“‘Maybe sometimes–the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want it to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?…Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to [a] long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly…But–maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me.’“  Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

It ended up being the perfect spot for the collage: right there over the changing table. Isn’t it funny how things can accidentally end up in their perfect place?

The halo-centric masterpiece was finally hung this weekend, thanks to The Husband, and though The Kid’s remaining changes on that table are hopefully few (potty-training, here we come!…?), there will be time enough to battle flailing legs, protesting screams, and the occasional laugh all while gazing at the story it tells: the weeks of what-we-never-wanted, harder-than-we-could-have-known, more-than-we-ever-asked-for. I look at it when I’m feeling weighed down by my own failures, especially at the end of the day: the flashes of temper, the heaving sighs, the weight of it all, terrible and glorious, bearing down on me and turning the days into minutiae when I won’t let them be more. I think about what was hard then, and what is now, and wonder how I can forget that there’s no comparison?

From the other side, the after it, the view is almost too much to bear. TH squeezes little feet into pajamas and I rub vitamin E into scars and the pictures threaten to undo me: the hours after the surgery, tubes and half-closed eyes, three days on a hospital bed. And the grin that none of it could take away. When I look at that, then down at him, the kicks and screams–they aren’t fun, but they sure look different. From here, from Now.

And it colors all of life, the Before and After, the waves that feel like they’re displacing us only to land us in the perfect place. Standing in a north Atlanta gym, singing the same song that echoed in a New York City auditorium, the accompaniment more acoustic now, less jazz, but the words the same. Five years and a lifetime later, and it feels like yesterday: awaiting the words about grace that always ended at the cross, stepping out into the Manhattan evening and down into the subway, dinner with friends like TH. Now it’s more words on grace but they’re followed by lunch next to a highchair, pouring milk into a cup and wiping off tiny hands, rushing home for nap time. So much more to do can feel like so much less freedom, but if I had wandered those city streets any longer I would have just gotten lost; instead, I ended up here–and that can feel hard or it can feel full. Can feel right.

This weekend there were multiple meals out, multiple highchair extravaganzas spent shoveling food down my mouth and wiping it off his, and there’s the before and after of motherhood: the distracted, never-concluded conversations, the short-term memory lapses that make the twenty-four hours allotted to Drew Barrymore’s character in 50 First Dates look like an eternity. These messy blessings, these mixed bags of highs and lows and easy and hard, to think that I was headed for them the whole time: running around Central Park, waking up to hangovers and regret, winning spelling bees and failing to know my identity, falling down and not seeing that there was always someone to pick me back up.

I think about it now, at the end of days when I actually didn’t screw up too badly and at the end of days when I know I did, when I beat myself up over a look I gave or a tone I took and stretch it out over the coming years, wondering how I’ll ever be the wife, mother, person I want to be; need to be. And then I remember that I won’t. That I wasn’t that person back then, either, but look where I landed anyway. From where I stand, I can look over and see the same person beside me every night. I can look down and see the grin that is half-mine and all-gift. I can take the cup and the bread in a different room and know that, like the grace they represent, they will never stop filling, never stop being poured out. Never stop being all I need. From here, I can see that the bread, the wine, the narrative of my life, speaks a language of forgiveness, of being enough when I am not. From there to here is a story, a song, and its loudest note is redemption.

The spiritual life counteracts the countless divisions that pervade our daily life…Living the spiritual life means living life as one unified reality.   Henri Nouwen

Vacation is over, and it’s time to get back to the grind of real life in the suburbs. Which, for me over the past few weeks, has meant bearing up under the deadly weight of that most reviled of activities.

I’ve had to choose paint colors.

I realize most people don’t face difficulties like this–the trips to Sherwin Williams, the agonizing over color swatches that turns into agonizing over samples splashed onto the wall. I’ve been brave, but it’s been hard. And The Kid has been no help.

But I think we’re there. Once I decide between Snot and Phlegm for the baby’s nursery, it’s off to the races.

Seriously, after everything we’ve been through the past few months, you would think that choosing paint colors would be a reward, a walk-in-the-park period of luxury. But since there’s not a gift my fallen heart can’t turn into a burden, I’ve spent most of this process cursing everything from Cucumber to Colonial Revival and lamenting why, why, I must be faced with the eternal punishment of so many options.

I will never run out of opportunities to display ingratitude.

But, thankfully, grace will never run out of opportunities to show me its gifts.

There are the days when I forget it all: when I forget that there were three nights in the hospital, seven added pounds of weight, twice-a-day pin-site cleanings, sponge baths, midnight vomiting, bleeding instead of a belly. There are days when I wonder resentfully if I opened up a Waffle House franchise in my kitchen and no one told me, when I curse the backaches that come with pregnancy and picking up toys, when the sun is too bright and my diamond shoes are too tight.

http://youtu.be/aVsPyaLSzJM

Then I’ll look up at the sky, full of impending rain dammit, while I’m on a walk with TK and notice that the slate gray color above me would be a great choice for our entry way. And to think, I’d never considered it before, so enamored am I of all the sapphires and aquas of a cloud-free day. I’ll lift TK up from his changing pad after a grueling diaper-changing session and realize how much lighter he is without the halo, how much closer I can hold him, and I’ll pray that I never stop realizing it. I’ll hear him say “mama” as The Husband leads him up the stairs and know that when this utterance stops being rare, I may not feel this surge of excitement and joy. But now, with this boy of few words on my hands, I do. I get to.

Some moments can be every color of the rainbow if we let them.

My friend emailed me last week with a recap of an experience that allowed her to witness another woman’s path of difficulty, and it left my friend feeling broken on this person’s behalf and over her own ability to miss all the good stuff. And I wrote back that I was turning this home-improvement venture into Sophie-at-the-concentration-camp over a couple of shades of green, so…yeah. I get it. Then I got TK up from his “nap” and within a few minutes was witnessing a meltdown of epic proportions. A few minutes later, I heard myself saying, “No, you may not take the batteries and Worcestershire sauce to the playground.” This is much of what my days are made of now: things I can’t believe I’m saying, moments I never saw coming. And the struggle for so much of life, so much of us, is not recovering from surgery every day as it is recovering from blindness.

We head outside into a cloudless afternoon, and I look up and find that this clear blue is beautiful, but contains shades of gray that I never noticed before. And that neither would be as beautiful, would be itself, without the other. TK babbles from his stroller, and I hear for the first time not a lack of words, but that his voice? It actually sounds like music.

But let us be thankful for every little glimpse of the truth that we can recognize and trust that there is always more to see–always.             Henri Nouwen

This past weekend, The Husband and I fled town for the second weekend in a row, this time to attend the wedding of a friend. The ceremony marked the culmination of the pairing-off of a core group of us girls who stuck together in New York City over half a decade: eating, drinking, praying, dating, laughing together as the days turned into weeks and the months into years. We watched each other make mistakes and try to fix them; we crossed the Atlantic and made scenes in another country; we sat beside each other on a floating bar on the Hudson while one of us, who had finally found her One, listened as the other expressed her fear that she never would.

On Sunday, all of us sat in the shade of a tree whose branches swayed in the light breeze and watched as it turned out differently.

It was the end of something and the beginning, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of a story taking shape, questions being answered after years of wondering and waiting, promises fulfilled and more made. Two of us sat with rounded middles, expecting her first and my second days apart, and I felt tears well up at the faithfulness of a storyteller who transcends dead ends and broken hopes and surgical interventions and even works through them to relate the best version possible, despite our insistence that we know the way it should go.

I should be clear: it’s not the best version possible because we got the One or the stick was positive or the operation worked or Carrie ended up with Big; that’s not what makes the author good, either. It’s the best–and he is good–because it went the way it was written by the only one who knows how to write it.

A few days later, my parental vacations finally put to a stop, I sat in a friend’s kitchen as the three kids between us ate their lunch and we talked. “Little blessings,” we muttered, laughing, as the boys covered themselves with orange cheese dust and the girl shouted from her highchair. We made the comparison–again—to sharing lunch with a trio of drunks as we shoved food in our own mouths and attempted conversation in between attempts to modulate the chaos. We both marveled over how far The Kid has come in the last few weeks, and I watched as he accepted a toy from his “friend” (the title we bestow upon other children by sheer coincidence of their parents being friends of ours) and played happily, babbling away. I have to admit, it does get lost on me sometimes, this blessing of uneventful days, of slow-but-steady improvement as I watch him develop at his own pace; but then I get a glimpse of just how miraculous it is that we are sitting here eating lunch with friends and I know:

Because of grace, our stories are always headed towards these endings and beginnings, these sacred moments at altars and dinner tables. All leads to the holy when love is the writer.

And there is either a comfort or great resentment to be found in this–that the story will be told, that things will happen, the way they are meant to, whether we beat our fists against it and demand a different, or timelier, outcome, or whether we rest in the path we are on. The difference lies in who or what we believe is at the center of it all. And the difference becomes the gulf between bitterness and freedom, fighting and sailing, and I’ve known both.

Every time I fear for TK and worry about how what he’s been through may hold him back, when he’ll use a word other than apple, or a hundred other things, the glimpse sneaks in. The sailing begins. He runs from me, laughing, and we collapse in a heap on the floor. He tries out a new sound. He reaches out a hand and accepts a toy. He eats a new food. The sacred shows up in the ordinary, and I wonder why I spend so much time afraid when the story is unfolding all around me.

I read it this morning, about watering and settling, softening and blessing–words that would have passed right by me if not for the storms I’ve known. The ways love showed up in the form of a torrential downpour, and how strange it is now that there are moments in the sunlight when I sometimes miss the gray shades that only show up in the rain, the intimacy and clarity that accompany the difficulty. I wonder, when I’m not in that season–when I’m past the searching of NYC or the recovery after surgery or the waiting for the stick to be positive–if, though things are easier, I am somehow less. And I see it in the poetry before me: that the storms bring the shifting and force the softening, but after them is when the settling happens, when the softness gives way to new life and we finally begin to take the shape we were meant for, the shape of what’s holding us.

The Husband and I try to get back to the spot where we were married–known to everyone else as 30A–at least once a year; twice if we’re feeling lucky. Our planned getaway back in February was preempted by The Kid’s halo removal and subsequent spasm nightmare, but we were able to reschedule it for this past weekend. 

Before I had a child, I talked big about…a lot of things. In particular, the prioritization of Couple Time and Date Nights and Adult Vacations. Now I see them all as more important than ever–and more difficult to achieve. In this particular instance, we hadn’t spent significant time away from TK since the long, dark tunnel that was his surgery and recovery, and I was nervous. It turns out that–even without spinal surgery–leaving a child you love is more painful than expected. But when you reach the point where U2’s “With Or Without You” is the song you’d pick to dedicate to your toddler were Delilah to ever ask; when proximity-induced blindness makes it all too easy to miss your blessings and your eyes are closed to your own life; when a sense of humor begins to be known as the One That Got Away–sometimes, clarity shows up in the form of a long, dark tunnel. But sometimes–and I am partial to these times–it shows up as a trip to the beach.

So I threw my maternity jeans into my suitcase and TH and I headed south, dropping off TK (and my lengthy How To Take Care of Him typed list of instructions) with The Mom and Dad. We cued up some Louis C.K. and discussed what we would do with time to relax. Because if there’s anything that TH and I thrive on, it’s the opposites of chaos: serene pools, crystal oceans, gluttonous dinners, resort communities full of pastel-colored houses.

Our doughnut-filled mornings, leisurely bike rides, waterside book immersions, and toddler-free two-day existence felt unnaturally wonderful. By some stroke of luck, there was live music surrounding us nearly all the time (more charming when it was a jazz quartet on a pavilion than when it was an overheard construction worker belting out Spanish love songs near the pool). The weather was perfect. We ate next to the ocean and talked about where we want to live over the next few years and eventually end up instead of “I forgot to thaw the chicken out for dinner” and “Could you empty the diaper genie?” I didn’t clean the kitchen once.

I sat out on our balcony on Saturday afternoon, reading my book and listening to a wedding band warm up, and felt the but approaching. The but this isn’t real life. But it’s easy to be happy in paradise. But what about gratitude in the every day? Because we’re going to be going back, you know. And I put down my novel and turned to Nouwen, my current grace-allotted sober companion. He told me what that long, dark tunnel had been whispering for its entire length: “The source of our suffering becomes the source of our hope.”

And in that sun-drenched moment, after a long-in-many-ways winter, I considered the life I lead–the life of a we now–and the never-ending tendency of ingratitude to accompany daily monotony. How I miss the forest and the trees daily by turning the trees into obstacles when they are actually gifts I’ve waited on my whole life.

Back in that real life, that toddler-consumed dailyness, I read Nouwen again and find myself constantly praying for patience, for understanding. Endless repetitions as in danger of losing their meaning as I am in danger of losing my sight. I find that, when I open my eyes, I am constantly being invited into opportunities to grow into the answers I seek. Outside my window, there are two trees with a hammock suspended between them. There is a toddler on the monitor dissolving into laughter at something only he knows. I can inhabit these moments, but only if I want to. Only if I choose to. 

It’s true that joy can be reduced by brokenness. I think about friends who wait to see how their hopes to start a family will play out, and know that my own excitement can never not be diminished by a factor of their longing. But I also know that joy can be amplified by brokenness, by the daily struggles large and small–surgeries and tantrums–and I realize that there is so much life that we just write off because it hurts. There are so many relationships that are squandered because of difficulties, labeled “growing apart”, when really? I think these moments are actually us growing into each other. Moments in the hammock, moments at the diaper genie, moments of food thrown and messes made, moments mid-tantrum, moments on pristine beaches and mundane couches, all stretching us into who we are meant to be so we can be big enough for each other.

My life may be summed up by the fact that I go to the mall for eye appointments. On Sunday. During nap time. That’s where I was headed last week, and when I was taken back by the guy in scrubs who would do my “pre-testing”, it became quickly clear that I was dealing with the aspiring-comedian type. You know the drill: snide comments followed by a long stare to make sure you heard him/got the joke. Anything other than “fine” or “good”‘ as an answer to the “And how is yours?” I felt obligated to reply when he asked how my day was going. News flash, buddy: I don’t want to be here. So let’s cut the chit chat and you can focus on doing your job.

After I completed the second test, he asked if my eyes “always go back and forth like that.” “Yep,” I told him. “It’s called nystagmus.” I felt my defenses rising, born of lifelong explanations and insecurities. “I could’ve used a warning for that,” he said, to which I replied, “Oh, is it not in my chart?” All faux politeness with an unmistakable edge of stank thrown in. Thirty-six years of carrying this trait around, and I still get reduced to rough edges and self-consciousness when it’s noticed.

The next day, I finally put together the collage documenting The Kid’s halo experience while he refused to sleep upstairs. We headed out to the park, where yet another child asked about his collar. I can’t fault the youth as much for their lack of delicateness, but that doesn’t stop my hackles from going up on TK’s behalf, imagining into the future how this neck fiasco will play out. How much he will have to explain. How often he will be celebrated for what he has risen above, collage-like, and how often he will be treated the opposite–with points or stares.

And when I think about that for the 0.2 seconds I can before getting angry/weepy, something strange happens. I think about my own eye thing and feel a profound gratitude for it–an unfamiliar reaction to what has felt like a plague my whole life. Because when TK comes to me with his insecurities or frustration over his personal affliction, I can tell him I have a Thing too. And that the truth is, we all do, it’s just that some people’s are easier to hide.

What I’ve found, though, is that when we seek to hide a part of ourselves, other stuff–good stuff–gets thrown in too. Vulnerability. Sensitivity. Sense of humor. We can’t hide ourselves without paying a price, and that price is being known.

The Bible-toting set, we love to quote Paul’s words on weakness and strength, But the interpretation is usually limited to those weaknesses that include a limit, an element of control, a lack of personal stigma. We prefer to hide the kinds of things associated with fears of being exposed. Qualities that aren’t as easily declared as prayer requests among groups–the things about ourselves beyond our propensity for speeding and our too-infrequent praying.

I’m afraid I’m a terrible parent because I can’t stop losing my temper.

I’m afraid my depression is going to push everyone away and leave me alone.

I’m afraid I’m not loved because my life is a disaster.

I’m afraid I’m going to fail.

“Our brokenness reveals something about who we are,” writes Nouwen. “Our sufferings and pains are not simply bothersome interruptions of our lives; rather, they touch us in our uniqueness and our most intimate individuality.”

I think about all the times I’ve let the weakest and worst parts of myself become confirmations of worthlessness, of failure, of unlovability. And then I remember the times I’ve refused to hide them–when I’ve spoken them, shared them, written them–and that there was always a community of others feeling the same thing. That’s when weakness and strength become more than theories and platitudes. As though grace were waiting to take me under its wing with a piece of itself perfectly fitted to my shattered edge, my wonky segment. Brokenness becoming part of a puzzle that ends not with condemnation, but invitation. Affliction as gift.

We were absent from church for almost four months. A literal season of our lives without Sunday morning sermons, songs, greet-your-neighbors. The Kid’s surgery dominated our inability to attend, and mixed in with that were morning sickness and exhaustion. But on Palm Sunday–the day commemorating a triumphal entry that occurred on a donkey–we piled into the Honda and finally made it back.

There were two seats next to a couple who had brought us dinner the week before. TK was safely ensconced in the nursery, and it seemed there had been a place reserved for us too.

It was kind of fun playing hooky for a while: no rushing around to get somewhere (sort of) on time; no tears at nursery drop-off; no crowds at the grocery store. But the pull to be back in a community outweighed even our tendencies toward introversion. True to form, I felt the weight of tears threaten to spill over my eyelids for much of the service. Every song, every reminder of truth, every moment of Communion felt like a homecoming.

A dear friend recently sent me a copy of Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, and it’s one of those books you have to put down almost every other sentence to let the earth-shattering simplicity of its truth sink into your deepest places. I find it entering my thoughts throughout the day, like the best books do, and challenging my thinking and living. Nouwen writes about what it means to belong, and how the knowledge of belonging changes the way we live. “Deep friendship is a calling forth of each other’s chosenness and a mutual affirmation of being precious in God’s eyes,” he writes, and the statement both shows me why deep friendship is so rare and how far I have to go in believing in that chosenness myself. With all my traveling along the road of grace in recent years, I still battle–daily–the inclination to interpret how loved I am from the circumstances that surround me.

Another friend said recently, “It’s like I have to learn over and over that things are going to happen the way they’re supposed to–not the way I think they should.” Amen. Over and over and over. TK’s unique pattern of development means that my fingers are nearly pulled off daily as he leads me around, communicating without words, and his frustration is mirrored by my own when we struggle to understand each other. Having a child who is both intelligent and speech-delayed makes communication tricky–and not just between us. I have a feeling I will be “explaining” him to people for a while as I struggle to pave a path of understanding and find the best spots for him–the places where he belongs. I struggle with patience; with wanting this part of his development to hurry up, for the day when “apple” won’t be his word for everything and the finger-pulling abates. Then I slow down and breathe and watch him and know that Today will never happen again; that I am wishing away a piece of the puzzle that will add up to the wholeness of him.

And I know that, for my own part, I have to believe that I am beloved to show him that he is.

There is a crucial element that transformed church from a dirge to a celebration for me; that converts daily life from a monotony into a miracle; that changed me from a rule-keeper to a story-teller. I suspect that this element is what is, steadily, turning me from performer into beloved. I know what that element isn’t, and it isn’t perfection. It isn’t adherence to my agenda. It isn’t absence of difficulty. It is grace.

I watch TK’s days unfold, and there are moments when we laugh together and moments when we don’t. There are moments when I feel like I’m doing okay with this motherhood thing and moments when I feel like I’ve failed at it irreparably. There are moments when I think I’m going to steal away in the dead of night and moments when I guess I could stay awhile. And I realize that every second I spend wanting to have already arrived is another second I take away from the beauty of an exodus, of redemption. Grace means that there is a place for us right where we are even as we are headed to the home it ultimately provides. Grace means that we already, always, belong. All of us.

The donkey story of Palm Sunday–I never knew what it really meant until this year. Then I read this:

In the Ancient Near East, a king entered cities riding on a warhorse in order to convey his military power, particularly when he was entering into newly conquered cities where his rule may have been regarded as illegitimate or met with suspicion or outright rejection. The exception to this custom was when a beloved king entered his own capital city. There he would ride in on a donkey — the benevolent king.

I always thought it was sort of a contrived act of humility–“I’m not too good for a donkey, see?”–and now I see the real message was, “Here I am. I’m back. Back among friends. I choose you.” An act of the beloved toward his beloved, and a reflection of the movement of grace in my life: not conquering, not galloping, but steadily pushing forward, finding the best spots for me–the places where I belong.

When I was pregnant with The Kid, I wrote a novel (installments can be found here!) called The Growing Season. It began as a story about the ambivalence faced by a woman approaching the birth of her first child. Coincidentally. I tackled my own feelings as I wrote: anticipation, fear, excitement, dread. I was concerned with such monumental changes as not going out to dinner every weekend and becoming sleep-deprived. I never once wrote about tilted vertebrae or neurosurgical outcomes.

TK, present day, has appeared to enter a strong recovery phase. He is wearing a therapy collar part-time and tilting his head less in general. He’s happier, and so are we. As I pushed his stroller out to the car today after lunch and a carousel ride with friends at the mall, a thought filled my mind: It feels so good to do normal stuff. To chase him around the food court, to put his shoe back on his foot a dozen times, to share Subway with him, to roll my eyes in unison with my friend at our kids’ behavior.

Then again, what is normal? TK’s MRI could be considered other-than-normal, and yet as the neurosurgeon reviewed it with us yesterday, it was full of good news: the surgery did what it needed to the bone, the areas of concern from the last scan have stayed stable, there’s nothing truly scary going on. There is some developmental stuff in the motor/speech area of the brain that could explain his late-walking and speech delay but which, the doctor reassured us, will not hold him back overall.

I watch my son walk backwards across the room and figure out puzzles and think of all he has overcome to get to where he is and I know the doctor is right. But I still don’t know exactly how this will all play out.

I’ve always thrived on certainties and assurances and predictable, guaranteed outcomes. And this season of our lives, parts of which stretch out and overlap with new seasons and inject unpredictability into the future, has been nothing if not fuzzy, ill-defined, borderless, teeming with questions and lacking in solid answers. And I’m being stretched: asked to bear the full weight of grace, to open instead of sending back the gifts that arrive in their own time and way, to depend upon the Ultimate Answer instead of the hundred tiny answers, to rely second by second on a power greater than predictability. I’m being asked to trust in ways that are new and uncomfortable and that signal the end of life as I knew it.

But the beginning of new life. Because I’m being stretched in other ways, too. So much so that I’ve had to start wearing maternity pants. While working on a new novel.

Do I really want an agenda more than I want grace? After all, I knew the test would be negative this time. All the rest were; it had been a full year. There was a halo and snow on the ground and The Husband stuck hundreds of miles away. And there was that time when it had started as a positive then disappeared.

I had gotten used to hearing no. I forgot that grace has its own agenda.

And the things I had hoped for: relief for TK, a sign of healing, a fourth member of our family–they weren’t nos. But they also weren’t what I thought they would be. They were slowly unfurling in their own time, their own way. The mystery that is TK–this beautiful design that reveals itself in ordinary moments of held fingers and an as-yet trio of spoken words–unfolds daily, calling me not just to a different life but a different way of living. And the funny thing is, after all that’s happened, I have so much less room for fear than I did while I was typing that novel. I’ve learned that there is a goodness at work that exceeds my demands for yes and now and all the other ways I tried to nail down joy before. Joy, it turns out, is not dependent on yes and now but is more fuzzy, ill-defined, borderless, and teeming with questions rather than solid answers. To think that I spent so much time avoiding it.

Stephen Colbert says of his mother, “What she taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain—it’s that the pain is actually a gift.” Gifts dressed as pain, deliverance wrapped deep inside delays. All is grace, every bit of it.

Say hello to my little friend.

Sometimes you just have to go along for the ride.
courtesy youtube

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.

I remember my first winter in New York. After the magic of Christmas and the beauty of (freshly-fallen) snow, February brought with it an unexplainable exhaustion and sadness. The days were short, the darkness oppressive, and after a while I finally realized that my depressed state had more to do with the weather than my constant lack of funds. When spring arrived a couple of months later, I felt twenty pounds lighter. Restaurants moved tables outdoors, I packed my down jackets beneath my bed, and the city and I–we came back to life.

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” wrote Shelley, and all it took in the days of my singleness and city-dwelling was that first rise in temperature for me to feel hopeful again, for the darkness to lift. Then again, my biggest concern those days was how to get rid of my hangover so I could watch movies all day on the couch. Oh, and money.

Now I feel the notes of resurrection in spring just as strongly, albeit in a more suburban fashion–blooming dogwoods, growing grass–but I’m also more aware of the price of admission to the season. Gone is the cooperative hair of the cold months. There are more bugs venturing indoors (I just killed an ant on the windowsill. Suck it, PETA). A thick carpet of pollen coats my throat and everything else.

It’s a mixed bag, is what I’m saying. Isn’t it always?

Take The Kid’s neck issues. As with most things, I saw it as a season to endure before we got to the payoff of spring and healing. Now I’m recognizing that the burdens–and gifts–of that season endure far past the days on a calendar. It’s the intermingling of good and bad, difficult and easy, light and dark, that make life what it is: complicated and beautiful.

Because there is a certain kind of beauty that is only revealed when life is allowed to unfold in its own time. When happiness is permitted to be a byproduct rather than a goal. There is a freedom, and peace, that come when I break down the dividing wall between seasons and admit that life can show up in the middle of winter, in the presence of apparent darkness, in the seeming absence of reasons to hope. When I stop demanding that one thing pass before I give thanks or stop crying or start laughing.

Champagne doesn’t need an excuse.

“Sweetie, you shit your pants this year. Maybe you’re done,” Carrie tells Charlotte, who is afraid to run for fear of miscarrying, and it’s an idea I’ve been tempted to cling to when things have gotten just a little too difficult: Surely that’s it, right? We’re done now? But after a year of way more metaphorical pants-shitting than I would have ever deemed appropriate, I know now that’s not how things work. Because grace doesn’t place a limit on the amount of blessings it gives–even when those blessings arrive in packages I wouldn’t have chosen.

And the grave that you refuse to leave

The refuge that you’ve built to flee,

The places you have come to fear the most,

Is the place that you have come to fear the most.

I know that there’s a way to plot escape from the bad news of the world, and that self-protection can become a prison. It’s this knowledge–and the experience of it–that have convinced me of the opposite: that there is a door to freedom within the thickest of trials and the most painful of struggles. Living, truly living, means accepting the coexistence of all that seems contradictory, and watching as a narrative unfolds–in its own time–that makes perfect sense of these unlikely couplings. (And not insisting on consciously uncoupling them.. Oooh. Your move, Goop.)

So there are fewer afternoons now spent lounging at outdoor tables and more cocktail hours spent looking like Ricky Bobby after his ride with the cougar (yes, Talladega Nights was on TBS this weekend.) This is what happens when you have a two-year-old–and say yes to life without demanding a contract in advance. “Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world…and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens,” writes Buechner. New life doesn’t demand perfect lighting or clear certainty to grow…only grace.

When the doorbell rang, I was sitting in front of a screen, typing. I silently hoped it was UPS, that departing footsteps would sound on the porch steps and the ringing would stop. This is why I was such a great New Yorker–there, we have buzzers and doormen as a first line of defense against unwanted intruders.

But the bell rang a second time, and I had to consider, from my position now crouched away from the front door’s windows, that the walls of my personal space had been breached and I had been spotted. Heaving a sigh full of regret over the lack of suburban privacy, I trudged to the door. My neighbor was headed back down the driveway, and I considered letting him continue his path home. But I opened the door.

He turned, a dozen daffodils and some papers in his hand, and I immediately felt guilty. Over the next few minutes, he handed over the flowers and papers–faith-friendly devotionals for people who are struggling. He hugged and encouraged me. And when he left, I no longer felt invaded. I felt crumbled, humbled, the walls a pile of dust. I felt loved in spite of myself. I felt seen–and not in a bad way.

This season of our lives, with The Kid and uncertainty and waiting, has called me out of the nooks and crannies into which I burrow–the comfort zones within myself and around me: quietness, solitude, the couch. I’ve had to let people in–to the door and to our story–because to not, to keep the story hidden, is to deny TK all the love due him. All the prayers and support and caring for which he is meant. And with “apple” and “bubble” being his favorite and near-only words right now, I’m called out of my inner monologue, out of my tendency to shut down, out of my preference for silence, and into a constant narration with and for him. He has to hear words, and I have to speak them. This is a part of my daily calling now. It’s not awful, but it’s not comfortable.

Which is an apt description of much of the best parts of life, I think.

Yesterday, a woman from church brought by some dinners. I dreaded her arrival–during nap time, my time–fearing she would want to do that talking thing, and maybe even…shudder…pray with me. But she left almost as quickly as she arrived, and in her wake was a bag of food and a bottle of wine. My love languages.

I wonder, sometimes, how much of my life has been spent focusing on the effort of saying no and avoiding what waits behind the door of yes. The ill-defined, shrouded-in-shadows terrain of the affirmative–until the door is opened and light pours through and I finally see what’s been waiting for me.

Because if this season of Lent, of our lives, is about anything (other than training TK not to climb out of his bed and to eat something other than crackers)–it is about the stepping out in love done for me so that I can now step out in faith. There is risk and infinite beauty in being called away from being only what I have been and toward everything I’m meant to be.

TK is doing well. He’s continuing to be a two-year-old, a quality that fills me with rage one minute and barely-containable love the next. But these battles of temper are not spasms of pain, and some moments I’m so thankful for that I can’t catch my breath through the tears. He has an MRI scheduled for Saturday and depending on what his doctor says about it, we may be taking a couple of road trips to broaden our neurosurgeon pool. We still don’t have an answer, but it’s hard to deny all that we do have. Especially when I tell him to say bubble and he semi-echoes in return–“buuuuba”–then turns and squints his eyes to make me laugh. And I do, in spite of myself–thank God for all I do in spite of myself–just like I do when, a few minutes later, I catch him in the monitor looking for a way out of his bed, toward the light, so he can open the door.

Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces. George MacDonald

courtesy now-here-this.timeout.com

The Husband and I, we like to make plans. He does Excel and I do lists, and we stare off into the future and organize it into virtual Container Store files. But as you may have gathered, this season of our lives is not allowing for many plans beyond “pee sometime in the next hour” and “shower with a two-year old watching”.

Before The Kid’s surgery, though–before the halo and the muscle spasms and the vomiting and the victories and the defeats and the way-too-much-Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, we went to our local frame shop, TK in tow, and purchased a 27×40 inch frame with the intent of fashioning a collage that would contain his experience. This chapter in his story, which we blissfully and ignorantly hoped would be closed come halo removal day.

The frame sits propped up against the breakfast room wall, same as the day we bought it.

I’ve gazed upon it with hope that soured to fear; pleasure turned to bitterness. I’ve glanced at it as we’ve brought him home from appointment after appointment, as we’ve crossed that threshold with snow sticking to our feet and bubbles to our clothes. It sits there, wrapped in plastic, and nearby sits a stack of cards and printed comments that will one day cover its white space with a story. But it feels too soon to get to work just yet. Because the problem is, the story continues.

Or is that a problem?

There are days–most of them, actually–when I’ve felt like Carrie with her Wall O’ Brody, first trying to the connect the dots of who, then where, he is, with my version more a why this tilt and when can we fix it? Neurosurgeon A goes here, Neurosurgeon B here, physical therapist over here next to orthopedic surgeon and now find a spot for the craniofacial and orthotics guys…and let’s find the connection. The answer. The solution.

But it’s always about more than just a singular answer. Why do I keep forgetting, keep trying to reduce our lives down to something other than story?

Because after all that TK has been through, and us with him, here is what I know: we have not been left, and this is not over. And all the beauty in the world (and beyond it) lies in that truth.

Nine years ago, I felt my heart stretch until it nearly ripped in a U-Haul across eighteen hundred miles as I, unknowingly and with tears in my eyes, headed toward a new faith, new friendships, and TH. And now, nearly a decade later? The same pain amplified by the power of unconditional love as grace has tempered my pleading why into so much more: what new, great thing will be brought out of this? 

It’s not just about me anymore. Which makes it harder, the stakes greater, and the story so much richer.

And I feel it, how everything that doesn’t belong within me is being shaken out, burned away, painfully and somehow beautifully.

From a cross-country U-Haul to a suburban SUV on a Saturday afternoon spent with The Sis and Niece and TK, blowing bubbles in the yard. He cried the whole way there, tears of discomfort or toddlerhood–it’s anybody’s guess some days. But on the way home, I hear a giggle in the backseat, and I turn to see him looking at some patch of light or source of mirth that only he can see. (There’s so much that only he can see.) And I reach back, grab his foot for a tickle, and his laughter reaches a fever pitch as his eyes meet mine, and when the light turns green I barely see it through tears. Tears of joy in the midst of this long road, this story that refuses to not be told, and the sweetness of them, of his laugh, is unmistakable and would have been unknowable without everything he’s been through. They just wouldn’t have mattered as much. A thought fills my heart until I think I may burst with the unquenchable glory of it all:

The deeper the pain, the greater the beauty. 

Could it be true?

Now this is something to hope for. This is better than an upright head, more than a singular answer. This is everything.

I think about Carrie’s wall, about our collage, and I know that the difference between them is that the story the collage tells, whenever it ends up being made, can never be torn down in a fit of frustration or undone by the ways of the world. In it, everything will be connected and nothing will be wasted.

The narrative of grace–the longing stretched across time, the wounded who stayed with us, who stays with us, the now-but-not-yet–this is the only narrative in which his story makes sense. In which our story makes sense.

The frame waits, and so do we, even as everything that will be told by it can never be contained inside its edges.