perpetuity or at least until he starts talking–the sense that TK will be written off by people, placed in a box or assigned a label, and the unfairness of it made me angry and sad. And it was convicting, because I used to carry labels everywhere myself,  and dispense them freely. I climbed into my seat and told my boys I love them, and then I prayed.

The one word that kept poking through as I poured out my messy heart? Advocate. “You are his strongest advocate,” I heard, and it was like a joke because of all the things I was feeling, strong was definitely not one of them. And what a joke it would be, this situation in which we find ourselves: a nonverbal three-year-old with a surgical history and list of unknowns and follow-up MRIs and his little brother whose head is tilting in the opposite direction. This scenario requires more patience and more strength and more faith than I ever signed up for or claimed to have on my customs declaration when I arrived from Non-Parenthood. What a joke this would all be, what an impossible situation, if what I brought with me were all I have.

Grace is a necessity as much as a gift. It is everything. It is what tells me, whispers in my ear and my heart, that maybe I’ve come to the kingdom for such a time as this. That–imagine the thought–this is not a joke, or an accident, but that everything in my life has led me to the moment I’m in and prepared me for it. That grace will, thank you very much, take it from here, and there, and everywhere, because I am not required to produce a resumé but just to be who I am. And grace will work with that and fill in the gaps and take my hand and turn this from a dirge into a dance.

I asked my own question at his last check-up, finally mentioned a word I was afraid to speak, and his pediatrician gave me the answer that was not an answer, not a certainty–and yet it echoed and affirmed what my heart had been telling me. That TK doesn’t fit into a box, that a strict label simply can’t be applied right now, because so much has happened to him and so much is yet to be determined. He is what he is–and right now, as a three-year-old who doesn’t speak yet knows all his letters and numbers, arranges his blocks instead of stacking them, tries to figure out how his toys work and are put together instead of simply playing with him–he is what the world would call different.

And I can work with that. I, a girl who was no stranger to different herself, whose quirks drove her to a keyboard and to a city and to grace and made them all fit. And though I never checked the box marked “different” for me or mine when I was signing up for this life and parenthood gig, here we are anyway: pitching our tent in an area not on the itinerary, where GPS doesn’t work, where answers are in short supply. It’s all very inconvenient, for the world and for the girl with the labels, to operate without a handbook. But I also know that different is what keeps me returning to the well of grace more than I ever would have otherwise. And grace is what renames what we thought we knew: Them becomes Us, in spite of becomes because of, different becomes beautiful, and we go from the being in the unknown to being the Known.

A relative who does not frequently reveal his emotional hand confided that he loves TK even more after all he’s been through. And as my boy grabs my hand and presses it to his face without a word, I hear what isn’t spoken. I look down at him with the eyes grace gives and know that I have never felt more fully or seen anything more beautiful, and I tell him, “I love you too.”

Is there anything more depressing than putting away Christmas decorations?

I’ve always felt a lingering sadness at the end of big events and important days–birthdays and Christmas especially. Specifically, the last three Christmases have left me in terrain bordering on despair, feeling almost breathless with sadness as the credits roll on the last airing of A Christmas Story and I glance one more time at the lights on the tree. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I’ve been a mother for the past four Christmases (the first of these four was when The Kid was two weeks old and I was too sleep-deprived to actually articulate a feeling). And for the middle two, we were preparing for TK to go under the knife: neck muscle surgery in 2012 (on New Year’s Eve, no less) and spinal surgery paired with the dreaded halo last year.

This year we are free and clear of all planned surgeries. But as I lay awake in bed on Christmas night, waiting for a few hours of sleep to descend upon me before the baby wake-up call went off, that old familiar feeling crept in. I wanted to shut down, erase all the Christmas movies from the DVR, wake up to an undecorated house. This thickening of emotions that accompanies becoming a mother, along with my already well-developed holiday grief, tempts me to feel that the end of Advent is the end of everything. The most wonderful time of the year indeed…then what?

It doesn’t help that we chose today to take down the tree (f**king pine needles everywhere and NO I DON’T CARE FOR AN ARTIFICIAL ONE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND STOP TRYING TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS). Or that our end-of-year roundup includes a budget review, paired with a planning session for the twelve months ahead. (Spoiler alert: we’re going to be eating a lot of leftovers in 2015. Sorry, Chick-Fil-A.) Or that the next couple of months are cold and dark and devoid of twinkly magic. The Husband and I tried to make the most of our homebound, makeshift New Year’s Eve celebration, popping open some Veuve (definitely not in the budget for next year) and recapping how much worse last year was at this point: surgery and a hospital stay looming eight days ahead of us, and the unknown-to-us months that would follow full of spasms and pain and fear that it was all for nothing.

But there was that morning when the test was positive. And there was the day when TK stopped throwing up and started holding his head (more) upright. There was Little Brother’s middle-of-the-night arrival, and TK’s gradual warming up to him. There’s the progression toward speech (not there yet) that TK has been making, and the fact that he sings now, humming “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” like it’s his job. There’s the way he places his hand on my leg while I nurse LB. There’s LB’s radiant grin at 6 am that puts off my need for coffee a few minutes longer. There’s the garden sign I got from The Mom for Christmas, reading “Don’t Piss Off the Fairies” because I wrote that into my novel and she remembered and I don’t have a garden or a publisher but I have that sign–I have hope.

There’s also the tilt of LB’s head to the right, mirroring his brother’s just like his dimple on the opposite cheek, and the PT sessions we’ve already been to which you think I would be used to by this point but which left me in tears anyway–this again?! There’s the short-term memory loss, how I meant to think about how much harder it was the day we all had stomach viruses but how I keep forgetting to remember because, you know, life. There’s the scar on the back of his neck that is present but fading, fading but present. There’s my own scar from the two of them, TK and LB. There’s uncertainty and tiredness and sleep training and potty training and wanting time to speed up and begging it to slow down.

But did I mention…that he’s singing?

So the lights are gone (except for that overzealous neighbor who pairs his with a “Happy Birthday, Jesus” sign and I love JC too but I just can’t with that), and the tree is down and the DVR is Elf-empty and the baby is, you know, sleeping now and then…and there is the rest. There is the aftermath of Advent. There is the fact that what showed up, never left. Because there’s the sign, there’s grace, there’s Spring…and there’s singing.

I’m sorry, but no. This did not happen.