Without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.  –J.R.R. Tolkien

I was spending some time in my Advent devotional recently, returning to a place that has become tradition–not to mention a reflection and resting place–this time of year (see also: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, any airing of The Nutcracker, and, oddly enough, Mickey’s Christmas Carol). On this particular day, John the Baptist was the subject matter, his forerunner status mentioned along with his designation of peace-bearer. It left me picturing him as an asexual, amiable, rugged Fabio with hands full of honey, and I considered his cousin J.C., the birthday boy himself, and their differences. Because Jesus, the baby-turned-man, is mentioned as bearing peace and swords, and it kind of made me wonder if there was a good cop/bad cop scenario at play here.

I thought about it for a while, and a bit more reverently, and that’s what we do this time of year, isn’t it? Think about what we believe, during these days that are shorter but somehow more sacred, once you’re away from the mall at least. They feel dipped in quietness and holiness, dripping with lights and pine needles and snowflakes, suffused with tones of gold and silver, imbued with a meaning the world can’t give or explain, baptized in a sense of more. I thought about it during reports of protests and violence, lives lost on city streets, fathers gone in a moment, forever. I thought about what it means that we’re asked to believe that he showed up as a virgin’s swollen belly, how he strains credulity and boundaries–the peace and the swords and the table-turning in the temple and the water turning into wine and the overturning of expectations. I thought about it because I know plenty of people who don’t believe it and there’s a part of me that can’t blame them because a lot of them, these non-believers, are better Christians than I am, and this world is rife with sadness and fatherless and so barren, it would seem, of miracles, and this guy–this God, if you will or won’t–he was sort of all over the place, no? Not just one thing like John the Baptist, not amiable and working within the bounds of our believability or the limits of our thinking. But all over the place.

And that’s when something shifted into place for me, because I began to get it in a new way. Which, by the way, is one thing Christmas is great at–new gifts. The thing I began to understand is how he–how grace–how it’s not just one thing, because it’s everything. It’s the kindness to the children on his lap, it’s the table-turning in the temple, it’s bringing wine to the party, it’s calling out the zealots, it’s not condemning the prostitute. It’s knowing that sometimes what we call bad neighborhoods are hopeless ones.  It’s knowing that the orphans and fatherless are sometimes grown men now, and that they–along with the rest of us–we all have brokenness running through our veins. It’s looking into people’s hearts rather than at the color of their skin or uniform, at the size of their paycheck or the orientation of their sexuality. It’s more, and it’s deeper, than the bounds of our believability or the limits of our thinking. It’s everything.

It’s making space for the doubt because we are all doubters sometimes. It’s the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night. It’s the hospital stays and the healing, the restful nights and the sleepless ones, the conflict and the resolution. It’s the Christmas card photo and all the other ones that didn’t turn out. It’s everything, because he’s everything. Peace and sword, baby and God, believable and unbelievable. And a life with everything in it–the good and bad (as we define the terms), the easy and hard, the failures and victories, the disappointments and hurt alongside the hope and love–these are not contradictions to or separations from faith but the things that put us closer to it, bathe us more fully in the grace that refuses to be just one thing, in the God who refuses the same, who embodies the more.

Merry Christmas.

Joys are always on their way to us. They are always traveling to us through the darkness of the night. There is never a night when they are not coming. –Amy Carmichael

Sometimes I have to remind myself that there’s a story here, because I’m missing it.

There was a time when I didn’t have to remind myself–instead, I had to pinch myself. It was during those first days of our togetherness, when friendship had given way to something more, and I felt that we were finally, finally what we had been meant to be all along. That we had finally taken the shape that fit. That we had arrived, that I was home. I remember pinching myself in the bagel line and laughing because I’d never had cause to do that before–a dream like this had never come true. I was his girlfriend, but it was more because I knew that one day I’d be his wife. And I’d never known that before. All the years of dating and mismatching and trying so hard to make something fit, they all shifted into place and let out a giant exhale. My life exhaled. Over the next few weeks and months I would feel an occasional inner nudge to appreciate this, these early days of being together, because one day–maybe even soon–I would take it for granted. I would take for granted the fact that we were each other’s and just assume it, would let little things bother me instead of being cute, would get tired of smiling all the time. Even though I knew it would happen, because that’s the way the world works–on a downward slope toward ingratitude–I couldn’t imagine what it would look like.

Now, half a decade later, as we wake up and fall asleep beside each other, as the wear and tear of two lives dependent upon us etches lines into our skin and disruptions into our sleep, I don’t have to imagine what taking us for granted looks like. Because that’s the way the world works–gratitude toward ingratitude. But it’s not the way grace works. Grace reverses the equation. But not without my assent. Not without vigilance. Not without a willingness to see the story, and to tell it. Most of all to myself.

When I’m pushing a double stroller with two boys in it, fifty-plus pounds uphill because, you know, fresh air and change of scenery and strapped in kids and sanity, I’m breathing heavily and I’m wondering when he’ll be home to relieve me and it’s easy for it all–for this life—to be reduced to logistics. For our existence to turn into a list. And then the nudge returns, the years-old nudge, and I remember how it felt to look at each other differently for the first time, for familiarity to give way to rightful affection, how exciting love was. Can be. I tell myself our story again as I push our boys, our life, around the neighborhood. And something changes. Something is made new.

We were lighter then, literally and figuratively. We hadn’t endured sleep deprivation or harsh words or accusing stares, hadn’t spent nights in a hospital with our oldest or made tough decisions or worried simultaneously over the future. We hadn’t organized pick-ups and drop-offs, hadn’t said “You take a shower and I’ll brush his teeth”, hadn’t split up chores or done the grocery shopping. And we hadn’t filed five Christmas cards in a folder, hadn’t amassed boxes marked “Halloween” and “Holidays”, hadn’t collected nicknames and shorthand. We didn’t have two boys who look like each other and both of us, didn’t know what his laugh sounds like or his smile looks like. We didn’t have house-wide stomach viruses but we didn’t have house-wide dance parties, either. We were lighter, but we were less.

And last year, we were preparing for a spinal surgery. We were doing research and making calls. We were getting over the miscarriage and wondering if there would ever be a sibling. We didn’t know that just around the corner there would be victorious walks in a halo but also muscle spasms and pain. We didn’t know the test would read positive and the extra room would be a nursery.

There is always Then and Now and Yet. But somehow, also, there is always all of it at once. The memories and the hopes and the moments, all rolled up into one, because the story never stops being told. There was last year and there is this year and there will be next year and for all the differences between each, there is one common thread, one whisper echoing throughout all of them: grace, making promises that can’t be unkept. Making beauty a constant that never stops. Beauty in yesterday, in today, in the days to come. Advent happening always.

The OB sat across from me in her corner office, smiling and well-rested and with clean hair, and delivered me a verbal list of the things I get to do now: baths. Exercise. Sex. Cease iron pills. Pump to keep up my supply. A return to normal life, six weeks after being opened up to make way for a new life. And I thought, GET to do? All of those but the baths and iron sound like work.

And so Little Brother melts into our family and we begin our new normal. A new normal where every stage is so temporary without feeling like it–sleeplessness, crying, constant diaper changes (and that’s just me). The Kid acknowledges his existence, sometimes a little too enthusiastically–we’re teaching the word gentle when it comes to doors and babies. We are shifting around, adjusting and resetting, to become a family of four. Because the becoming, it doesn’t happen overnight, or once you leave the hospital, or after six weeks. It takes…always.

And sometimes it takes just one day to show you what you have, remind you that this life really is beautiful, especially when you aren’t all struck down with a virus that renders your family a tableau of pain.

I remember being sick when I was a kid, and how it was sort of a treat: staying home from school and watching cartoons while subsisting on a diet of ginger ale and saltines. Being taken care of, looked after. Now it’s The Husband and I doing the care taking, and when you’re both struck down, along with your toddler, and the only “well” one in the house is the little guy with the lungs and the repetitive need to be fed even as you fear you might puke right over his head…well, that’s something different. New, scary, overwhelming. When did I grow up?

Twenty-four hours, a night and a day full of that, and you are leveled. But somehow, not reduced. A few pounds lighter, maybe, but not reduced, because the loss isn’t just fluids but also skewed perspective and unrealistic expectations. A bit of ingratitude and monotony-induced myopia. Suddenly the world becomes clearer, once you’ve stopped viewing it from the lid of the toilet bowl, and the new normal is a place you’d gladly hang your hat.

“Redefinition is a nightmare,” writes Anne Lamott, and isn’t it the truth–how painful it is to grow. How so much of that pain has to do with the insidious, often-subconscious offense taken because we thought we were already done with the hard part, that we had evolved past the dark places within ourselves, only to find that hard parts don’t stop and dark places don’t disappear. But what they don’t have to do is define us, or be the truest thing. The biggest thing. And so grace enters in, sometimes in the form of a whisper and sometimes as a raging virus, and reshapes our lives and hearts so that we don’t forget what is truest, what is biggest. Like the way we sleep beside each other, and take care of each other instead of just being taken care of. How this is a gift, this burden of care taking, and how–when it is passed on to us like a heavy torch and fear (I’m not enough?!) gives way to realization (I’m not enough.)–we see, clearly now, as if a veil has been lifted, that we’ve always been taken care of. In not just the absence of hard parts and dark places but within them. That this is how we know what is truest and biggest–because, after the storm, it still stands. We feel like shadows of ourselves, but we look around and see that what cannot be shaken, remains. Words that used to sound instructive now read like poetry; tasks that used to feel like burdens take on a lightness; food that you let become tasteless is now full of flavor. Life, relived.

The next morning I’m up before the sun with LB, our latest stage of temporary, and he eats and then sleeps and I make a cup of coffee–did it always smell this amazing?–and take it into the sunroom. I turn on Christmas music, pick out a picture for our Christmas card, listen for the man and boy upstairs to stir awake. The light dawns, slowly at first and in spots so that it almost feels just temporary, before its full brilliance fills the room to stay and the new day begins.

In what is a stunning metaphor for our lives right now, our Christmas tree collapsed the other night. Mere hours after I had strung the lights in a fit of achievement that was accompanied by a soundtrack of Baby Crying. I was upstairs when the tragedy occurred, attempting an early shift of sleep. I awoke to what sounded like furniture being moved across the floor downstairs, and I clenched my fists, gritted my teeth, and wondered what the hell The Husband was thinking–doing P90X in the living room at 10 pm– and why he was narrating it with a barrage of foul language. I stomped out of bed and leaned over the stair railing to hiss down at him: “What is going on?” News of our tree’s demise floated back up to me.

It’s been a rough week, made rougher by my deciding in my mind that it’s time for things to get better: after all, my two-month anniversary of getting cut open was Monday; The Kid began sleeping through the night at two months; it’s impossible to be more tired than I am; and the ultimate reason–my deeply abiding, underlying belief that God and I have some sort of contract that obligates him to keep things from getting too bad. The whole “God won’t give you more than you can handle” needlepoint masterpiece that is actually a twisted version of an otherwise-intended verse, passed down through the generations in a game of Telephone, altering the truth to an unrecognizable but palatable and control-freak-friendly form.

Sometimes, in the dark, we’ll reach for the closest thing rather than the truest.

The closest thing, for me, these days? Well, here’s the deal: positive thinking is not my default setting, Dr. Peale. There are currently no boot straps to pull myself up by, and I am unimpressed by shallow, misunderstood theology and spit-back Scripture that scratches at surfaces and decorates wall hangings. I need a deeper succor, a truer balm when my factory settings feel like pillow-punching, voice-raising, tear-flowing, hope-abandoning. My thoughts go to dark places, the tamest of which is my current theory that Little Brother is an undercover operative for ISIS sent to inflict a new form of biological warfare ending in the dissolution of our family and my sanity.

This is not a good look for me. The newborn weeks have, historically, not been. As in, that one other time. And it doesn’t help when this time is supposed to be all Johnson & Johnson magic, sweet baby-head smell, and the life I’m leading is by all measures charmed and blessed. It doesn’t help when, technically, everything is good but feels like a prison sentence. Then I’m the asshole, right? Because there is the sin of ingratitude–of calling a blessing a curse. But there’s also this: the calling of hard things, hard. Of spades, spades. Of unflinching honesty in the face of Pinterest perfection. I’m living in the tension, on the fine line, between the two places, between ingratitude and honesty. I’m living in a bit of both, and imperfectly. That’s just the truth.

I had an epiphany the other day, more likely an average thought but what felt earth-shattering and soul-affirming: I am not temperamentally fitted for this. No one is, really, fitted for exhaustion and screaming and ceaseless unpredictability, though some have a disposition that renders them more able to “roll with the punches” and “go with the flow”–either that or they’re taking a drug I’d like to be on, please. (Or they’re lying. They’re all lying.) But no, my realization was deeper and more freeing: I am, simply, not particularly maternal. Not from the start, at least. I’m a Miranda, not a Charlotte. And these first few weeks of life, with their thankless giving, endless laundry, constant upheaval–they are not my wheelhouse. This is not the part of motherhood I enjoy. Now, The Kid? Are you kidding me? That guy…he is my boy. And his brother is, too, just more so in future tense. I love them both, but I do not enjoy the majority of the day spent with a newborn. And that is so okay. It’s okay to admit that, to acknowledge that, for me, the maternal instinct doesn’t shut on like a light but grows along with my child, intimately knitting us together as the days become months and years. TK made me a mom, often through sweat and tears. My heart bursts at the sight of him now but I remember a time when I just wanted to run from him. I loved him from the beginning but now, I really like him. I enjoy him.

The love is not less just because it’s not pretty at first.

Part of the “problem,” maybe, is that I was a lot of things before I was a mom and I plan on remaining a lot of things now in addition to motherhood. Finding my maternal instinct isn’t so much a reach-in-and-grab it endeavor as it is a slow burn, a growth that is messy but true, sure but slow.

LB and I have a ways to go, is what I’m saying. But we’ll get there. And this whole work-in-progress thing? Isn’t it exactly what grace is for? What redemption is?

And that–we’ll get there–is part of the truth-telling I must whisper to my soul when doubt turns to despair and the dark feels closer than the light. I am being remade now, reshaped, which is a much different thing than I expected: not a demolition so much as an uncovering, a lifting out. The parts of me that are for this–for marriage, for motherhood–are being called forth and brought out in ways both joyful (rare smiles, effusive laughs) and trying (piercing screams, questions without answers, marathons without endpoints). They are not at the surface; they are in the deep. They are being called out in whispers: gratitude. Servanthood. Trust. In hoping for more than what is. In believing it’s there.

Because what is, right now, is a screaming baby and a fallen tree. All of which has so much of Christmas stamped on it, so much of the rustlings of Advent.

This morning I went for my laptop in the cabinet that the tree is currently resting against. The tree that fell because we went big this year and the stand we’ve been using wasn’t strong enough to hold its mass. Metaphor. I pushed against the collapsed pine and it wouldn’t give. My computer remained buried behind needles, and I cried. I couldn’t do it. There is so much I feel I can’t do right now.

Then TH came in, working from here this morning because of the frantic look in my eyes and the tears staining my face, and I asked for help. For help to do the thing that I am not enough for. And he lifted the tree while I reached inside, blindly feeling and searching for the thing that is part of who I am. My fingers found it without seeing it and recovered it. It was there, hidden in the dark, and I knew it. I knew it because the truth is bigger than what I see or how I feel, and I do not make it–it makes me. It reaches inside me and lifts out the pieces, one at a time, that are needed for this moment, and one day there will be completion. Wholeness. Everything put together, made right. Today, though, there is tiredness and crying. So I walk over and whisper the truth in his tiny ear, the truth that is hidden underneath dark spots–that we love him, that he completes our family, that we waited so long for him. There’s a moment of quiet, and later there is a smile, and I cling to these like I do the moment in the middle of the night when I pause in my own crying and whisper a prayer of thanks. It lasts only a second, but it looks and sounds like so much more to come.

Last weekend The Husband and I made reservations for a dinner out. The In-Laws were in town and we were looking forward to our first date night since Little Brother was born eight weeks ago.

I know–ambitious.

I won’t get into every detail behind the difficulty of getting a two-year-old and two-month-old fed, bathed, and put to bed in the span of an hour (as well as getting their mother pumped, made-up, and dressed), but suffice it to say that such an hour is an integral part of my training program for the half-marathon I’ve registered to run next summer. Gone are the days of preparing for a date in an empty bathroom while an episode of Sex and the City plays in the background and a glass of champagne sits on the counter. Gone are the days of smooth, nick-free legs, of freshly blown-dry hair and toenails with polish intact. Here, though, are the days of my “going out” perfume having gone bad for lack of use; that scent being replaced by the aroma of A&D clinging underneath my fingernails (and, probably, to my shirt); a lingerie drawer now co-opted by the adult Christmas onesies I picked up at Target for me and TH in a caffeine-fueled vision of yuletide hilarity.

Now are the days of sitting across the table from each other while fighting off yawns. We talk about the kids, about sleep training, about the past year and the past eight weeks and, slowly, we lose the edge that lack of sleep has brought to some of our recent moments together. In the darkest moments of the darkest nights, it’s easier to look across the room at each other and see a foe, a person who isn’t pulling their weight, whose flaws are magnified in the shadows. Now, in the flameless candlelight of the wine bar we ended up at because we missed our reservation because kids, we share food and drinks and a life and the reasons for all that are becoming clearer. We get to be friends again.

At lunch last week, I commiserated with another friend, another mom, over how our lives have changed since our heyday in New York. How she recently got a call from a children’s clothing store informing her she had left her credit card there. Which reminded us of how many cards we had lost at bars over the years in moments fueled by alcohol, not sleeplessness. And yesterday, the family ventured out to Costco (because that’s what we do now) and, our cart front-loaded with a toddler and back-loaded with an infant in a carrier, we turned a corner to see two parents standing at the freezer next to their young son, who was shouting, “Esurance, backed by Allstate. Esurance, backed by Allstate,” on an endless loop and I know that there was a time when I laughed at witty, nuanced, real jokes but this struck me as hilarious.

Life, date nights, Saturday afternoons–it’s all different than it used to be. And I spend a fair amount of time comparing now with the less-full but simpler way things used to be, daydreaming I’m back on that fourth-floor fire escape in Murray Hill with a date night ahead of me, a long dinner with TH that won’t end with paying the babysitter or feeding the baby. There’s no helping it, really, these comparisons–they tend to happen on their own. It’s what I do with them that I’ve got to watch out for.

Because what is–am I geared to think it’s less because it’s different, because it’s harder, than what was? Or does more just look different from what I expected? This observation happens to be timed with a bubble-blowing session with TK. The cold bites at our faces and my knee is hurting again and…oh, the tiredness. Then he looks up at me, and he brings his hands together in the sign we’ve taught him. He is literally showing me what “more” is. This boy of mine who doesn’t speak yet but knows how to ask for, and expect, and recognize, more.

Today I am thankful for the hard, the messy, the weary, the beautiful of more.

It’s official: I hate growth spurts.

I don’t even know what they are, which is part of the problem. Or, more accurately, I don’t know when they are. The websites tell me they occur around ten days to two weeks, three to four weeks, four to six weeks, and on and on in a series of overlapping numbers that, in the end, are guesses anyway because every baby is different. Which leaves me wondering, every other day or so, whether or not this is “I gotta eat” fussiness or just the regular stuff. Whether this day is different from the others with needs that must be addressed, or whether I’m just worrying too much as usual. Whether I am depriving or over-feeding my child. Whether I’m doing anything right.

It’s possible that this growth spurt issue is exposing an underlying insecurity. It’s possible that this trouble I’m having with it is really about more.

Whatever happened to predictability, indeed? I think it disappeared the moment they pulled The Kid out of me, or at least the illusion of it did. And Little Brother is driving the point home, with all his echoes of TK’s newborn weeks filling the house and the night and my anxious mind. This is not exactly the laid-back nature I was hoping to experience, to display, the second time around. Turns out this whole thing is still just hard.

Then the spurt, the storm, it passes, and I’m left with a wide-eyed wonder who no longer fits into his newborn clothes–that, and my own wonder at the impossibly fraught nature of this whole loving-someone-more-than-yourself venture, this chosen servitude full of surprises, the ridiculous demands mixed with hallowed moments that can all seem like too much, so often. And then it is too much: because TK climbs the play structure by himself now, The Husband’s breath held the whole time, and he slides down the big slide on his own, and he used to be afraid. He used to be tilted and askew and afraid, and now it’s like he’s becoming himself. The himself I feared he’d never be, and every day he proves me wrong. Every day he grows.

I took him to get shoes this week, and what used to be a ride through the emotional wringer for both of us–his crying protests, my frustration-limited empathy–was something new, something not entirely different or without protest, but something better nonetheless. Something like…growth.

Then there’s the growth that’s loud, that announces itself with doors opening and slamming shut all around the upstairs as he shows off his new skill, as if to shout “I’M the warden of this prison!”, and with it comes the absence of naps, those hours no longer to myself, and this is growth too–the uncomfortable stuff, the asking-more-of-me stuff. Growth that is rude, unapologetic, that wasn’t invited to dinner but showed up anyway, and without wine.

What a gift for some, to be able to take this all in stride, to celebrate each moment levelly and joyfully without prejudice. For others, is what I’m saying, because I’d still prefer an engraved announcement in the mail, an electronic follow-up, maybe even a text before these moments of uncertainty arrive at my door, before my plan–written, somewhat begrudgingly, in pencil–is erased once again and whatever was on the agenda is sacrificed for what is actually happening. For what needs to happen for us to grow.

Because my idol isn’t an unwillingness to grow, but an unwillingness to be inconvenienced by it. Elizabeth Gilbert said it to Oprah while I nursed, that on the bathroom floor she had wanted circumstances–everything–to change without requiring anything of her. I hear you, sister–but that’s not how it works, is it? How can it, when we get to always end up in such a different place, the kind of place where you look around and see, finally, that this is hard–so hard–but it’s also better.

“The unmerited grace [that] is handed to you, but only if you look for it,” is what Annie Dillard wrote about, and at 2 am one morning I am headed back from LB’s room, freshly exhausted after another feeding, and I climb into bed and it hits me, overwhelms me–how much I love each person in this house, this man beside me and these two boys sleeping unpredictably and inconsistently across the hall, and this is so not me, to be almost giddy with joy instead of depleted by sleeplessness, except that it is. Now. In this moment. And maybe more, that I will grow into, slowly or in spurts, predictably or probably not. It strikes me that if I’m constantly ruing the shifting ground beneath my feet, then maybe I’m standing in the wrong spot. Maybe I’m trying to plant a flag when I should be bending a knee.

The digging in of heels is so overrated, after all, when there is ground to cover. When there are stories to be told and beauty to be beheld.

Trappings and charm wear off…Let people see you. It’s called having friends, choosing each other, getting found, being fished out of the rubble. It blows you away, how this wonderful event ever happened–me in your life, you in mine.        Anne Lamott

You know I’m a fraud, right?

I’m sitting here in the room The Husband painted red because I asked him to, a few feet from the child I prayed for, looking at the framed picture of TH and me that our wedding guests signed. Yesterday, I stared at that picture and wondered what happened to that couple–would they ever be happy like that again? Are two kids, a lovely home, a few years of marriage–are those really the things that knock you down until you’re staring at each other exhaustedly over the breakfast table, running out of (nice) things to say? Their prayers answered, they quickly fell apart.

And yesterday, the baby would. not. stop. crying. And the things I thought–you do not want to know. I considered writing a stream of consciousness blog, but feared it would read like a suicide note. The baby she waited a year for rendered her ungrateful and insane.

Sometimes I feel like the yoga pants in which I currently live: worn out, and a blatant misrepresentation. I get it together enough to approach the computer, type out words from a raw but calm place, and I wonder if TH ever reads it and wonders who that woman is, because the one he dealt with last night? Well, she was bat-shit crazy. You know, the one who wrote a piece called “I Want to Kill My Best Friend“? The one who said at 3 am that she couldn’t take it anymore (again)? The one who dissolved into tears of misery over cereal? Yeah, that one. That’s the real me, right?

We had our yearly pictures made this year, the four of us and The Sis, Bro-in-Law, and Niece, and Little Brother was probably the best-behaved. The Kid ran back and forth over our neighborhood park’s bridge, crying out in rebellion when we suggested he, I don’t know, be still and smile, and The Niece almost dropped LB on his head, and I felt all my body parts clenching as usual. I remembered last year, when we gathered at a park near the river, and the possibility of TK’s surgery loomed over us and I watched his tilting head and observed his lack of cooperation and wished for a different scenario: one where everything was just fixed and his head was straight and he was the kid who quietly fell in line. And here we are now, with a slightly tilted but recovering head/neck situation, and no cooperation, and I think back to six months ago on this same playground when we could only stay for ten minutes before the spasms started.

For all the sleepless nights, and toddler rebellion, I’d rather be here. Maybe here isn’t so bad–bleary-eyed, short-tempered, messy and imperfect here. Which makes me think that  it could be time to give thanks.

The search for the perfect picture is a pipe dream at this point, and when that ghost is given up it makes room for the real. For the toddler who screams on Santa’s lap, for the nearly-three-year-old who sobs when forced to stand still beside his cousin and brother. I will order that shot, please. Because it is him. Because it is us. Not some presentable, polished version, but the real thing.

And the real me? I am messy and imperfect too. I lose my temper and am forgiven. I long for a dinner out with TH even on the days when we might choose to have that dinner at separate restaurants, because I know we’ll end up at the same one eventually, that we’ll wake up in the same bed tomorrow and the day after, that we’ll get past the crying and trashcan-kicking and harsh tones. I don’t give in to the darker thoughts but, instead, walk away for a minute. Re-suction a pacifier into a tiny mouth. Replace a battery in TK’s guitar and watch him play it, then cast it aside to arrange blocks into an order only he sees. Is this daily monotony, or is it an act of rebellion against the darkness? Is it a way to live messy but brave? I think about the way I like things in a certain order too, and that life has been teaching me–will keep teaching us both–that sometimes there is beauty in that order, and sometimes there is beauty in its upheaval. And we rarely get to pick.

But I’ve learned that when it all feels like it’s falling apart is when it might actually be coming together. And that there are quiet moments in the storms, when you look around and see the people who are still there as if you’re seeing them for the first time, or with new eyes at least. That often there is no way to find your own way out of the storm or will your own way out of the hole because you have to be led, or lifted. The prayer help is my most frequent but hopefully the other one–thanks–is gaining on it, because that one may not lift me out of the mess but it will get my eyes pointed up where they should be. And like the toddler on the bridge, that thanks can be an act of rebellion against the world’s demands for perfection, can be my white flag, my vote for now, my act of worship. The thanks can be the acceptance of the picture we get rather than the one we envisioned, the potential in the worn yoga pants. The recognition of the divine spark in all the moments, all the messes, each shot and every bridge.

On Saturday, The Husband was trying to get out the door to go to Costco with The Kid but finding it difficult, as I was attached to his leg like a jellyfish and begging him not to go without me. And Little Brother, if he must join. I needed some time out of the house, even (especially?) if that time was to be spent in a suburban consumer warehouse. So we bundled up, strapped the smaller ones into their car seats, and headed out.

Afterward, we were looking to kill a little more time so we stopped at Starbucks. The line was horrendous and LB was starting to scream, so TH parked the car and I sat in the lot with my offspring, one of whom was perfecting his “I’m being stabbed” routine. When TH came back out and turned the key in the ignition, nothing happened. We looked at each other. LB screamed. TK laughed, whether at his brother or parents we weren’t sure. TH turned the key again. It was official: we were stranded.

In moments like these, I vacillate between extremes. I either draw on a strength outside myself and rise to the occasion (rare), or I completely shut down. Maybe because I was out of the house and therefore not alone with the screaming infant, I went with Option A. After all, it just wouldn’t do to have two babies crying. I prayed for help, which always feels a little silly and privileged–God, please get us out of our lovely car in this safe parking lot, and by the way can our team win the football game?–but the car wouldn’t start anyway. Then a couple pulled up and asked what our trouble was, and they were not serial killers or swingers, so there was our help. While they gave us a jump (TH tells me that the Southern phrase “jumped us off” is not only incorrect, but inappropriate), I pushed LB around the lot in his stroller and drank my pumpkin spice latte. A few minutes later, our car was started and we were heading home.

I’ve been reaching the end of my personal battery a hella lot in the last five weeks of LB’s existence, to the point that I’ve wondered how and why people do this ever, and if we’re going to, why we don’t have support groups for it, and the phrase “I have nothing left” has escaped my lips in the afternoon hours during a baby’s cries and in the middle-of-the-night hours to TH beside me. This is hard. It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard. I am physically, emotionally, and mentally depleted. I am, more than ever, at the bitter end of myself.

And here is what whispers to me through the crying, in the night, and past the insanity of it all:

The place where I have nothing left to give is where everything that matters is located.

All the things I don’t have are what save me: the grace, the patience, the kindness, the fortitude–they are there, have been given on my behalf. They are not lost to me. They just aren’t always (ever) my default setting. But they are Someone’s. And grace shows up with supplies, just bags of equipment, and knows exactly where to get started.

Spoiler alert: it’s not the crying baby who needs the work.

Grace shows up with the double therapy appointments every other week to which I accompany TK, a two-hour expenditure of time and energy that could feel like work…if they weren’t framed in joy, my reliably allotted time with my firstborn who needs that right now–and so do I.

Grace shows up on the afternoon walk, when I look down and see that there are two boys–two of them!–and these are my sons, and I get to be their mother, and we will make it past the screaming to something better. We already have with one of them. There is past precedent. And just then, LB screams and I roll my eyes and when they roll back to where they belong, they watch TK reach his perfect hand out and clasp LB’s alien claw and it’s like he knows just what needs to be done–and what is that if not grace with skin?

And grace shows up even in that dark bedroom at 4 am, when LB’s eyes are wide open and he is two seconds from crying and all I want is sleep and I say it again–“I have nothing left”–and it occurs to me that maybe it’s time to stop saying and start asking. So I pray for help, more fervently than in the car, and grace shows up on my youngest son’s face in the form of a smile that lights up the night. I would have missed it if my eyes weren’t where they were supposed to be, if grace hadn’t moved them there, and for a quick second it occurs to me that these moments with him will not last forever and maybe, just maybe, I could let them be beautiful every once in a while.

And just like that, the car becomes a church and the walk becomes worship and the bedroom becomes a temple, and all that I’m not matters so little compared to all that I have.

I can’t even tell you how much of my life is dominated by sound machines right now.

There’s the one in The Kid’s room, turned to the “rain” setting but switched to classical music by him as soon as we tuck him into bed at night. After he’s fallen asleep, I creep into his room and change it back. In the morning, his first action of the day is to climb out of bed and switch it back to Mozart, then climb back into bed. I watch from the monitor in our room, where I’m usually feeding Little Brother, and I smile–then the anxiety of getting a family of four ready for the day kicks in.

LB is in our room for now, despite The Husband’s quiet but frequent hints that it’s time to move him. We had TK in his own room from Day One, and I think that was largely due to the fact that I didn’t know how much there was to be afraid of then, but now the monsters loom large in my mind: spitting up, choking, cessation of breathing–as if I can control it all if he’s forty feet closer. With his presence comes his own sound machine, also set to “rain” at a volume so loud (pediatrician’s recommendation) that I’ve woken a few nights and been confused as to whether the house was flooding. Then I go pee, creeping by his rock ‘n play and hoping he won’t cry until I’m done.

This ambient noise is meant to lull their tiny selves to sleep. I remember a few years ago, when my ambient noise was the sounds issuing from my New York City block, the yells of people leaving the club on the corner, the resident street alcoholic who was chipper or angry depending on that day’s consumption, the taxis using 29th as a thru-street, the occasional sound of puking or fights. I loved it; it made me feel a part of something but also separated by four floors from its nastier aspects. When we prepared to leave the city, I made a list in my head of suburban weaknesses I wouldn’t succumb to: searching for a parking place close to the entrance instead of walking; driving when we could walk; becoming oblivious to how much more space we have and how much less expensive life is–and just human weaknesses: taking my relationship with TK for granted by such methods as nagging him, focusing on negatives, pointing out crumbs on the floor.

Needless to say, I have broken each of these vows. And how.

These aspects of our lives, they might otherwise be called blessings if they weren’t always so there. Marriage allows you to take for granted that your partner isn’t going to leave for lack of romance (or presence of demands). Health provides the expectation that the only thing standing between me and a half marathon is time and sleep. Ha. Two boys make you forget about miscarriage, about trying for a year, about the longing you had before they even existed–and make you long instead for sleep, nights out, moments away. The ever-present gifts that lull you into complacency, allowing you to forget the empty space that was there before them, to forget how truly miraculous it is, every moment we spend together. As if there are days when I am entitled to any of this, and pure ease along with it.

I think it’s important to be honest about the hard stuff–it’s why I do so much of that here. But there is also the moment at 4 am when I am sitting on the carpet beside LB as he fusses in his temporary crib and I am thinking anything-but-grateful thoughts and grace cuts in, not quietly and politely as it so often does, but like a sledgehammer to my sedated sense of entitlement: I am living in a home with a healing two-year-old across the hall, a husband asleep in our bed behind me, and the baby I waited through blood and loss for crying intermittently beside me as I sit in the room my husband designed and had renovated so that we could live here as a family. 

It’s so easy for it all to become white noise.

We tag team with TK still, though now one of us is usually holding a fussy newborn, and when I’m the one standing beside TK on his changing table, I look up at the collage of him in the halo. And there’s the picture that is at once so beautiful and awful that I sometimes can’t bear to look: him beside me on the hospital bed, still groggy from anesthesia, with the halo in place and the IV in his arm and I’m turned to him, and I know now the mixture of emotions that grace kept calm at the time because it’s on my face, in my eyes: the love and fear and pain and pity, the everything, because that’s what always comes along with the love. Everything. And though he’s so much better now, though we’re marching past that whole dark season, those emotions wash over me like a flood–but it’s a flood of mercy that refuses to let me take it all for granted. Even though I will, probably in a couple of hours when the cries wake me up and I feed, but then too there will be a little mini-flood, when I look down and see the tiny face and know that ingratitude, frustration, entitlement–they are not the truest things about me because grace won’t let them be. It’s grace, along with a two-year-old miracle, that turns the white noise into music.

I still can’t handle the crying.

I did a good job of convincing myself, a couple of weeks in, that I had turned over a new leaf, that this refurbished version of myself–Mom 2.0–had finally gotten the hang of this newborn thing for our second and final run. Little Brother would cry, and I would take a deep breath, count to 10 or 30,000 (depending on the day), and calmly go address him with loving words and gentle arms.

Well, that shit fell apart pretty quick.

Last night, the little turd fell asleep after his last feeding for six hours. SIX HOURS. I woke up feeling refreshed at 3 am, wondering how much time had passed, and when I checked the clock and did the math, I frantically checked LB for signs of life: warm forehead? Check. Breathing? Check. Pulse? Check. I wanted to do a dance, I gladly fed him, I cautioned myself against optimism, but I still held out a hope that this was the start of something beautiful: more sleep. Then, two hours later, he woke up screaming. Which he repeated an hour after that. I didn’t threaten to kill myself (that was the night before), but I did throw a self-pity party right there in our bed, complete with tearfulness and “I can’t do this”es, and I imagined hopping into the car and backing out of the driveway, both middle fingers blazing.

So…I’m still me.

Which is not to say it’s not easier this time around, because the transition from 1 to 2 is much less of a train wreck than the transition from zero to one for us. As one friend put it, “the life you had before kids is already over, so that shock is gone.” Our big mistake was liking that life we had before, while parenthood, like a fine wine, is more of an acquired taste that I am convinced gets better with age. And that, like the wine, demands drinking.

During The Kid’s early (dark) days, I fretted constantly about keeping him on a schedule. If he showed signs of hunger before his three hours had lapsed, I consulted my books and sweated over how this would mess up our lives. I lost it more frequently, cried more readily, threw up my hands more often. Now I know that a schedule is a great framework, a helpful technique, and an elusive bitch. Which is why I wear an elastic on my arm to remind me of which boob is next rather than a watch. I worry a little less.

But…I’m still me.

And when he spits up off schedule, or ever, and I have to put him in his third swaddle then he pisses that and it’s 7 am and I’ve gone from doing laundry every other day to every single day, there’s a piece of me that feels a little crazy, that forgets how soon this too shall pass, that feels like this life is being inflicted upon me rather than given to me. Then I look up and see, through his blinds, that the rising sun has sprayed the sky purple and pink and that this viewing of it was not on the schedule I had devised. Would have been completely missed on that schedule. And I look down, to where LB is smiling in his sleep on his changing pad, and know that this creature whose cries expose some deep and dark part of me–he and I are going to have a story of our own pretty soon, just like the one being told about me and his brother.

Because that one…I walk outside with him in the late afternoon and the way the sun hits us, it’s blinding. All of those dark nights leading to these golden moments, this running on the driveway and lopsided grin and this purest of love and trust that he gives me with one look. The look that reminds me, convinces me, assures me that there is a love that all the other loves come from; a love that lasts longer than night and past inconvenience and through “I can’t do this.” The love that can do this. The love that has held us all, that always will.

The light out here is so bright it’s almost painful in certain spots–and so is the love. Little Brother and I will get there too. Every cry from him, every tear from me, every mistake made and moment endured, will be redeemed for the narrative, transformed from schedule to story.