No one told me that water-breaking would be so painful.

The contractions were rippling through every fifteen minutes, give or take, and it was that give or take and the varying intensity of them that left me uncertain, wondering if I should call the doctors’ answering service again and risk being that girl or go to the hospital or just wait. It was, after all, unlikely–right? The fact that I had worried about this very scenario had, I thought, been an insurance policy against it–the after-hours labor possibility, the figuring out of what to do with The Kid, the rushing to the hospital in the dark. Then I stood up and doubled over, racked with a pain from the inside out that made me feel as though I was being squeezed in half. Then came the gush of liquid, the exclamation point after all the question marks: Go! Make the calls, grab the bag, kiss the sleeping TK, get into the car.

He was born at 1:06 am, the latest I’ve been awake in quite a while. The whole thing, therefore, had a hazy, dreamlike quality to it: the mostly-empty hospital lobby and corridors, the unpopulated pre-op rooms. The dream was shattered first by my own puking, the product of worsening contractions. Then it was shattered in the OR, when they lifted him up and he cried–it was all real now. That cry led to more water, filling my eyes this time, dividing me into two in so many ways and dividing us into before and after him. Is this always what accompanies new life? This breaking of dams, of walls, of water, these waves of pain, these cries, this exhaustion, this joy? These baptisms. Can it all ever really be short of, anything other than, everything?

And the two weeks since, this adjustment of him into our lives and our lives around him, has been less of the acute disorientation of the first time around, thank God. But there is an emotional heaviness to having two, to balancing time and having to say no to one who doesn’t fully understand, and that is its own pain, the pain that comes with the joy of navigating a new shape to our family, to my heart. Few things feel as full of effort as bringing new life into the world, whether it arrives as a seven-pound human or a three-hundred-page manuscript or an idea finally coming to fruition: living our calling can feel so hard, like so much work. These newborn days of constant laundry, of dodging spit up, of broken sleep, of twenty-four-hour days–it’s so easy to get lost in it all to the point that I feel I’m holding it all up, keeping it all together, and that’s where the trouble starts. Life begins to feel less like a path than a stairway, and everything seems to depend upon my continuing to climb it.

It feels like nothing is ever enough when I’m looking to myself to be the enough. And this, I’ve learned, is no way to live. My own words, originated in a divine space and handed down through grace, echo through my heart and fingers: Enough has a name, and it is not mine.

Life may call us to climb, which may make us forget that we are held. Because the biggest work, the one thing I can’t do, is save us all–and this is everything. I can’t be the grace we need, I can only let it break through, flow on, baptizing us in its wake and setting us free from the tyranny of me. It’s true–the laundry won’t get done if someone doesn’t do it. It’s true–the baby won’t get fed if I don’t step up. So it’s easy to feel as if this whole operation needs my signature to continue its existence.

But I didn’t fill the empty space, create the stirrings of life. I didn’t break the water or heal the neck or design the smile. The weight lifts, and the climb begins to flatten.

And the things on the list–the appointments, and the shuttling around, and the feedings, the the folding–the effort begins to ebb a bit as I attend to them more as gifts than tasks–no easy thing, sure, but not impossible, either. I’m driving TK away from his OT session, where he killed it and where my initial alarm at him needing such help is vanquished with each marker held, tunnel entered, new skill learned. Things change, you know. A song comes on the radio and I realize after a minute that I’m hearing it differently. In New York, I ran to it in Central Park and along the East River, the low undertones matching my pace; now I hear the higher notes and they match TK’s smile meeting mine in the rearview mirror. Later, he leans on me harder than ever, maybe feeling the shifts himself, and this weight is the best kind: the heaviest and the deepest, and I have a moment where I can barely breathe as I take in the beauty of it. It’s not every moment, but it’s so enough. Grace, it changes my vision and my hearing and every fiber, washing over us like a baptism, turning effort into open hands and filling stairways with songs.

I remember the first year of dental school (the parts I haven’t blocked out, at least): mornings spent in a classroom and afternoons in a lab. What you might not know about your local dentist is that (s)he had to train in all sorts of ways that sound crazy now, take in all kinds of information that now seem irrelevant. For example, many of those lab afternoons were spent constructing teeth out of blue wax, ostensibly to learn dental anatomy. To me, it just felt like punishment.

We carried our lab supplies in tackle boxes that year, and you knew it was a rough day headed for a rough night when a student headed to the car with that tackle box in hand. I was often that student, because the finer points of tooth-waxing seemed to elude me (like many skills that didn’t involve reading facts in a book and regurgitating them on a test). At the end of the lab period, I would queue up behind the other kids in the line for oil to pour into our little flame lamps, which would provide the fuel needed to burn the wick that heated the instruments that melted the wax that became a tooth (or, in my case, something vaguely resembling one). I and my tackle box would then head toward the car and an evening spent at the kitchen table in my apartment, toiling over teeth.

Little Brother was due yesterday–a scheduled C-section–but instead he is a week old, and lying in his rock ‘n play feet from me, farting occasionally, while I type with still-numb fingers and a ballooning heart. Last Tuesday night, I stood up in our bedroom then doubled over as my water broke and reinforcements arrived so that The Husband and I could head to the hospital while The Kid slept unaware. LB was delivered a few hours later, at 1 am that morning, in a departure from plan–the scheduled plan, at least. Since then, life has consisted of stolen moments of sleep and food, emotional highs and lows, utter exhaustion and searing love. TK has slowly warmed up to LB, approaching him in the rocker and reaching out a hand to pat him gently before running away, laughing. And I think, as my family takes shape, these seeming random thoughts about oil and teeth and how this is so not a season of storing things up in lamps for ourselves, but living on the moment-by-moment provision of manna from heaven, bread from the sky, gifts from friends and prayers from the faithful. There’s no receiving line, no tackle box, no way to get a pre-packaged portion that is enough of what we need for the month or week or night. This is day to day grace.

There is grace in watching TK slowly, beautifully understand that this baby is here to stay; in watching him sign on gently to the fact and grow into it, seeming to understand beyond what we expected (as usual) what to do, where his place is. There is a joy in watching him not wither like I feared, but thrive in his new role. Next to LB, he appears bigger than ever, and the love I was so anxious about sharing has multiplied over them and TH. The time, it has to be split, but my heart has stretched, grows right along with each of them, as we all settle into our places in this (we hope–TUBES, YOU STAY TIED!) final family configuration, this gift of being four-sided and tired and stumbling but whole. TK arranges his blocks beside me, not stacking them like the OT recommended, and before indulging in worry I am given the gift of sight: he has grouped them according to the pictures on them, and now as always I love him more than ever as he–now as always–sees things others don’t, recognizes patterns and lives out gifts that were designed into him, and worrying gives way to the freedom that exhaustion and grace bring. He is becoming exactly who he was meant to be, and the comparatively (so far) healthy journey we’ve had with LB–yes, even this early–distills into brilliance their unique paths and reminds me of all that TK has overcome, all that has played into him being him, and makes it even more beautiful.

Yes, he’s becoming who he was meant to be–has always been becoming–and so are we, so am I. Because that becoming is a diet fed daily, not stored-up plans and filled-up calendars but drops of bread on tongue in minute-by-minute faithfulness, walking one foot in front of the other regardless of the amount of light at that particular time of day (or night). There’s a peace now that I didn’t let in when TK was born, because I was not then where I am now, who I am, and somehow (spoiler alert: REDEMPTION) that is okay. I’m still me, still rough-edged and impatient, but beneath and around it all is a growing sense of sight regarding all that can’t be seen. Which translates to slightly more of all the stuff that wasn’t there before: mainly an overarching freedom in surrender to the gifts of grace in whatever package they arrive.

Don’t get me wrong: I can still claw and blow up and melt down. But I can also be stilled, can rest, can just be. Day by day.

Yesterday morning, TK stood beside me as I sat on the couch, arranging blocks then moving to his current favorite book, and the final configuration was this: LB in front of us, then me and TK and TH on the couch. My Bible lay on one side of me and It’s Not Easy Being a Bunny on the other, and I felt an obligation to both, and here is what I can tell you about grace in the moment, about bread from heaven: a voice spoke gently into my heart and told me to read the bunny book. That sometimes children’s books, tiny hands held and bodies leaned into, are purer moments of worship than anything I could construct myself. And so I exhaled, I read the book over and over and over, and the four of us sat there, becoming, in the growing light of morning and grace.

Nope.

“He won’t play with me,” The Niece announced, standing alone beside her new Frozen dollhouse (about which The Sis had just whispered to me, “Can you believe how much that plastic piece of crap costs?”). But a few minutes later, The Kid did want to play–at least, beside her. His Y chromosome had homed in on the architectural details of the house, and he set about trying to detach various parts of it from the base. Meanwhile, The Niece just wanted to talk about the characters and their placements. When she realized what TK was doing, she began to cry.

“He’s tearing it up!” she wailed.

I understood. I can’t stand it when life’s wrecking balls–now more commonly known to me as grace–start decimating all the pretty scenes I’ve created.

And when I told her the next part–that some boys like to take things apart and put them back together, that’s just what they do, and that I would never let him break this gift she had been given–I had to wonder, once the tears subsided, if I wasn’t also talking to myself.

Because nothing in my life has been broken that either wasn’t meant to be, or wasn’t put back together better than before. And also? This difference between them, this desire to admire on the one hand and disassemble on the other, this is built into who they are. And freedom, I’m learning, is not what I thought it was; it’s not doing what we want. It’s being who we were made to be.

This understanding has not come easily, but only after dawning realizations and painful conversions, the transformations that occur less often against idyllic backdrops and more frequently in the trenches of daily life, the #nofilter reality that doesn’t get posted to Instagram, the failed recipes that never make it to Pinterest, the family moments uncaptured by cameras and absent from Facebook. These moments are early mornings and late nights, vomit and blowouts, kicked-in trashcans and thrown-across-the-room computers, tense discussions and brittle detentes. Save your “magical experience” descriptions of childbirth, please, because I’m scheduled to experience it as a sequel next week and I’ll count as magical a fine glass of wine or a sunset from a rooftop bar; the bleeding and the pain and the sweat and tears are something else altogether. But they are something else. And there is the not-so-small matter of how they lead to life.

There was a time when life, and freedom, looked like this: sleeping in, walking to Central Park, tapas and champagne at 3 pm on a Sunday just because, cans of Italian beer on a boat headed for Capri. Then being free meant sleeping in, rolling out of bed together and grabbing bagels, watching movies on the couch, picking out furniture for our new house.

This week, freedom looks like long, uninterrupted showers, dropping him off at day care with occasional tears (mine, not his), therapy visits attended, parking deck circled a dozen times, more treats than usual to compensate for an upcoming shortage of them, making a half dozen frozen dinners, sitting beside him on the couch for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse as he leans his thirty pounds fully into my belly, making him laugh at dinner, watching fall premieres together after TK’s bedtime.

And next week? Somehow, freedom will look like being opened up so new life can emerge, not feeling my legs for a couple of days, not driving for a couple of weeks or exercising for longer, glazed eyes and sleep deprivation, adding a new name to the top part of my heart’s registry, wondering if anything will ever feel “normal” again, trying to balance two where there was one. This will be life, and freedom, because he is growing within me and that is no coincidence, no accident–it is what we were meant for. It will feel like anything but being free, but then again–sometimes love feels like anything but that; sometimes victory looks like anything but that; sometimes rescue shows up with surgical knives and wrecking balls.

Because the gift that arrived two and a half years ago? The one that has been setting me free through every cry, every doctor visit, every trip through the parking deck and hour of therapy and moment of recognition, his head to my belly? There is unwrapping of it some days, wrecking by it others. But to be the wife, the mother, the holder of words that I never would have had otherwise–this is to be alive. This is what has redefined free for me, made it more terrifying and unpredictable and full. And next week* a scar will be made bigger, because life times two will have emerged from it–along with tales of freedom waiting to be told.

*Joke’s on me! I wrote this post two days ago and am posting it today from a hospital room that I share with The Husband and the brand-new Little Brother, who is set to meet TK later today.

I’m seeing the doctor weekly now, monitoring Little Brother’s progress as it is shown in centimeters dilated (NONE, dammit), measuring his heartbeat and my belly, and I feel it as the world opens up to make a space for him. It’s beautiful, painful, brutal work, arranging homecomings.

The Husband and I talk about packing our bag, and my mind is trying to turn it into a vacation: part of me is already excited about the robe and slippers I bought from Target, about the meals that will be brought to me and the cleaning up that I won’t have to do, even as I struggle with anxiety over The Kid’s transition from only child to big brother, over my impending need to balance two lives where there is now one.

Then again, he’s getting better at transitions. Maybe I am too.

These are the things the OB doesn’t measure: the moments you will spend steeped in regret over the way you handled a tantrum; the amount of tilt his head will display before spinal surgery is necessary; the way his cerebellum extends, like millions of others, just past where it’s meant to and the implications of that on speech and motor activity. The OB can’t tell you that he won’t walk until he’s seventeen months old–and he certainly won’t tell you that even that could be a sign of greatness, not weakness, considering what he had to overcome to do it.

There are some measurements, some lessons, only provided by grace.

Because no one can tell you, either, why one day your eyes will fill with tears of joy because he’s holding a marker and using it to draw–he never did that before! No one can tell you why the building across from the hospital will come to feel like a second home, three days a week, why you’ll know the names of people in the hallways and have a friend on every floor. You wouldn’t have known, would you, that the woman at the daycare in the burka who looked so foreign to you on your first day, that she will come to love your son in a way that eases your heart and mind while you are away from him, that she and his other teachers will cry on the day he leaves, and again when he comes back and says “apple” to them.

His name–James–we didn’t know until after we chose it, that it means supplanter. How perfect. Everything that came before him has been gloriously uprooted to make space for his life; for his growingly-confident run and his increasing persistence and his penetrating uniqueness. His brother’s name, I read, means protector, and we’ll see how that plays out. But for now, I like how what we’re going to call him–Will--reminds me of what grace, through him, has already taught me: that these things happen when and how they’re meant to, when they are willed to; that the ultimate plan is the best one and thank God if mine falls apart in service to it, because look at where we’ve been…and where we are.

No one could have told me that years of feeling out of place, of not belonging, were shaping me for a New York-shaped future, for life on an island that held The Husband and a new faith and deep friendships. That that is where I would find I belonged–I just hadn’t gotten there yet. No one could have told me that being a wife would mean confronting more about myself than about him, that iron sharpening iron can hurt like hell and feature moments of tension that never showed up in New York bars but would bring with them a raw beauty in the midst of ordinary living that buoys me daily and redefines faithfulness. No one could have told me that becoming a mother? Oh, God, becoming a mother. That it would, in some way, hurt all the time, but that the pain is so often indistinguishable from love that you might suspect they are two sides of the same coin, and that what this teaches you about joy and suffering will reshape your entire mindset, your life. No one could have told me that getting the room ready, making a space for them in that life, that the preparations are so insufficient for the real thing, and that making a space for them in the world, figuring them out and figuring out where they fit in–that this takes forever. Every single day of forever. No one could have told me how hard that gift would be to open, and how precious it would be once I did.

Finding a place where I would belong, it used to be encompassed by the future tense, by just the longing part. Now it is taken up with the be-ing. Home is where they are: at the moment, one room where I type with numb fingers and one where TH types, separately, because he listens to music while working and I don’t, and yet this–he–is home. And TK will look up in an hour when I go to get him, he will see me and not say “Mom,” yet, but his eyes will meet mine and we’ll both know, and his hand will grasp mine and we’ll both be exactly where we belong, and headed home.

Towels, dishes, sandals, and all the other ordinary things in our lives reveal what we are made of more quickly than anything else. –Oswald Chambers

It was the morning, which is when the contractions are least frequent but the fingers are most numb and time is the most scarce. The Kid was running around his familiar path: sidewalk, porch, and front yard, then a cutaway to the little hill on our neighbor’s side of the driveway. Said neighbor just had his yard aerated and seeded, which is a fancy way of saying it looked like a rabbit had pooped everywhere, and of course TK wanted to climb “his” hill. Up and down, up and down, muddy and muddier.

This is the difference between seeing grace and not seeing it: a child who, not long ago, would never have ventured up that hill, now conquering it endlessly, and I’m worried about cleaning the mud off his shoes before school. He’s grinning at me from the peak, and I’m smiling tightly back, wondering how much time this will take.

This is the difference between knowing redemption and not knowing it: TK ambles down the hill, sneakers sodden, and I take a breath. Put his hand on my shoulder, remove his shoes, and walk us all over to the hose. And within seconds, the mud is gone and I haven’t even cried. The world holds together another day.

There are those for whom this all comes easily: happily wiping down surfaces that are dirty, watching a cascade of water travel from sink to floor and calmly mopping it up sans emotional breakdown. Congratulations to you, my friend. We are not alike. But on this late summer morning, with the temperature just starting to drop and new life on the way, grace showed up in mud, redemption in a gush of water from a hose. Sometimes the only thing to do is just the next thing.

I’m about to go from late pregnancy to newborn days, and I asked my friend the other day to tell me something good. Repeat what she had said about how it gets easier, how it’s never quite as hard as the first time around. And she did, and I believe her? I really want  to. But there’s this problem of knowing myself, of knowing the quick temper all too well, the effect of the cry on me, the feeling of seeming totally unproductive for weeks at a time. The exit, albeit temporarily, from normal life and the entry into that dark, sleepless cave. I’m cooking and freezing dinners, folding and putting away laundry, writing and saving drafts like someone battening down the hatches pre-hurricane. I know that the one thing I want–to feel normal–will be the most elusive. Impossible, really. So let’s find the grace in that.

A mandated rest that turns out not to be very restful; a forced stillness and homebound status. They won’t even let me drive! And I think about it, how I’ve been home now–not working–for almost a year. How in that year, TK has triumphed over surgery and spasms, how we lost one pregnancy and kept another, how I’ve written more than ever, how those dark nights in the hospital room mark the date from which they determine when Little Brother will be born. Life from stillness. Maybe productivity, maybe worth, maybe life’s calling all look completely different from the picture the world provides.

I attach so much of my own worth to what I’ve accomplished in a given realm: patients seen, words written, dinners served. A house that’s pretty and clean and smells good (thank you, autumn-themed diffusers) so that my family has a warm, safe, healthy place to rest. It’s impossible to completely untangle how much of what I do is for acclaim and how much is done from a heart that already knows it’s loved. But there are times that make the untangling easier: times of rest that is not very restful, times of forced stillness. Of halted production and being only able to do the very next thing: to feed a child and keep him alive another day and that be the only thing I’ve accomplished. And yet–somehow it’s going to be everything.

I spend so much time looking for a spot to be meaningful; maybe I’m already there. I want to inject activities and words into the world that will make a difference; and his tiny shoes need the mud washed off and the poetry shows up there. The counter needs wiping. The big one could use some homemade cookies.

And with every clasp of the carseat’s belt, every bath time laugh, every shared glance over the dinner table, meaning is woven in through the ordinary and a calling is lived and grace is spoken in whispers that make a difference.

The Kid sits still for circle time now.

He does, however, have “trouble with transitions” according to his well-meaning teachers–which is really just a nice way of saying that he doesn’t like to be told what to do. When I asked about things we could be working on at home, and they provided this information, I had to laugh to myself. No kidding. Because, you know, he’s two, and, you know, his mom is thirty-seven, and we’re both going to need some time.

“I wonder where he gets that temper,” The Husband nudged me playfully one weekend when TK pitched a fit over being “transitioned” from playing on the floor to washing his hands for dinner. And it’s both funny and poignantly real, how painful it can be for us to be moved. And how, really, this is what life is.

We’re in the quiet weeks now: the laundry is done, the gear is set up, the car seats installed, and we’re waiting. My nurse will ring the doorbell one last time next week and administer my last progesterone shot, the medication designed to keep things static in there, and though a date has been set–plans in pencil!–who really knows when our family of three will give way to four, a new cry sounding through our nights and our lives taking on a different shape. I feel myself clinging to what I know, holding TK tighter as he stacks blocks on my belly, sitting beside him and smelling his head in the glider where I will rock his brother. This event brings everything, all rolled up within it: excitement over meeting him for the first time, guilt over sharing my heart, dread over sleeplessness and zombification, even a strange resentment over something we prayed and ached for finally happening.

I think TK and I are going to have to learn to deal with change.

When we saw the occupational therapist and found out what wasn’t wrong, we also learned about some things that are going on. The sensitivities that TK carries around with him (you’re welcome, kid). The proclivity he has for familiarity, something explained not by a spectrum or a syndrome but by actual anatomy: this is the way his brain works. All the studying and reading, the internet-provided, self-guided refresher courses on cerebellar function and motor planning and cortical divisions, the plunging of myself into his skull as he plunges his way through my heart, and the end of it all–or, more accurately, the now of it all–is, like T.S. Eliot said, “to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Which is to say, he was made this way. Designed. He avoids, then approaches, then warms up, then knows. He learns in his own way. (I bet Einstein did too, I think to myself.) And instead of the god of conformity that I grew up idolizing, I see the beauty of intended uniqueness, the endless possibilities all this could be fitting him for, and something inside me snaps as I stop being afraid of it and begin to embrace it. Love it.

He played with a toy this week as I talked to his speech therapist and voiced it aloud, what it means to be his advocate: how other people will misunderstand and assume, including the well-meaning cashier at Trader Joe’s who hugged him, gave him stickers, then told me her sister is “like that” and I realized she was assigning, kindly, a label to him that actually doesn’t apply. That this will probably occur often at least until he speaks, and maybe past then–I remember an eighth-grade teacher of mine asking if something was wrong with me because I stared into space (hindsight reveals she was probably hungry and in need of a cigarette. Also, she was an ass). Some people do that–they stare off into space because they see something beyond. And I’ll be damned if I try to train that out of him.

I love that we have a pastor who talks about Alabama football in one breath, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in the next, and I love how that little triangle sandwiches love and belonging right in the middle. How the need for a home is ingrained in us, how we have got to fit in somewhere. I love how faith, how the seeing more, is the only system that reflects design–and that design is the only way to fully explain these nuances that make us each who we are, that constitute a fitting and a calling and a belonging to something bigger than just us. I love that in the narrative of faith, life is an exodus: a journey home even as we have home with us, so that we’re always headed somewhere even as we know this place for the first time. I love that there is bread and wine for that journey, the holy enough being put into our hands every moment, the perceptible and imperceptible changes that make us who we are and take us where we’re going.

I love that being his mother is making me embrace TK for all he is while teaching me to be myself, setting us both free as we walk a life that is one change after another, held by a love that is perfectly changeless.

Three years ago, I was washing these clothes for the first time. They were pristine, tags still on, and I imagined the tiny feet and arms that would fill them; admired the ducks and trains that decorated them. They were so cute.

I washed those same clothes earlier this week, folded them and put them away in Little Brother’s dresser–stains and all. They may be worse for the wear, but I’d like to think I’m better for it.

And maybe they aren’t really worse, either. What’s so great about pristine, anyway? Each stain tells a story, a bout of spit-up that we both survived, a diaper explosion that didn’t do us in, a leaky bottle that we escaped unscathed. Before I had a child, I was an expert on children. Now I’m an expert on my child–but expert looks less like “knowing it all” and more like knowing him, being his advocate, holding his hand.

This all looks so much different than I thought it would.

“All” includes marriage: a memory leaped into my head this week of the period of time before I knew The Husband, back when I had heard about him through mutual friends–this guy who lived in London and was moving back to New York and was going to meet us at church this Sunday. A nice guy. My future husband. Then I saw him leaning against the wall at Hunter College, accepted a beer from him at the Alabama bar, and he seemed harmless, which was a nice change from most of the guys I’d known. Now I step over his socks and hear him singing upstairs to The Kid and wake up beside him and don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the unexpectedness, the beauty of life’s surprises, of the things we never planned for and didn’t see coming.

At some point, the page between not knowing and knowing is turned, and though there will always be some veil of mystery keeping us from knowing everything, some grace that protects us from carrying that weight, there is the Then and Now. There is the year of not getting pregnant (or not staying that way), the year that ended in a major surgery followed by a positive test. There is the six-week period of muscle spasms and doctor-calling and medicine-loading and hand-wringing, of thinking it was all for nothing, followed by an upright (mostly) head and finally turning left. There is the “apple” and babbling and there will be the every-other-word too. There are the rampant kicks and contractions and there will be the brand new face, the warm weight in our arms.

There was the appointment last week, with occupational therapy, for TK to be evaluated. And for once, there was the “this isn’t a problem for him” and the sending us on our way, followed by an ENT appointment yesterday of the same nature. Were all of the diagnoses that are available today, available when I was a kid, I have no doubt I’d have racked up a few of them, the variations from normal that put you in a box slapped with a label. And sometimes the labels are helpful, when it comes to early intervention and therapy. But sometimes, what you need more than a label is someone who knows you. Who sees you. Who watches as you arrange the blocks rather than stack them and, rather than giving you a code for insurance, calls you a dreamer. Who hears “apple” and interprets “cookie.” Who observes all the things other people call quirks and recognizes them as pieces of herself, maybe some of the weirder pieces but pieces nonetheless–and knows you’re going to be okay, not because some doctor confirmed it but because grace whispers it. Because grace designed it. Because grace doesn’t allow for anything but okay.

He doesn’t talk, but he stares at my belly, places his head there, and has chosen these past few weeks to become a mama’s boy, reaching for my hand and rushing to hug me. It’s like he knows. And after he’s gone to bed, I call that nice guy over and have him look out the window with me at the same sun that set in New York, now setting through the trees across the street from our home. The pages turn, each one more full than the last.

The moment occurred on I-85 somewhere between Atlanta and Montgomery, as The Kid and I headed west toward The Mom and Dad’s house for a few days while The Husband was away on a business trip. TK was talking to himself in the backseat, the radio was playing a good song, and everything (for a day that began in tears when I heard the door shut behind TH and feared being alone) just felt good. Peaceful. On a road trip with a two-year-old behind me, and a pre-newborn in my belly, this is no small thing.

I turned, looked at TK, squeezed his knee. He stopped talking and grinned at me. I thought of all the road trips before this one, of cries from the carseat and Goldfish passed back, adjustment of sunshade and mounting frustration. Of how hard it can all be sometimes: how I can make it that way, but also? How life can. How the overwhelming weight of this parenthood venture can feel like one big complication. How right now, with the road clear and TK playing happily inches away from me, nothing felt complicated. Two and a half years, unexpected struggles, pain and healing, and I realized, finally, in an open clearing, that I don’t just love this kid–I really, really, like him.

Nothing else starts out that way, with the love first and the like second. It was a marker that TH was different: the fact that, despite only meeting him days before and talking to him for a few minutes, I actually liked being around him. Strangers are typically guilty until proven innocent with me, but I immediately liked this guy. Friendships start out like that, with a liking, a likeness, before plumbing the deeper terrain of love. But with a child, in the ever-complex land of parenting a life, we are called to love first. And it’s a brutal, heavy, asking-all kind of love that can leave us breathless in ways good and bad. We are made to give all up front, then watch as they ebb gently away into independence and turn into real people.

TK is becoming himself, and I’m finally letting him, finally not fighting it or directing it or demanding of it what it’s not. And it turns out that I like that guy he’s becoming. It’s a comforting revelation that I don’t take for granted. I mean, I don’t like many people.

We stopped at a Chick-Fil-A in LaGrange, Georgia, and after he chaperoned me to the bathroom, I accompanied him to the indoor playground. He ran up to, smiled at, a three-year-old boy who was game to play but did ask me why TK doesn’t talk. My shrug belied the complexity of the answer but also honored the truth: it’s okay. Because he will. I’d love if it were tomorrow, but for now, he communicates via the word apple and sings and laughs, and this is what we get–and it’s closer to everything than to nothing. We were told “goodbye” by the other patrons, encouraged to have a safe trip, even invited to a family pumpkin patch nearby in the fall, and my cynicism gave way to enjoyment as we walked to the car, TK’s hand in mine, his brother stomping healthily away at my bladder. It is all so much closer to everything than nothing.

For the next few days, we were coddled and cared for, fed and cleaned up after. TK and I sat beside each other at the breakfast table, each somebody’s kid, and ate together. He occasionally cast conspiratorial glances at me, shot me the side-eye, from under his lashes, and when I laughed he’d do it again. He explored the backyard and I explored Us magazine, and he’d run back inside to me, burying his face in my lap and sitting beside me on the couch. I uttered so many prayers of thanks–not least for this time together, the two of us, before he becomes a big brother and I a mother of two, before the family dynamic shifts and I become a (temporarily) sleepless version of myself. I felt myself fill with the simplicity of just him and me, of the non-fraught moments that are all too rare.

On the drive back, he played with his feet and I sang from the front seat. I thought about what road trips used to be: the ninety-minute trek between home and college, the ninety-minute flight between the South and New York, the single bag and solitude. Yeah, I make it harder than it has to be, but life is just that hard sometimes. When it is, though, I have to tell myself, whether it’s tearful drives or doctors’ waiting rooms or miles-long runs turned into minutes-long walks–I have not been reduced to this. I have grown into it. There was just me for a while, then there was TH. Then TK, and soon, Little Brother. And like his kicks from within, like the sound of breathing next to me once we make it back home, like the babbling from the back seat all remind me, I am not alone–and this is always, always a gift. A gift that, even in solitude, I’ve always had–the gentle tugs of grace calling me, pulling me along, all my life as they do now.

Man, you wouldn’t believe the most amazing things that can come from…some terrible nights.

I spent my thirty-first birthday on a lovely toilet in Positano, Italy.

I woke up that morning with a pain in my stomach, and by the time the four of us hit the beach, I knew things were headed downhill. I was the victim of a twenty-four hour stomach virus, and of course the twenty-four hours affected were the ones spanning my birthday. This year, I woke up on my thirty-seventh birthday mouth-breathing through a throat on fire, the victim of a cold virus that The Kid picked up his first week back in day care. I spent the day filling Kleenex and fielding contractions.

The next day, however, was great. It just goes that way sometimes.

And now, four years (to the day) into marriage and almost three into parenthood, I consider all the expectations I carried into each venture. How clueless I was about what it really takes to build a life with someone–to truly love someone. It’s beginning to make sense why I’m not given the whole picture up front, why the days and years ahead so often remain shrouded in mystery and unfold moment by moment instead of all at once. This kind of grace must be lived out in the seconds, in the slow revolutions and rhythms of each day, to remain what they are meant to be: gifts.

I think about what got us here. How, that same summer six years ago and a few weeks before Italy, I was standing on the porch of a bar named Sharky’s in the Outer Banks with my family, waiting for the pounding rain to abate so we could run back to the house, and my phone rang with a call from The Husband, who was then just A Friend, and a part of me knew that because he was on the line, the chaotic joy of this moment was now complete. It would take five months for me to tell him, a year and a half for us to both get there, and what would have happened if I had known, standing in the rain on the phone, that in two years we’d be married on a beach ourselves? What would my heart have missed in the meantime–the year and a half of trust-building friendship, of knowing a faithfulness greater than my own demands?

And then, of course, there is TK.

When I go into Little Brother’s room now to pray for him, I sit on the glider where I prayed for TK. I know what humbled really means as I sit there, and it’s not the way we typically mean it, as if we’ve been put in our place; rather, everything has been put in its place. This shuffling of plans and priorities by a Greater Love has undone and re-ordered the terrain of my heart, and I can utter my prayers while knowing the true reality of who he will be remains shrouded in mystery beyond what I ask for, and this feels less like a threat than it used to and more like an oath. Like entering into a holy contract full of messy moments and mistakes that are covered by forgiveness and held by redemption. The prayers are less specific this time around–I listen more, demand less, and wait for the gift to unfold.

None of that would have happened without the mystery, the gift, that is TK. The moments spent on those damn developmental charts, on the internet mentally scoring questionnaires, adding up numbers to try and define him in moments of fear as words with scary implications bounced around my head. Wondering about what speech delay implies about intelligence, aloofness about autism, jumping to a Worst Case Scenario as if to protect myself from what might come. Meanwhile, he puts puzzles together on the floor beside me, redirects me to where our car is actually parked in the deck because I forgot and he remembered, and has taken to running up to me every time we’re reunited–whether after school or dinner–and hugging my legs fiercely, placing his head on the bump that is his brother, looking up at me and grinning. And I realize that there are myriad things that will define this boy, but a chart is sure as hell not one of them.

Diagnoses and definitions abound in this searching-for-certainty world, and sometimes the greatest offense can be remaining an individual; following the beat of your own drum and a faith that defies control but offers so much more in its stead.

I’ve placed a mental asterisk beside so many things: *once TK speaks; *once our family is complete; *once the surgery is over; *once everything is easier. As if life begins when the asterisk disappears–but the asterisk is mystery, and is life. And one day, it will lift, only to be replaced by another, so while I wait for viruses to pass and give thanks that they will, I also know that there is only one certainty that swallows everything else up, and it’s hard to trust that when sons are dying at home and abroad and hate is more of a treasured commodity than love and asterisks remain. But believing it–believing in the something more that awaits, even as the rain pours, it feels like an oath, made to me and by me–like entering into a holy contract.

There was some concern among the powers-that-be at The Kid’s day care last week over his behavior during circle time. It was expressed to me, in hushed, grave tones, that he had “not participated” in the fifteen-minute endeavor. That he “didn’t sit still.” That he–gasp!–“did his own thing.”

You’re damn right he did.

I wasn’t so flippant when I heard the report: as a lifelong people-pleaser, a recovering approval addict, I felt the old familiar knee-jerk reaction: an urge to smooth things over on his behalf, to curry favor for him. I carried this emotional load with me as I picked him up from his classroom. I carried it and him to the car, where I strapped him in then cried from the front seat and he babbled happily from the back, not knowing or caring about the torrents of feelings I navigate daily as I struggle to be his be his advocate while retaining perspective and maybe even some modicum of objectivity.

As if that last part is possible.

I let the earlier evaluation seep in over the rest of the day; let it eat at me and grow larger until it became a shadow on my heart, a force larger than life, and I created scenarios and dialogue in my mind–heated conversations spent defending him. I projected this circle time misadventure far into the future, imagined him misunderstood and “outside the circle” years down the road. I went a little crazy, I guess. It’s not a long trip.

The next morning, after a fitful sleep, I prayed for resolve–and a lack of tears–as I took him back. This time, I talked to his teachers. They gave me a different story–a front-lines rather than administrative version, a more patient retelling and a fairer opinion. I felt relief wash over me. But a few minutes later, from the treadmill, I still prayed for a seated circle time.

It’s not lost on me, in these moments of frustration, of non-conforming, of delayed speech, that there is a great work being performed on my heart. The perfect incongruity of it just reeks of grace, when I remember that I am the beloved and not a target: the fact that I, a rehabilitating pleaser, am the mother of a child who “does his own thing.” Who practices the giving of zero f—s on a daily basis when it comes to standardized timelines and expectations. Whose aloofness runs through and through rather than being localized, like mine, to the exterior as a defense mechanism. Who embodies, carries out, the title of this blog.

It’s the unexpectedness in life that is so jarring, the coming-from-nowhere that they don’t cover in books I read, on milestone charts. “GET READY!” seemed to be the battle cry proclaimed from the pages of the tomes I picked up to teach me how to raise the boy I’d always hoped for. I was warned about chaos, dirt, irrationality, a Pigpen-like whirlwind of constant activity. Well, suck it, books. Maybe those days will come, but what we have now, instead, is a thoughtful, measured creature. A guy who spends considerable units of time exploring the underside of tables and chairs, examining tools closely, stacking blocks carefully. The scant amount of child-proofing we performed seemed superfluous from the beginning, as he watched his own head without my shrill plea and grabbed for a hand before attempting a step down. He’s not the boy in the books–he’s my boy. And that can be a flood of relief or fists clenched tightly, depending on the moment. But what it always is, what I must remember it always is, is a gift.

Something inside you breaks, necessarily, when you have a child. When you must come to terms with the fact that you love anyone more than yourself. A sense of control, a wall of vulnerability, a shield against weakness–it all crumbles as this love grows and your own well-being is forever, inextricably, wrapped up in theirs. This is the price of loving. This is the gift of losing yourself within something greater.

The next day, Day Two, I ventured through the door of TK’s classroom. I asked his teachers how it went. And it turned out he had sat through circle time and enjoyed it. I was thrilled, of course, and have been as he continues his steady ascent up the behavioral charts. But what I remind myself of–during pauses on the stairs and moments of independence and the still-not-speaking and his own unique way of approaching the world–is that, circle time or not, he is exactly who he was made to be, and becoming it more every day. And, in one of the biggest winks of love, one thing he was made to be is a wrecking ball to the demands of my own limited heart, a heart that must have rooms opened up and chambers revealed in order to love more fully and be more fully loved. Because sometimes I’m the one who needs to learn to sit still. He is living out his giftedness without even realizing it, which makes me wonder–how much might the rest of us be doing the same? Living as conduits for tiny miracles, not because of who we are but because of what grace is.