Who am I? How did I get here?

Spring, 1987: I’m the girl hiding in the back of the line, shuffling her feet and staring at the ground, hoping this is far enough away from getting called to bat and embarrassing myself in front of the rest of my class, and if I can run out the clock then it’s a straight shot from here to home where I can escape with a book.

Summer, 1996: I’m the college sophomore who finally found a social niche and a safe place to come out of my shell, so now I’ll finalize my plans to be engaged just after graduation and married not long after that, and these three-hour labs will be my ticket to a career that will give me time for the family I’ll have soon.

Fall, 2002: I’m a graduate student running with the middle of the pack for the first time in my life, and this flirtation with mediocrity has saddled me with some identity issues that will lead to mistakes…and a new place.

Winter, 2008: I’m the city-dweller who rediscovered her faith by way of grace and is on her way out to her last first date.

Today: I’m a dentist on sabbatical, a wife learning that marriage isn’t an institution set up just to meet my needs, and a mother twenty-four hours away from letting them place her son on an operating table.

I watch him in the monitor now, his butt in the air, arms splayed out. He can’t sleep like that after tomorrow, I think, and tears rise along with panic over all I can’t control. All I can’t predict. None of this was on the sheet of legal paper I filled out years ago, the life plan I constructed from an organized mind and a clueless heart.

I think about the wife and mother I would have been a decade ago and whisper a prayer of thanks for the things that don’t work out as we expected. All that I asked for, and it never came close to what I got. I’ve been a reality-escaper, a control freak, an identity crisis. These self-inflicted shadows lurk about, always willing to make a reappearance, to have their recurring role bumped back up to series regular. I have not arrived; but grace has made me more susceptible to the truth.

Here is a truth: I am no match for the road that lies ahead. And as I battle the fear that, when named, is called Not Being Enough, the voice residing in my heart calls me to stop fighting and rest, because there is redemption in the fact that I was never meant to be. Enough has a name, and it is not Stephanie.

courtesy William Koechling, Twitter

So I remember other truths, like those  told in stories, and how it was Tolkien who wrote, “a great lord is that, and a healer; and it is a thing passing strange to me that the healing hand should also wield the sword.”

Well, it is passing strange to me too. But I know the hope in its truth.

Because there are the other moments, the glimpses of glory, that remind me. We have a story here too.

There were years of disappointment, then vows taken and a double rainbow. There is an emptied dishwasher even though I was an ass the night before. There is a tiny hand that wraps around my finger and leads me. And just the other night, there was the tug on my jeans leg and the whisper straight to my heart: “Mama. Mama.” 

The Husband and I whipped our heads to him, then each other, eyes wide.

“Did he–”

“I think he just–”

I dropped the plastic bib and followed where he led.

Tomorrow we will be the parents in the hospital with the child in the halo. In the coming weeks I will be the mom fielding questions about what that is in a reality that is inescapable, a situation that is uncontrollable. But because of grace I have an identity that is unassailable.

How did we get here? Love brought us–a love bigger than I am. Love will carry us not around, but through this. And love will make the whole thing beautiful.

“Anxiety is the result of a collapsing false god.” –Tim Keller

“He sure is active,” I hear from a lot of people regarding The Kid. Depending on the tone of delivery, I either want to react with a knowing smile or say, “No shit. He’s TWO.” But I typically have time for neither as I chase him to his next toddler-decreed destination.

In one week, that toddler will be lying on an OR table, motionless. I already ache for the moment they bring him back to me.

But then the real fun begins, as he’ll be decked out in a halo that renders his head immobile, pins and metal uprights decreeing his movements for the next three months, and this just as he was getting his sea legs: running from here to there and everywhere, dancing to the beat of his own drummer, climbing stairs like a boss (if a boss were to have his parents’ hands gripping his wrists during the ascent). The orthotic specialist told me that if he needs help getting around, we can be provided with a walker. And a picture of someone kicking a puppy, if the idea of the walker wasn’t enough to make us cry.

Lately I’ve been naming my fears at night in bed, after the lights have gone out and the praying begins. I’ve found that when I speak the fear, it’s like a slow undressing under a spotlight: first comes the overt source of my anxiety, then what’s underneath it, then what’s underneath that–and I’ve learned that fear is a complicated, multi-layered thing. But deep within the panic over rejection and abandonment and everything that fear is really about? There is always love. Love waiting to answer every layer and be bigger than what I’m facing, what I’m afraid of.

Because here’s how it goes: I’m afraid of TK not waking up. I’m afraid of not being enough. I’m afraid of being abandoned. I’m afraid…because I love. And I can stop being afraid because I am loved.

That’s what these heart-wrenching, life-altering struggles are really about. The deep-seated, rarely-spoken fear that love will leave. Why can’t we talk about this? Why do we cloak our fears with stabs at perfection?

There is a love that never leaves. I think I’m just now starting to believe that. And I know it’s the struggles that have told me it’s true.

I am not strong enough for this. But I am held by a love that is.

Everything is watery these days. My heart has been marinated in a mixture of parenthood, struggle, and grace, and I am not the same. The world has less black and white in it, less us and them, less good and bad. I’m often looking at everything through the blurry lens of emotion, and caring is gloriously uncomfortable work. The teenager who plopped down beside me halfway through the service on Sunday, he pulled a travel-sized Bible out of his pocket when the sermon began, and the ever-ready judgments that typically accompany my appraisal of my fellow man vanished as I saw that Bible: worn, scratched, beaten-up. It was a book belonging to someone for whom perfection is not an ideal but brokenness is a reality. I love that Bible. I am that Bible. I am closer to my brokenness these days than I ever have been. Yesterday morning, all it took was the day surgery administrator asking me to confirm the spelling of TK’s name for the tears to spring to my eyes. I dropped TK off at school and told his teachers that this is his last week, and we all broke down together.

This is love. There is more love in raw brokenness–in ruined makeup, drop-everything hugs, ugly crying sessions–than a thousand shiny veneers.

For the second year in a row, we spend New Year’s Eve in the quiet of home, preparing for another surgery on our child. This time, the hospital’s party favor not a soft collar but a rigid device. And yet it’s the stillness that lends itself to healing. It’s the immobility that is the prescription for redemption, even though chaos surrounds. “Be still and know…“

And though I don’t particularly like the mode of delivery, it is on this pathway that we are being blessed. I am being loved out of my defensiveness, out of my inclination toward shutting down and turning inward, because if there’s a story worth hearing, it is TK’s. And every other fear-prefaced struggle that turned out to be a direct pathway to grace and love. Stories of strength from weakness, victory from defeat, crowns of twisted thorns and metal halos.

The Kid let out a frustrated whine, the puzzle piece lodged between his thumb and forefinger and refusing to fit into its spot. I leaned over and loosened the piece from his grip, turning it upside down. “Sometimes you just have to flip it around and see it from a different angle, remember?” I asked him, and he happily returned the fragment to its rightful home.

Christmas is about looking at the world differently.

TK is scheduled for surgery two weeks after Christmas Day. In two weeks, he will be put to sleep and placed on a table, where surgeon’s knives will attempt to alter into proper alignment the neck he was given. They will place a device called a Halo on his head and shoulders, and he will be returned to us with that device in place for three months, during which time I will be staying at home with him and working on expanding my childcare entertainment repertoire beyond “trips to Target”. And working on expanding my vision beyond “getting past this hard moment”.

On the page of notes I took from the phone call with the orthotic specialist, I wrote his description of what wearing a Halo feels like: imagine you’re walking down a stairway while looking straight ahead, unable to bend your neck and look down. And I consider it, how I’ve always looked ahead to the next thing but that was what made me fixated on the present moment, and moving past it. I consider how this journey of grace teaches, in ways gentle and hard, that now is the gift, even when now is a cry in the night signaling the end of sleep and the beginning of exhaustion; when now is a three-hour wait in a doctor’s office; when now is the placement of a needle or the reading of a result. Life is not found in hurrying past these moments to some lesson but in unwrapping these moments as gifts; in trusting the beauty to come while living with eyes open to the beauty that is now. I always want to get to the part with the answer; but knowing isn’t the gift.

Redemption is happening all the time: on the day and on the eve.

As this two-year search for a solution appears to reach a pinnacle, my eyes open to the possibility that it’s about more than semantics to cease calling it what is happening to us, because we are not victims of an accident but recipients of a gift, and this is what we were meant for, what we were always pointed toward: this tilted head and this tiny bone askew and this boy whose favorite word, Abba, means nothing in English but everything in so many other languages. And maybe that’s the gift: that we’re learning a new language. Maybe that’s the miracle of Christmas, of parenthood, of grace. This boy who proclaims “abba!” and sits at the table during his school’s holiday party only as long as he wants to and then retires to the bookshelf while the other kids decorate cookies. This difference in him that months, weeks ago I may have tried to “correct” but now, I walk over and claim my seat beside him. I get being different. I get not wanting to sit at the table with everyone. I get it when a book makes more sense than a crowd. And this is my boy, in all his glorious different-ness.

The Husband and I take a night off while The Mom and Dad watch TK, and we go out to dinner and sit at a table of our own and talk about surgery when, a few years ago, we talked about movies and parties and more, but somehow less. We go to the symphony hall and the notes swell, and the truth hits me that our acceptance of this story will either be the halfhearted humming of a resigned tune or the offering of an assigned symphony. Clawing or embracing.

The Sis gave TK a drum set for Christmas. “He loves music,” she reasoned, knowing him with her gift. He loves music. We offer the symphony.

On this national day of anticipation, what are we waiting for? What are we looking for? A friend once expressed displeasure over the difficulty of faith in a world without miracles, and I agreed, at the time, that it would be easier to believe if all around us the water was turning to wine and the blind were receiving sight.

Miracles, like love, are misunderstood because we expect them to look a certain way. But grace has put me on the table, and I have witnessed mundane moments become sacred: water to wine. I have beheld blessings that were once shrouded in shadows: the blind receiving sight. And this is the miracle, the space for which grace creates in our stories: the always-more; the recognition of holy in what the world sees as less. The advent of love that magnifies each moment into eternal brilliance, that turns every day into an advent and an eve.

The inner reality of redemption is that it creates all the time. Oswald Chambers

The year we left New York, The Husband and I (then, he was The Fiance) made a bucket list of things to do before we abandoned the city. On that list was Niagara Falls. So over Valentine’s weekend, we boarded a flight to Buffalo and headed to the site of Jim and Pam’s wedding.

Dear God in heaven. Have you ever been to the clusterf*ck that is Niagara Falls? As one of the colleagues of The Sis put it: “Who let this happen?” More specifically, who saw a glorious wonder of nature and responded, “We should put a state fair RIGHT NEXT TO THIS.” TH and I dropped our bags off at the Sheraton and walked around the “town” to find it littered with Tom Horton’s, Rainforest Cafe, and carnival side shows. We found Niagara on the Lake to be more our speed, what with its absence of people and presence of wineries, but our last night there, TH and I did venture into a haunted house (they are plentiful at the Falls).

TH is a haunted house buff, and this place was listed as the scariest in the vicinity. So I stifled my urge to drive back to winery land and walked beside him into the unknown. About halfway through our adventure, we found ourselves stepping into total darkness. Pitch black. After a few seconds, and some pawing at the walls, we realized that the horror of this section of the house was that we had been unwittingly enclosed into a tiny room with no exit. TH marveled: “This is so awesome!” I screamed: “I HATE THIS!” Eventually, we made it out.

This past year has felt, at times, like a walk back into that room.

My ledger of thankfulness sits on the table next to the Christmas tree, and what keeps it from being a Pollyanna-esque exercise in futility? Thoroughness. There is “beautiful sunrise” listed right next to “another negative pee stick?” because this is what separates gratitude from phoniness, men from boys, truth from fiction. It’s giving thanks in everything, even when a question mark must be added because this part of everything sucks and I don’t see the good in it yet. “Surgery?” “Another rough night?” “Rejection email?” From that question mark hang my frustration and hope, their habitual coexistence, and in the deepest part of its curve lies truth.

One day, the question mark will disappear. But probably not today.

Today, every prenatal vitamin and page written can feel like a joke…or an act of faith. I can give in to feeling like an idiot, or I can raise the rebel flag in the middle of the territory marked “foolishness” by the world, because here’s the thing: most of the world just doesn’t know. My pills and pages may be my way of showing up to a barn and expecting God to arrive as a baby.

In a mundane moment, as we hold The Kid down and force ointment into his eyes to resolve pink eye, I remember similar, less mundane times in the hospital, with needles instead of ointment, but the same narration: “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but right now I am loving you.” My heart is a few seconds slower than my ears, but eventually I get it–and I wonder how many times it has been whispered, deep calling to deep, to me.

And I realize now that we are not back in that dark, doorless room. Because everywhere, all around, there are tiny cracks, and I thought they were just the beginnings of my falling apart, but this is what they are for: they are letting light through.

“Gifts always come out of the unseen and hidden places.”

TH and I ventured into the unknown together, promises made on a beach bathed in sunlight, and landed here in our story, where the light has a way of changing from time to time. And as I feel my way around, as I write everything down, the patches of light coalesce and I begin to see that we are inside a chamber of the very heart of grace. And we are being led around, given a tour, because this is what Advent is: finding a home in the waiting. Finding love in the not-knowing. Advent is what makes up our days. But at the end of them all? One day, when the light has all but disappeared and everything has gone still, a cry pierces the night, and all the pieces come together to make us whole.

Every good and perfect gift is from above…

Dear James,

Do you know how loved you are?

I ask you this every day, and since you’re not speaking yet I answer it for you. I name the God who made you, and your dad, and me.

Lately, I’ve had to add a few more to that list.

Because if the first year of your life was about us finding our way around each other and making plans, then this year has been about finding our way around your story and watching those plans fall apart so harder, better ones can take their place.

And so many people know who you are now. I can’t type it without tears, knowing how loved and held you are.

I read it before you were born, looked up the meaning of the name we had already chosen, and saw the word supplanter. And I thought, “How appropriate, for he will be taking the place of sleep.” That you did–but there was more.

There’s always more.

The trajectory of my life, and the secret of its meaning, lies in the rubble of What Was that had to give way to What Is. Your story–the What Is that we are living now–has supplanted the What Was that I imagined for you, for these first two years. I have a boy with a head tilted to the left, a boy whose words are still on the inside, a boy who has seen the interior of countless waiting rooms and medical centers and who has been poked and prodded, who has had hands wrung over him and brains picked because of him.

When you were still growing within me, I announced your impending arrival on Facebook AS PEOPLE DO and made a collage of the congratulatory comments. And now, with spinal surgery and rehab on the horizon, I’m gathering again–all the thoughts and prayers and encouragement sent from the people who have heard your story–and this collage? What a work of art it will be.

What a work of art you are.

You, my constant reminder of grace: unpredictable, wild, raw, ever-present. You transform mundane moments on the floor into glorious glimpses into the heavens. My tears and laughter, purified by loving you, have never been more real, more true.

And though there are moments I never would have chosen–sleepless nights, IV needles, wonky vertebrae–I would not give any of it back. Because without any of it, you wouldn’t be you. And I wouldn’t be me, it turns out. The two greatest gifts I’ve ever been given, the most important roles I will ever play, are being your dad’s wife and your mom. And though I fail in both capacities daily, there is an undercurrent of grace sustaining all of us and unfurling this beautiful life we are living together. This beautiful, messy, difficult, easy, little-bit-of-everything life.

What was intended to tear you apart, God intends it to set you apart. 

There are stories you will hear as you get older, tales we will read to you in your room among the helmet and the neck braces gracing your stuffed animals, and you’ll know names like Harry and Neville and Sam and Frodo, David and Moses and Joseph and countless others who seemed the unlikeliest of heroes: scarred, weak, afraid, flawed, stuttering, left-for-dead. And you’ll know them in a way many don’t, feel a kinship that runs deep, because you know what it means to be scarred, to wear wounds that aren’t easily hidden. You’ll wonder why they feel so familiar to you, these stories, and why these heroes feel like friends.

And your dad and I will tell you our favorite story: the one that spans a Saturday morning headed to the hospital, all the way to this moment in your room. All the cries and laughter and uncertainty and questions and operations and devices, the moments of falling and walking and quiet and speaking and grinning. A story still being told. This is your story, and ours, and every moment of it speaks redemption. Every second of it is grace.

Happy birthday, my gift, my joy, my tiny hero. You are so loved.

“Words are a most inexhaustible source of magic.” Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II

She might have walked right by our room there on the CT wing, but The Kid let out a cry just as she passed the open doorway, and she whipped her hairless head around to look at him. She wasn’t staring at his tilt, or asking what was wrong with him. She didn’t have to, because she knew the only thing worth knowing in the moment:

He was here, so he was like her.

I never thought I’d know my way around the first floor Children’s Hospital like the back of my hand; never imagined I’d cover the distance from the parking deck to the elevator to the radiology department multiple times in a quest for the discs with TK’s scans on them, to be overnighted to doctors across the country. And so far, we’ve only been outpatients. This girl’s parents–they know every floor of that place. This girl, with her smooth head and far too grown-up eyes, has endured far more than feels fair.

She stood in the doorway, and though I smiled and waved through my own tears, she kept her eyes locked on TK: another suffering child. She knew.

And then, a few days later, another child and more staring, but this time coupled with misunderstanding: “Why is his head tilted like that? It’s weird.” I resisted the urge to inflict injury on a minor, and not for the last time, I’m sure. My urge to protect TK eclipses reason and though it comes from a place of love, it is imperfect love at best–for there is a love that made him this way for a reason that my own faulty heart could never conceive. There is redemption in this tilt, and some of it is for me.

When I was growing up, I wondered how adults knew the way to the beach by heart, and all the words to the songs that came on the radio. I figured it was a form of wisdom parceled out once you reached a certain age, like how to wash clothes and utter “because I said so”–given as a rite of passage along with a driver’s license. But once I reached adulthood, I felt lost. Anthem-less. Where were my directions? Where were my words?

Then an invisible map led me away from home, and I began to type.

Words were what led me back to grace, first others’ and then, slowly, my own. At times it felt like I was remembering, transcribing, a song I had known a long time ago: the purity of a love once it is separated from the effort of religion, distilled down to grace, and proven to be bigger than I. A love that means I don’t have to step through my life as though I’m avoiding land mines. A love that is not disqualified by landing my family on a bed at Children’s Hospital. Again.

That love, that grace, renders me incapable of sharing only the good moments, because it is in every moment. There are the moments when marriage could be reduced to a series of creaking floorboards and annoying habits; when child-rearing could amount to dirty diapers and backaches; and then I am reminded that if there is more to it all than human waste and personal deficiencies, then maybe there is more to this tilt. Maybe there is more to the hospital visits. Maybe there is more to job loss, to pregnancy disappearance, to this ubiquity of struggle. But if we don’t talk about it? If we only say “God is good” when our team wins or the wreck didn’t happen?

Since when did grace inflict selective amnesia?

Last week I wrote some words about redemption, as seen on TV. And a couple of days later, the link was retweeted by Charles Esten–the guy who plays the character about whom I wrote. After I changed my pants, I flipped through his pictures on Twitter and found out that one of his daughters had leukemia a decade ago. I looked at the picture of him with her, the little girl with no hair and her dad who was smiling as he went through hell. And I recognized those eyes. I knew.

“God made him that way, and we don’t know why quite yet,” I said, instead of drop-kicking the kid with all the questions. Twenty years ago, maybe even twenty minutes ago, they would have been words recited from a map, a trite needlepoint expression meant to hustle us all into the next moment, a preferably less painful one about things more certain. But there’s no map now. Just grace.

And now those words, they carry all the emotion of the journey we’ve been on and continue through. They are set to a rhythm of faithfulness. They are accompanied by a chorus of supporters. Now, they are becoming a song whose words and melody I already know by heart but am learning anew every day.

This wasn’t the halo I had in mind.

A few days ago, I posted a picture of The Kid at our neighborhood playground: beams of light falling all around him as he gazed into the distance at something only he could see. “Has anyone seen my halo?” I captioned it.

On Tuesday, we walked with him through a sedation and CT scan and across the medical complex to the neurosurgeon’s office. Every doctor we’ve seen so far is just doing his best, but scratched heads and hmms and “Well, we could try”s are just not enough when it’s your child on the table.

I thought about it as The Husband and I stood beside the CT machine, my eyes filling with their daily allotment of tears to see The Kid knocked out on the table. The scanner began its circular motion, capturing images of the spine TK was given, and the whir of its lightning-speed work served as background music for a montage flashing before my eyes, all the scans and X-rays and imaging and waiting rooms and therapy, all this desperate searching for answers, to arrive here, again, just not knowing for sure.

We search in the whir of machines for answers that arrive only through the beat of a heart.

The neurosurgeon came up with a plan on the spot: put TK on another table, open his neck muscles again, shave off the part of his vertebra that’s tilted up where it shouldn’t be, and then–I caught my breath–screw a device called a halo into his skull that will stabilize and retrain his neck over eight weeks.

Shut up, Beyonce. I’m trying to think.

Implications were tossed around: the effects on his balance and walking, the suspension of day care, the sedation to remove the halo. The parental questions raged inside my head: what will happen when I take him to Target? What if he falls? Is anyone else drawing comparisons to Dr. Frankenstein’s work, because this is not what I had in mind for my child.

TH gave me the side-eye in the car: did I think I’d be able to stay sane as a stay-at-home mom for eight weeks? We laughed, and I burst into tears.

I hate that he has to go through all this.

I felt them, the waves of pity for TK and all he’s endured and will endure, with a few thrown in for myself, in all honesty. The tears fell, my breathing ragged, TH’s hand on mine, and then–a break in the storm.

It’s okay to be sad, but you don’t have to stay there.

The difference between empathy and pity was becoming clearer, and I began to see how grace relieves us each from the overwhelming burden of victimhood–how it keeps that from becoming all we are. Hear me when I say this: I believe we have a divinity that bears our sadness with us and that no tear is shed in the singular. But the beauty of redemption means that the sadness I feel, am accompanied in feeling, will never have to be a final resting place. Will never have to be more than a temporary campsite, because to build permanent lodging there would be to deny the story that is being told, the beauty that we are meant for. Staying sad would mean turning a blind eye to the much more that is happening beyond sterile rooms and black-and-white images. There is more than we can see as of yet. And even now, there are gifts falling like rain all around us.

To wit:

Several have reached out and offered access to their connections in the world of pediatric neurosurgery. Doctors across the country are looking at TK’s spine right now. This gift of kindness blows me away. Every comment and “like” and text and message reminds me of the deep love that surrounds TH and TK and me and convinces me of its source. And yesterday, I talked on the phone to a friend whose child faces her own set of challenges. “You’re in a lonely place,” she said. And we are–we haven’t found any other examples of TK’s particular issue.

But it doesn’t feel lonely.

We are inundated with your prayers and concern and thoughts and rain dances and I just can’t get over how well TK is loved.

One thing my friend encouraged was to constantly narrate life for TK, since he’s still not speaking professionally yet, and as we drove around yesterday I uttered every observation that entered my head. I hate talking almost as much as I hate meeting new people, and I hoped that TK would not remember some of the inane statements that came out of my mouth. “It will give him context when he does speak,” she had said, and I kept talking to him. “Hey, look at those trees,” I threw toward the backseat. “Red and yellow–looks like they’re on fire!” I rolled my eyes, then heard what I had said.

This story we’re living fits into a greater one. It gives context for the narration I type here, and one day TK will know the context for everything he has endured. This is the promise that grace bestows, and it doesn’t come cheaply or easily. A vision that much greater than mine recalibrates me, reconfigures the path beneath and ahead of me, and that transformation is nothing short of painful. The distance between what I envisioned and what he has planned is serious ground to cover. Are we ready for what lies beyond the sad?

“The process will be long and in parts very painful,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “but that is what we are in for. Nothing less.”

I look in the backseat, out the window, past the pain, and finally see that I have no idea of all that TK is meant for–and this grace has the makings of glory. I look until the only answer I see becomes the only one I need: I AM. Trees on fire, burning bushes everywhere.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.  C.S. Lewis

The problem with believing God is in control is that when you don’t get what you want–or get what you don’t–it feels like he could do better.

I heard a lot of “no” last week. No, your manuscript isn’t a good fit for my list. No, you will not be working here any longer due to corporate restructuring. No, you are not pregnant this month.

The nos always seem to drown out the yeses.

In the middle of the week, I exited the office. My scrubs were sweaty. My hair was unkempt. I was sporting one of my recent facial breakouts caused by constant mask-wearing. I picked up The Kid, whose lunch menu I could have read from his outfit. We picked up The Mom and headed out for an errand.

My grandmother left me a three-stone ring that has been sitting in my drawer for months–since she got really sick. After she died in September, I opened the box and plucked the ring from its velvet seat. It slid around my finger, several sizes too big. Last week, the jeweler called and said it was ready. And so The Mom and TK and I headed into a gleaming showroom, marble floors and glass cases surrounding greasy hair and cheese stains, to pick it up.

The ring slid onto my finger perfectly, like the two were made for each other. I picked up TK, who farted loudly and yelled “OOH!” On our way out, we passed an older woman drenched in pearls and fur.

I don’t remember the last time I felt so out of place, so ill-fitted to my surroundings. And yet I belonged there, because the ring fit. It had my name on it, left by someone who wanted me to wear it.

TK will endure another CT tomorrow, and The Husband and I will hold him down again while another IV is placed into his tiny wrist. We’ll talk to the neurosurgeon after, try to decipher from the images what the next step should be, flying without a map.

I think about how I’m waiting for a yes: from an agent, from a plastic stick, from a doctor…feeling as though I’m trying to put together a puzzle with missing pieces, or read broken tea leaves, and I know that this is not how he works, with games and hiding. There is a difference between trickery and mystery, and somehow he is in the No just as much as the Yes.

Sometimes we just must learn to bear the beams of love. The love that drives the car to the hospital and holds us still while they place the IV. The love that inspires words but doesn’t couple them with a business plan. The love that creates life in its own perfect timing. The love that shows up, mapless, because stories aren’t told with a compass: they are unfurled.

And I read it this morning: that I am being unfurled too.

I have not had anything pulled out from under me, because I stand on rock, not rugs. And any time I reduce this season to waiting–waiting on the agent or the stick or the doctor–I am trying to wrap up with a bow what is meant to be opened as a gift.

So each day begins and ends with its own questions and mystery, and I open the box to find that it fits perfectly, this circle of love that never ends and puts me right where I belong.

I have demanded, for as long as I remember, that my life follow a particular plan.

Maybe because I grew up as a child immersed in the world of books, with their clear print and beginning, middle, and end. There is structure to a story–rules to follow. And though I ended up in a career surrounded by teeth rather than books, my path was strewn with them along the way here. I buried my head in their bindings, planted myself behind desks and studied their contents until my brain was soaked with pathways and formulas and concepts. Life spent in pages is safe and predictable.

It’s also not real.

When I was pregnant with The Kid, books were once again my ally. I read about sleep and poop and schedules. Sitting in the nursery glider, waiting for him, I familiarized myself with the methods that would ensure my child would sleep and thrive. I felt prepared.

I wasn’t prepared.

Months later, I sat in that same glider in the middle of the night with a newborn in my arms, and I felt like a total hack. I was afraid–all the time. Of dropping him. Of the emotional reaction his cry elicited within me (is insanity an emotion?). Of the constant end-of-my-rope feeling. Of the suspicion that I was doing everything wrong.

There had not been a book that covered this.

And then he was sleeping through the night, and I landed on an aircraft carrier next to a “Mission Accomplished” banner, fist pumping, and planned our itinerary for the smooth waters ahead.

Instead of being smooth, instead of being predictable, these waters were uncharted and came without a map–physical therapy, an orthotic helmet, neurosurgeons, an orthopedic surgeon, a craniofacial surgeon, neck collars, sedations, speech therapists, Botox injections, CT scans, and MRIs.

And then there are all the other things a parent obsesses over: are the milestones being reached? That kid on Facebook is eating with a spoon–how old is he again? Should my kid be eating with a spoon? Not knowing how much his neck issue played into all this, I felt lost at sea. How could I be expected to parent without a manual?

A small voice–and there are many inside my head, so it was hard to hear–suggested that I might be missing something. I looked around frantically, pored over old textbooks and digital images, wrung my hands.

Then I looked over, last week, at my son, who was charging toward me when I came to pick him up from school. He wrapped his arms around me. He didn’t say hello–he roared. His classmates, most of whom do say hello by now–they roared too. This is the group greeting I receive every time I cross the doorway. I think it kicks hello‘s ass.

It’s a new language I’m learning. He’s teaching it to me.

These tiny victories are not so tiny. Once expectations are released, life becomes less battle and more party. Every breakthrough at speech therapy elicits cheers. The way he stacks blocks is a miracle to me. I watch him study everything he touches. He is a marvel, and I wonder how many marvels I have missed because I was demanding milestones.

I remember the theology of my youth–in particular, a handy little manual called Life’s Little Instruction Book for Christians, and my attraction to sermons like “How to Know God’s Will for Your Life”. I wanted a to-do list, because I could complete that. My theology had its fulfillment in the future–but what did I miss?

Everything. I sat on the floor beside TK last night, lost in thought, and when I snapped back to reality–to what is real–I caught him looking at me with a knowing smile, and we began to laugh in unison.

That was never in the books.

On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for him.      C.S. Lewis

This doesn’t feel like love.

Another week, another physical therapy appointment, and this time The Kid starts sobbing as soon as we get past the waiting room. He walks over to me, buries his head in my knees, and I don’t want to go in either. I don’t want to watch him hurt. I hate it. What I feel is hate. What he feels is pain.

None of it feels like love.

I speak up, and the therapist agrees–that he’s getting too old, that we’re not sure it’s working, that we need to talk to the rest of the doctors and figure out the next step, because the Botox hasn’t fixed the tilt or his disinclination to turn left.

I would follow him around for the rest of his life and turn left for him if I could. I would do the PT and let them mess with my neck if it would fix his. I tell him this in the car later, and he doesn’t understand it yet–the words, or the love, that sends us into these inconvenient and sometimes painful places, our efforts to rid the dark by finding the light. I’m looking for answers even as I’m loving every part of him.

It doesn’t hit me until later that I have some trust issues when it comes to love.

TH hands me a gift from my sister-in-law and it’s the Advent book I’ve been meaning to buy, but the one I would have bought would not have been inscribed, and this one is: with a scrawling of words that catch my breath and fill my eyes–my name, followed by: 

You are so lavishly loved.

Why am I crying? Didn’t I know already?

But this, from the one whose words daily remind me of the inextricable link between grace and gratitude, who wrote that these gifts surrounding us are love notes from him if we would only look–I trace the words with my finger, feel their imprint on page. Can they be imprinted elsewhere, too?

I think about the first time I realized people love differently, when The Dad and I had dissolved into yelling and I stepped outside a few minutes later to watch him checking the air in my tires. The Mom, she would just say it.

Not everyone does love the same way.

I think about the other reminders: how I hardly ever go to the gas station any more because The Husband fills my tank (pause for inappropriate laughter). How I am watching as some of my friends become mothers too, how their faces change and their voices soften. How some, painfully, are not yet, and how they have changed too–struggle that softens in a different way–and all of this can be love?

I think about the people with whom I’ve reconnected because I’ve shared TK’s story–all the people who love him because they know what he’s gone through, and I feel overwhelmed by the love that’s directed at him, that he will one day know about because I’ll tell him and he’ll understand and he will be different because of it. We will be different because of it.

I’ve had a hard time believing I could be so loved, because I’ve always equated love with performance-based approval. For God’s sake, I said I’d be an organ donor once just because I wanted the DMV worker to not look at me with reproach. TH had to hand out candy this year because I was afraid the kids wouldn’t like me if I only gave them one piece (except for the SOB who reached in and grabbed half the bowl with one hand–he, I didn’t mind denying).

But a love I don’t have to work for, that is independent of my faithfulness? If there’s nothing else like that, can it still be real?

I watch TK stack his blocks in a new pattern, head cocked, and I’m starting to understand.

I woke up early one morning last week and in the darkness felt a prompting. To meet. Not to fulfill, or accomplish, but just to show up. And in the light of the lamp, book open, I knew that this love was always there, waiting for me to see it.

We took TK to see Santa at Phipps Plaza (a racket I swore I’d never assent to, then realized they operate by appointment and efficiency and so I SIGNED UP), and the scene was a cross between A Christmas Story and “Toddlers and Tiaras”. Parents were begging their children, remaining in the picture with them, holding the kid on their own laps instead of Santa’s to get the perfect photo. The assistant approached me and I told her what we wanted. “JUST THE KID, IF HE CRIES THAT’S FINE,” she yelled to the photographer. They snapped him just before he lost his shit and looked back at us as if we’d betrayed him.

How often have I looked up with that same expression on my face?

We could be headed for spinal surgery, and though I know God is full of surprises and works in mysterious ways (NEEDLEPOINT PILLOW ALERT!), I also know he can work within the bounds of pragmatism and that if TK ends up on another operating table, it will not be because we don’t love him. And it will not be because we aren’t loved, either. Love that is real and infinite has the power to transcend circumstances, to turn “in spite of” to “because of”, to not “rescue” us from what will make us what we’re meant to be. It doesn’t always feel like love.

But it is.