I found out about it through Facebook, the source of most of my news these days. A friend’s brother had passed away in a particularly tragic way, and I struggled to find the “right” words. As if there are any. So I wrote about how this would be turned to good, and how that would be such a powerful component of his ministry one day.

He wrote back and thanked me for my thoughts. Then he said, kindly, that though he knew the “turned to good” stuff was true, he was not ready to go there. When I read the response now, I am struck by his graciousness in the midst of grief. But I remember being, at the time, stung–that my words were “wrong.” I needed to be stung, though, exactly in the spot where I was, in the place that values correctness over empathy, being appropriate over sharing grief. I didn’t need to be right. I just needed to be there.

Last week, one of my dearest wrote to me about the miscarriage. She said that she had been trying to think of something to do to make it better–that she wished she could fix it. And I totally understood. Just her telling me that helped, I said, because I knew how sincere she was. It was like when I texted SS the news and the phone immediately rang, all “Oh hell no, we are NOT doing this via text.” And though the conversation was tears and “I’m so sorry”s and not one thing happened to reverse the events, the call was a healing balm because of what it meant: one person coming alongside another and staying.

Personally, I am a recovering “I don’t know what to say so maybe I’ll say nothing and no one will notice”-er, a “when will this awkwardness pass so we can tell jokes again”-er. So I understand when there is a lack of response, or the casually tossed “Praying for you!” As if informing someone that we are in talks with God about their painful situation is all he meant when he said to share each other’s burdens. What does it mean to take care of each other? I think it means more than “I’m praying for you” and a bundt cake. I think it means taking on their grief as your own, and that looks like different things to different people but I know this: other people’s pain doesn’t stop me in my tracks nearly as often as it should.

All losses hit closer to home the bigger our hearts are made by grace.

This particular event in my life is not going to just fade away–I know that. I’ll carry it around, like the scar from the time The Sis accidentally threw a stainless steel dog bowl at my head. Or the story my arm tells about when she turned a key into a shiv and the pool of the Perdido Key Beach Club into a prison yard. (I may need to discuss anti-violent conflict resolution with The Sis.) I’m learning from this season how circular a thing healing is, how we revisit the grief from time to time, with warning and without, how the throat tightens and the tears show up uninvited but wet and present nonetheless. I’m learning about how to treat people who are hurting, both from the way I’ve been treated and the way I’ve treated others. I’m thankful that while karma operates in lessons, grace operates in love, and this is a walk full of both recovery and redemption.

And when the tears pass, and I open the bathroom door and walk back into my life, I feel the glorious weight of grace’s best agents. There is The Kid, who nightly now climbs the stairs with The Husband behind him as I cheer wildly from the landing. He turns to look behind him, and if it were fear doing that he would just stop climbing–but he turns back to me and smiles, as if he knows how far he’s come and just wanted to be reminded. We put him to bed, and I walk into our room and see the ridiculously overpriced custom-framing of our medals from the half-marathon, the training and running we did together. Because even though he’s a dude and he has a half-foot of height on me, he stayed beside me the whole time. Every run, right to the finish line. And I know that while the old Footprints story tells me that the single set of them is from when He carried me, I know that there’s always more than one set. Because that is how he carries me.

Someone believed in God and all she got was this lousy miscarriage. 

The thought popped into my mind sometime Friday, the day when the red woke me up with its rushing and seemed like it would never stop. There was humor reflected in its T-shirt-like succinctness, and maybe a bit of bitterness too. But the worst of the emotional tidal wave had passed days before the physical one. There was the empty ultrasound and the confirming phone call–it’s always a bad sign when the nurse hands you over to the doctor for the news to be delivered. Delivered. And then there was the shower scene, tears mixed with tap water, the dam of grief broken. At some point in the sobbing and release, grace broke through, clear and true, and I knew it more than any diagnosis or news delivered: however much I was crying, whatever grief I felt at this loss, it did not compare to what was felt on my behalf. There is one whose tears outnumber mine, who is so close to the brokenhearted that there is no separation, soul and spirit dancing and grieving as one.

But it still sucked.

There is not getting what you want, and then there is getting exactly what you don’t want. I am an Irish twin, born twelve months and three weeks before my younger sister, and there is a self-imposed sense of urgency to recreate the closeness of that relationship for The Kid. Every month that passes dilutes that dream, and I know that for all the work grace has done in me, I still prefer to write my plans in pen.

She called when a text was not enough, and it was the first time we had actually heard each other’s voices in over a year of friendship. We talked about the hidden fears that suffering reveals, and I realized that after all this time I still doubt his goodness. I gaze warily, Eve-like, at him, just knowing the apple will sustain me here when there is a banquet of wine and bread over there. And as the torrents of grief turned into occasional, less intense spasms, I wondered how much of my renewed hope was due to leaving a heart open to grace and how much was placed, re-placed, in a specific outcome. Next time will work. How many disappointments, how many miscarriages of hope, will I allow God before I take the reins yet again and demand my way, and in so doing betray all faith in his? How many of the tears spent on my behalf are from a heart broken over my disbelief in his love?

These are the moments when there are no bootstraps to pull ourselves up by, no amount of positive thinking that will readjust our hearts to home. I can deny the grief, cover it over with a veneer of religion and a frozen smile, or I can allow it to become a part of me in that perfect work of grace that meets soul with spirit and incorporates everything into making me who I am meant to be. Is there a narrative wherein I can grieve and hope? A story in which I don’t have to be afraid, but I also don’t have to pretend?

Fear crouches at my door, always willing to drop by for a visit or forever, and I pray the most honest prayer I know: I don’t know what to do. I believe; help my unbelief. Help. And the answer, like most good things, comes later, as I reread this and remember–am re-membered by–the truth that all is grace, and everything is a gift. Thanksgiving is the death knell for fear.

I give thanks for my miscarriage and the broken heart that came with it. And in the strangest way, I come to mean it.

My birthday approaches, and the irony is not lost on me that gifts come in all kinds of packages, but this one? Thanks for the miscarriage, God. You shouldn’t have. Did you keep a receipt? Because I’D LIKE TO TAKE THIS ONE BACK. But the mystery within which grace makes its daily movements means that I can take this gift, with its torn wrapping, alongside the others and wait for it to become beautiful.

We sit on the couch together and The Husband hands me my gift: the novel I wrote two years ago, after a job loss and with numb fingers as TK grew inside me. My words, first inscribed on my heart by Him and now put into print by him, and I hold them in front of me. A real story. I know that I am loved more than I ever dared hope. And I recall all the yeses I hoped for leading up to this moment, and how if they hadn’t been nos I would not be beside this man with our baby upstairs. All the torn wrappings that brought me here, with what will now always be my first book, placed in my hands as a gift.

When things start splitting at the seams and now

The whole thing’s tumbling down…

No one’s gonna love you more than I do.

“I really don’t know how much more of this I can take,” her email read, and though our circumstances are different, our feelings are not. Her words echoed the thought running through my mind as I lay on the table, screen beside me on one side and The Husband on the other, and an all-too-silent–again–doctor and his nurse, brows furrowed in concentration and exploration.

It wasn’t this hard last time. It wasn’t this hard last time, I think, and we’ve said, and the underlying implication is that it shouldn’t be this time, either. Because this time, after the better part of a year of trying, of peeing on sticks and waiting on results, we finally had a positive. And ever since, we have been on a roller coaster, moments of elation followed by moments of trepidation, cautiously optimistic, alternating between hopeful and disappointed, excited and fearful, giddy and resigned. This can’t be good for the heart, these highs and lows. When the doctor asks if there’s been any pain, I hold back the truth, the words that don’t fit the cold and sterile room because they are both melodramatic and way too real.

Only my heart.

He shows me the image, the space where, two years ago, there was a heartbeat. Today there is not. Today there is just emptiness, and we don’t know yet if that space will fill with life or if it will slowly fade away. But he’s less optimistic as time goes by, he says, and for the third week in a row we sit across from him in an office and feel hope deflate. For the third week in a row my arm is poked with a needle. For the third week in a row I will wait twenty-four hours for numbers that could dictate our future.

But do they? And how much hope have I placed in that empty space on the screen? My fear is that the answer is…all of it.

And that is the real diagnosis here.

Because the medical one, and the possibility he gives of it now, involves chromosomes and the word blighted and what amounts to a bad egg and I almost have to laugh–bitterly–at the image it invokes: Veruca Salt being plunged into darkness after her attention-grabbing solo, her demands of “wanting it now”, and though I may dress it up in various shades of ambition and humility and churchgoing and prayer, there is still–there will always be–a part of me that is that little girl, who thinks that studying hard equals getting a good grade, that working hard equals success, that praying hard equals favor, as if the methods of God’s kingdom are comparable to the ways of this broken world. As if I deserve a break because I know the Owner. When all around me, people better than I are waiting on jobs and husbands and babies, have been suffering miscarriages of hope for years, and I hear them and pray not to join their ranks. As if I can somehow earn an exemption for good behavior? I know better. Don’t I?

Though this world may operate on a level more akin to karma, I know that the kingdom of my true residence does not. But what could be scarier than a love that is so big it does not recognize my designations of good and bad, that has more invested in me than my comfort and happiness and timetables? And though, when hope is deferred or outright dies altogether, and that love feels like less rather than more, what will I do?

What do I do if this empty space never fills, but fades instead? Will I go back to running, to spin class, to my nightly glass of red as if nothing ever happened? How can I keep seeing this doctor who has delivered so much bad news? How can I keep seeing this God who has not kept the bad news from being delivered?

Will I continue to proclaim faith in pews and posts while secretly stashing away my heart in broken cisterns? Do I believe what I say I believe, or am I really just a functional atheist, claiming God as mine until things don’t go the way I so desperately hoped?

Is my hope in that sac, on that screen, in that room, or is it located in another realm entirely? With one who is good, but not safe–at least not as I define safe, all smooth edges and predictability and not a roller coaster to be seen?

And I feel them now, the holes where others have had their blood spilled too, the dreams deferred and dying, the invisible threads connecting us that I wouldn’t have known existed before now, and I know that we don’t have to talk about it–we can keep it quiet and discuss our vacation plans and church-friendly prayer requests if we want, but I also know that sometimes small talk is just self-protection and the only place that self-protection ever landed me was alone. Which is exactly what an enemy would have me believe I am, because in some ways it is only happening to me, but really? It is not. It is not only happening to me, or to you. It is happening to all of us. And though there is an ending to this chapter that leaves me pushing away TH and everyone else, that leaves me bitter and resentful, there is another ending. There is always another ending, because there is one who makes beginnings of endings.

And so, over the next twenty-four hours, I will wait. I will cry, I will hold my breath and check my underwear and feel the nerves. But also? I will press publish and I will pray more honestly than I have in awhile, and I will talk with the people who can bear my weight and whose weight I have borne, and I will fold The Kid’s laundry and pull his sheets tight so he doesn’t have to sleep on wrinkles that he would never notice but I do. I will be held by a man who doesn’t have a uterus but doesn’t have to be shunned for that because we are one person now, not two. I will open a door and a nearly-two-year-old will turn and see me and light up and run on legs that took their time. I will remember the two times in as many days when this happened: my back was turned to him and my heart was heavy, and I felt TK grab onto my legs and bury his face in them and wait a moment while I bent down and hugged him before he ran off. Like he knew. Or like Someone did.

I will choose to believe that there is no empty space that will not be filled, that there is nothing sad that will not come untrue. Because our preacher said it yesterday, and it was like my heart was hearing it for the first time: Do you really believe he loves you? And I realized that there are places in which I still don’t believe it. Empty spaces waiting to come to life.

In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die

Where you invest your love, you invest your life.

In the early days of my relationship with The Husband, when friendship had gloriously transitioned into Something More, a moment occurred that remains burned into my brain. I had been floating on air for several days straight, and one morning I stood over my bathroom sink–the site of late-night (and early-morning) retching after too many drinks; the location of tears shed after too many bad dates; the venue where I had prepared for countless days of living and working in New York City within a fog of uncertainty while walking on a foundation of faith. Finally, I had found The One, and I knew it. But deep within, I also knew my (and everyone’s) tendency to let the newness wear off and be replaced by the taking-for-granted ways of familiarity. I told myself to remember this moment, these heady days of falling in love and flirting via text and meeting for late-night dinners, because if all went well, there would be another moment down the road when I would want to kill him for forgetting to buy milk.

Or for running over my toe with the cart. On Sunday, The Kid sat in the front of said cart while TH pushed it through the aisles of Costco and I hovered alongside them. Right there in the freezer aisle is where the offense occurred, where a wheel hit the tip of my toe, and my outrage far exceeded the extent of the crime. And I felt it pass over my face, that look that reveals the ugliest parts of me, the deepest fears and unfairest assumptions, that are all born of my own insecurities and doubts, that lie along the fault lines of my own heart, where brokenness sits in various stages of healing. I felt the look and in an instant regretted it–its message of you’re not taking good care of me and you don’t see me and, the worst, I knew you’d disappoint me. The fears that plague me when I choose them over faith, over protecting, trusting, hoping, persevering like I promised I would on an August day three years ago. The deepest-held fears I have not just regarding him, but regarding Him.

I haven’t seen Before Midnight yet, but I want to. Especially after reading this part of Entertainment Weekly‘s review: “This deeply bittersweet movie suggests that our long-term relationships sustain themselves over time by dying in order to be reborn.” And I think about what I know of dying to be reborn, what in my life has been resurrected from the ashes of defeat and hopelessness, and the answer is everything worth anything. I think about my resignation on the street in Manhattan when I passed that damn Tiffany ring ad one too many times and finally surrendered to a possible lifetime of singleness. How I finally got to the point of believing that if that was my story, it wasn’t because I wasn’t loved. I think about the past year, of the endless waiting-room moments and x-rays, of holding my son down in a search for answers as they stuck him with needles and he lay on a table, motionless. I think about typed-up reports filled with foreboding and the tear-soaked grief of not knowing but fearing the worst. I think about his first steps, and how he will not stop saying mama now. And I know that fear, though it deceives with its familiarity as if it’s a friend, does not have to be invited over for the week and given a guest room and towels because what it can be is a preface to deeper faith. To deeper, more real relationship.

There are moments of tension in warehouses with carts, and in kitchens with crumbs all over the floor, and during midnight cries and turns taken. There are moments of weakness when I wish I could erase what my face just said because it is a lie and I choose not to believe it. We are not the couple we were five years ago over a table in a crowded restaurant, empty bottle of wine and laughter between us. We are more–because of the thousand tiny deaths that faithfulness brings, that choosing to believe in each other entails, even when the waves of daily life and the moments of monotony would have us take it all for granted. Much is said of the sacrifices required for marriage and family, as if there is a resignation to a life of couple-ness that requires a surrendered sigh and digging in of the heels for the dark road ahead. But commitment to anything beyond ourselves asks us to die a little…and then what?

Every now and then we go back to that restaurant in New York and there is laughter and wine. We need to remember where we started, why we began in the first place. But every now and then we hold hands across from an MRI machine, or I collapse into him outside the doctor’s office when we didn’t get the news we wanted. We became a family that day in August and have been growing ever since, with the scars to prove it. That couple in New York had no idea what would be asked of them, and sometimes I envy their innocence. Then I see how TK’s eyebrows do the same thing TH’s do, and how they look identical when they’re thinking hard, and it doesn’t feel like we got here by dying. It feels like we got here by being reborn. It feels like a promise being kept every day.

In your tears and in your blood
In your fire and in your flood
I hear you laugh, I heard you sing
I wouldn’t change a single thing

“When did we become these people?” I asked The Sis, echoing her thoughts from a couple of weeks ago, as the younger invitees to the four-year-old’s birthday party ran circles around us. We laughed, but I could feel the anxiety tightening its coil around my heart. The Kid was the youngest there save a fifteen-month-old whose mother had just told me she’s having to keep him from climbing the stairs at home. But mine’s not climbing the stairs, I thought, and the familiar cocktail of panic and fear called Maternal Guilt (splash of lime on the rocks, please) competed against the wine in my hand–Solo cup sloshing as I took turns with The Husband following TK in his circle of curiosity around the house. And when we were the first to leave, the fear jumped in the car with us, the inner dialogue and analysis and comparisons that would unfetter me from the freedom grace promises.

And these promises–they aren’t vague notions and flowery phrases, but hard truths written in ink and flowing like water. Yesterday, a baptism at our church for the couple who endured miscarriages and years of in vitro and now, their boy’s wet head between them. I remembered TK’s ceremony a year ago, the conversation and understanding that preceded it: the son of covenant believers, the sign of a promise dependent not on his faith, but God’s grace. I remember the message still occupying my inbox, sent from a friend among my dearest, who felt my panic when TK gasped for air one time and she responded with the catechism that is hundreds of years and wisdom old. The comfort that pulses deep, even through the hairs on his head. I look down at the rings on my finger, one given with a promise on a rooftop in New York and the two beside it, on a beach in Florida. I know the vows I’ve made, but how easily I forget the ones made to me.

It’s so much easier to, as my Italian friend in New York used to say, “see the monsters around every corner that are not really there.” To let the MRI and CT and comparisons and milestone averages speak louder than the promises. And then yesterday, as I was once again following him around, TK and I turned the corner outside the gym-turned-sanctuary and the girl looked at him and said, “Aww. What happened to his head?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He tilts it funny. What’s wrong with it?”

Deep breath, throat thickening. “That’s how he was made.”

She pressed on. “His head is just…like that? Well, he’s still cute.”

And she loped off, leaving an oblivious toddler and a gutted mother in her wake.

I swept him up, hurried outside, felt the tears sliding down. I had a few seconds to go before the privacy of the car, then what? A couple of years before he asks what’s wrong, before I have to hold it until we get home and I can cry in my closet? I felt ripped open, crushed, violated. Experiencing hurt on your child’s behalf–watching it stretch out before you, years into the distance, a never-ending sea of vulnerability–is like having open-heart surgery without anesthesia. The Husband arrived minutes later to my explanation through sobs. And I remembered, as I told him, how I had met this same girl’s mother weeks ago and she had described when they met their daughter at the orphanage in Guatemala. How she, like TK, had a tilted neck that turned out to be simpler than his and was now healed. I wondered how much of this the girl knew, how many of her questions came from innocence and how many from insecurity. I wondered if one day, TK will be so restored as to see someone with an affliction similar to his now and ask questions and feel pity. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Or would it?

Because one thing I’m learning from living in this broken world is that there is a difference between pity and empathy. And if TK lives with an awareness of his flaws as part of a design, if they cling and persist all the way down the line this side of eternity, then is that the worst scenario? If his place is to be more at home among the offbeat, the less-than (or so much MORE than?) “perfect”, will he not be all the more able to weep with those who weep? There is one who is close to the brokenhearted–should we shun the things that make us more like Him?

These are not the worst things. We know they’re not, as trials are held and not held and children of all colors are killed and thirty-one-year-old sons die alone in hotel rooms. Part of my job is to see the kids with special needs, the nonverbal and the hand-wringing and the tube-fed. Yes, it can be worse. But we each carry our own brokenness, and if this is our road, if this is how grace is to be imparted to me, to him–through waves of tears and oceans of vulnerability and a bit of a tilt–who am I to ask for another cup? Yes, I’ve learned the difference between pity and empathy–have lived it. And you can lump me with the raw, the honest, with those whose flaws are right out in the open either by design or by admission, because I want to read and hear from the people who are real about where they are in their story, not those who only proclaim the ways they’ve met the mark. I can deal with misplaced pity, with masquerading–I used to dole it out myself–but I’m not inviting it to my birthday party. It’s not among my dearest, you see.

I know where this story is going. And whether TK receives his restoration at the hands of a surgeon or at the gates of heaven, I know who will be its true provider. I know that if I’m going to stay afloat in this sea of uncertainty called parenthood, called life, I’m going to need a bigger boat than my own efforts. I know that grace is a healer, and not always of the infirmities I would prefer to be rid of, but always of judgment, of self-pity, of martyrdom. There are no victims in this household, and no better-thans either. And in those moments soaked with tears, when resentment and fear threaten to ride home with us, I slam the door and send my prayer upward, to someone who knows about wounded sons. Behind me, a toddler plays happily in his carseat, his babbles on their way to becoming words and “flaws” proceeding at their preset pace on a journey to glory.

If history is written, as they say, by the victors, then the official account of last weekend’s activities will one day be provided by The Kid. He definitely emerged in the “W” column after our family road trip.

The Husband and I decided a few months ago to take a July 4 weekend trip to Charleston because (a) he’s never been there; (b) my parents decided to come along and help with childcare; and (c) weekend trips on holiday weekends are something a normal family does, right? Even with kids? RIGHT? Charleston is such a lovely city: waterfront, historical, quintessentially Southern (ie, hot as hell and a little bit racist). I went once, eight years ago, for The Sis’s bachelorette party. Strangely enough, I don’t remember much from that weekend, and I’ve never been there with a year-and-a-half-old, so we were all, “Here’s to new things!” and “This sounds like a great idea!” And we loaded the car with every toy and diaper we own and set out for the five-hour journey.

A half hour in, TK began to cry in the backseat. This began my anxious-mother seat-crawling dance: unbuckle my belt, contort my body into a pretzel, flash the other cars on the highway, land my tailbone square on the seat belt buckle in the backseat, cry out and give thanks that TK doesn’t know English yet. Had you asked me two years ago about the appropriate way to address a toddler screaming in the backseat, I would have advised, “Open the flask and turn up the radio. He’ll quit eventually.” Since then, I have become mother to a child I kinda like, and emotion has a funny way of creeping into the decision-making process. Plus, we had no alcohol in the car (rookie mistake). So in the interest of risking over-placation to conserve sanity, I spent much of the trip riding bitch beside TK, reading him books and trying not to vomit from carsickness. He took a lovely, roughly 40-second nap at one point, and we got there alive, so…there’s that.

At our neighborhood pool recently, with our husbands and kids splashing nearby, The Sis mused, “When did we become these people?” By these people, she meant, of course,  those moving about frantically, trying to keep their kids from drowning, rather than the bastards lying leisurely in the sun with a magazine in one hand and a beer in the other. I used to be that bastard! I thought of that moment several times during our family-friendly adventure, as TH and I moved from one situation to the next like firefighters putting out flames. I think vacation is less of an accurate description than disaster control. On Friday night we loaded TK into his stroller and set out with my parents for our 5:00 dinner reservation because that is what time people with children are allowed to eat in public, and walked the scorching streets of Charleston toward the restaurant. About a third of the way there, we passed a carriage house for horses and breathed through our mouths as the scent of manure coated our hair and clothes. About halfway there, the sky opened up and, drenched, we ducked into the closest doorway, which happened to be half organic diner/half biker bar. “You have a baby! In a bar!” The Mom whispered to me, and I laughed until the entire population of the joint turned to stare at us and I wondered if the record-scratching sound effect was real or in my head. We stayed for a drink anyway, since that’s the kind of “wet” we prefer, then headed back into the 99% humidity to our destination–which turned out to be packed and way too nice for TK’s plate-throwing antics. I felt the helpless tears coming, and The Dad kindly told the staff that we would not be joining them for dinner this evening. Which is how we found ourselves in an open-air section of Satan’s armpit for dinner, feasting upon subpar seafood as sweat ran down our faces.

The next day went better, mainly because we had been broken down and put in our places by the previous one and didn’t set out with sweeping ambitions like “eat normal food” and “walk around in the sun.” We headed to a museum down the street and paid the entry fee in exchange for air conditioning. For the next hour, we each took a turn watching TK walk up and down a hallway as the rest of the group gazed upon Revolutionary War artifacts and fashions. In a room full of silver and china, I thought about my very different experience a decade ago in Charleston’s sister city, Savannah, where I spent a few weeks living during a summer off from dental school. My preparation for that trip involved required reading (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), required viewing (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), and self-protection (learning from The Dad how to shoot a 380 revolver and carry it across state lines). Much different from, say, calculating diaper consumption and dinosaur books. Legend says that Sherman spared the cities of Savannah and Charleston from his torches because he found them too beautiful to burn (he didn’t run into that dilemma with Atlanta, apparently). As I walked through a room filled with silver and china from Charleston’s oldest families, I thought about history and the traditions that compose it.

We Southerners have some skeletons in our open historical closet. We’re acquainted with being on the wrong side of the war–the side that doesn’t write the recap. But we’re also acquainted with periods of reconstruction, with trappings of society like silver and china that get passed down from generation to generation and, though often overvalued, are–at their best and deepest–symbols of endurance and commitment. Gentility and manners that can seem (and sometimes be) arbitrary or insignificant unless regarded for their original intent–to show acknowledgment and respect. I’ve lived on both sides of the Mason-Dixon and have a heart split between them, but I do love that my side of our family’s tree comes with the full-bloomed magnificence of a region both broken and healing, wrong and redeemed. The whole package. Kind of like all of us, when we’re honest.

The weekend improved, thanks to some emptier restaurants and flowing beverages and a little help from each other. TH and I put TK to bed and met my parents in the courtyard outside of our room, where they had snagged us the last of the free happy hour drinks–two for each of us. One of our family traditions. My baby asleep in the monitor beside me and in the bed a few feet away, I took a drink, felt the A/C, and looked around at our group. We are what we have in common, and that makes us a family. I let out a breath held for the last twelve hours and sank into the feeling of being one of those people.

I always saw my life playing out as a romantic comedy. All the going-nowhere relationships were just buildup to the eventual meet-cute scenario that would introduce me to my leading man, with whom I would walk off, hand-in-hand, into the sunset and our happy ending.

The problem with re-imagining your life as a movie is that no one else, least of all the Real Showrunner, recognizes your self-proclaimed role as director/producer/star. So any deviation from your script is an aberration to be fought, fixed, reshot. And then there are the extras who demand to be featured, or those you assigned as leads begging off the project entirely. It’s all just so much work.

Last night, I went in to kiss my son and got a mouthful of snot.

These are not movie scenes, these moments of life that involve sickness and frustration and mess. The mundane movements from detail to detail that constitute most of our days. I am typing this with a swollen finger, a product of a patient’s bite. This life doesn’t feel like a movie. And most of the time, it sure doesn’t feel holy. And yet it is full of the kind of sacred moments I would miss, do miss, were it not for grace to wake me up, remind me, gently (or not so gently) nudge me out of the director’s chair and call for a new vision.

No one talks at a baby shower about how all the “cute” gifts will be covered in spit-up and shit in a couple of months. (Okay, I do, but that’s just because of the cute mimosas they were serving in baby bottles. Sue me.) No one imagines that their journey to a family will be reframed as a struggle to conceive, lying on cold tables and looking at ultrasounds of ovaries instead of babies. I remember pre-The Kid, when The Niece would hack her daycare cough and I would think, “poor thing, she’s got a cold.” Now TK hacks that same cough and I wonder if I should call a team of pulmonologists–is this NORMAL? Is daycare/my career RUINING HIS LUNGS?! No one told me that one of my closest friends would be a liberal hippie I’ve never met in person. And sure, I imagined marrying a man who was my best friend, but my script did not include a confession of feelings followed by a year of waiting in that friendship for it to become more. The Husband? He pictured having a little boy one day, but I have in on good authority that the ball-wiping part of the package didn’t appear in those dreams.

I outlined my life. Grace threw out the bullet points and established a narrative. Those moments that used to look like deviations and interruptions are now where real life is found, because happy endings? They are messy.

My life is a new genre full of all the old ones: comedy, drama, mystery, and at diaper-changing time, horror. The moments don’t follow a script, and I’ve stopped fighting that. Mostly. Because I’ve seen what grace can do with surrender, and it looks like this: a husband whose witty kindness balances out my cynicism. Friends whose idea of vulnerability runs deeper than leaving the house without lipstick. A child who sits beside me now, throwing his Cheerios around the kitchen as I pretend it doesn’t bother me. And then I turn to him and see him staring at me, head tilted in a way the script didn’t call for, with a lopsided grin to match, fist pumping into the air. I couldn’t have imagined that grin on my own. Grace means I never had to.

“We had an incident today,” she said, and standing there in the toddler room of The Kid’s daycare, the thoughts spun around my head like pinballs just released into the machine. That crazy-haired kid hurt him. BRING ME HIS HEAD! Or, TK bit someone; they probably deserved it. She went on to explain that earlier in the day, TK had appeared to have difficulty moving his head and got a little scared–that neck of his being a weak spot–and after I asked a few questions, put him in his car seat and headed home, tears streamed down my face to accompany the fear that coursed through my veins about future injuries and moments when I wouldn’t be around. Will it always be like this? Will I always be afraid?

The fear that haunted me throughout his newborn days woke me the next morning, and I wondered, How do I stay sane as I send my son out into a broken world where he can be hurt?

I did that, the Voice responded, and instantly my thoughts were prayers and I was not alone.

I forget it all the time, how our story is embedded in the greatest one, and how there’s nothing I can feel that hasn’t been felt for me a million times over. Some mornings I’ve imagined a trip to the ER or diagnosed myself with five cancers before I’ve gotten out of bed, because I forget who holds this life. I forget that TK has just been entrusted to me and The Husband on this earth but that he is held by hands so much bigger than ours and that those hands have known pain, have had it engraved into them alongside my name, and TH’s, and TK’s. I forget all that, and I get scared. It’s one of my trouble spots.

I’m not good at facing my trouble spots.

Taking inventory of my strengths wouldn’t be a lengthy process: I’m usually punctual (there was the matter of my birth, to which I arrived three weeks late–sorry, The Mom; but since then my record has been virtually spotless); speaking of spotless, there’s my kitchen floor; and rule-following is a particular forte. But in a reverse of Michael Scott’s reasoning, I find that even my strengths can become weaknesses.

I tend to lord punctuality over certain people who struggle with it (sorry, TH); my head fills with silent screams when crumbs or applesauce hit my pristine floors (sorry, TH and TK); and then there’s the rule-following thing. After almost three decades spent valuing morality over grace, I’ve found myself among the religious hippies who don’t spend as much time worrying about church attendance or an errant off-color word as they do ruminating on God’s perfect, independent-of-me faithfulness. But even that pendulum can swing in the wrong direction, because though grace doesn’t depend on behavior change, it does lead to it, and how often do I make excuses?

In other words, I’m riddled all through with weakness.

The neurosurgeon we saw last week finally said it, that thing I’ve been wondering–that TK’s vertebra is truly unique, that he hasn’t seen this exact anomaly before, which raises the possibility that everything they’re saying, everything they’re trying, is just a guess. And I am so not okay with that being the best we can do for him. This doctor mentioned a nerve block, spinal surgery and the shaving of bones, and as TK played wordlessly in front of us I wanted to scream. So many answers being tossed around with question marks behind them, asterisks beside them. Not good enough. Then I go to my own appointments, follow-up exams and troubleshooting procedures after waiting and disappointment and I am lying on a table once again, waiting for answers in a paper gown, a picture of vulnerability.

I treat God like a service provider, living as though he will enter the room in a white coat, owing me an explanation, and after all my clamoring and sweating I am spent, and I read words like this and this, and I know that the things we need are not always answers. The deepest wounds are often the parents of the greatest revelations. And I read these words: “I am not her savior.”

I feel a weight lift. A weight I had placed there myself. I am not TK’s savior. I am not mine. The world doesn’t depend upon my vigilance to keep spinning the way it was created to.

I know now what I didn’t used to know–that casting my anxiety on him isn’t the same as tossing a dirty load into the washing machine and walking away, reciting a Bible verse and brushing off my hands because all is fixed. It means that I’m casting myself because that anxiety is a part of me, that fear and frustration and need for answers, and when I throw myself into those arms, something changes.

Usually, me.

I walk ahead, not away, with an assurance that this is exactly where we are meant to be, whether this is on a table or in a children’s medical building or at work or at home. I walk with a thankfulness that TK will not be learning about grace second-hand. He will be well-acquainted with it, will know his way all around that building. I walk, knowing that what prepares me for parenthood is not the books I’ve read or the Sunday services I’ve attended or a lack of falling but my own ever-growing acquaintance with grace; the deep wounds that have brought revelations that I’ll share with him. Parenthood–life–is a million moments of courage strung together, of choosing where to put my faith that determines what that courage looks like. Is it a deep breath and gearing up of my own devices? Or maybe it’s a steady leaning, eyes open to good and bad as I define them but willing to believe there’s something deeper that reframes it all. Weak spots? Are they? Funny, I thought they were the places where grace has more room to show up.

To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon…the parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.         Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree

We weathered a few storms last week.

Thursday night brought some fierce winds, a torrential downpour, and an extended power outage. The Husband and I scooped The Kid out of his crib and the three of us, one sleeping peacefully and the other two, parents, rode out the storm in our basement. Candlelight bounced off the walls and TK’s breaths punctuated the stillness. The weather passed, though not without effect: the power remained out for twelve hours, the cable and internet for two days, and then there was the matter of all the debris and fallen trees throughout the area.

A few days before that, though, TK woke up and I went to scoop him out of his crib. Before I reached him, a wave of vomit-stench nearly knocked me over, and I saw that he had puked on his sheet the night before. I felt like a total asshole, naturally, because he hadn’t stuck his head in the monitor’s screen and called out, “Clean up on aisle five!” like he really should if he wants me to know about such events, and he had coexisted with the barf for hours without my knowing. The virus that led to the hurling persisted for days in TK’s diaper and attitude, and one morning an hour before I was due to wake up, his cries rattled on. TH had taken his turn, so it was mine, and as I rocked my son in the last moments of darkness, the sun creeping its way along the eastern horizon, the poisonous thought entered my mind: I can’t keep doing this.

This, of course, could mean any number of things, given the week: sleepless nights, pre-dawn wake-ups for work, leaving work early to pick up a sick baby, standing in front of a gastrointestinal firing squad that has claimed TK and TH and waiting…waiting… Much like Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, I felt I was in one of those spots where something’s gotta give. And joking with TH aside (“I love you both, but I’m going to have to leave”), the family-abandonment plan is not on the table.

The debate rattles on over who has it easier–working moms or stay-at-homes–and as someone who has done both, I can tell you that neither is a honeymoon. You can find me flinging my middle finger out the window toward the pool set on my work days and bobbing alongside them, TK in arms, the next; and the point is not who’s working harder but that we’re all struggling in our own ways, and kicking ass in others, and each of us has “our people” with whom we identify most, but that doesn’t have to end in elementary-style camps with “Do Not Trespass” signs and kicked-away welcome mats and arms-crossed glares. This road of motherhood is gloriously, horrifically, asking more of me than should ever be allowed in polite conversation, and pardon me if I don’t compare to-do lists with you or keep score but instead just show up here once a week to drop a truth bomb about how hard and wonderful it all can be. And when I ask myself in the middle of the night if I really can keep showing up for the job, I need more than a message board to provide the answer.

I can’t keep doing this, I thought. I don’t have it in me. As if love, showing up as sacrificed sleep and plastic gloves and endless laundry and neuro appointments and physical and speech therapy–as if love is Gatorade and the last plant just shut down and I’m left to wring my hands, alone and exhausted. Maybe it’s all easier for you, or maybe you’re just better at hiding when it’s hard, but for me it’s a daily struggle against selfishness and the other ugliest parts of me, a daily crisis of faith in which the truth quietly bobs nearby, like a buoy, waiting for me to stop my self-inflicted flailing and just grab on. Because right now, I’m not being asked to make grand gestures or flying leaps but daily yeses, one foot in front of the other, boots-on-the-ground faith, which can be painful when I show up in the wrong footwear, blistered and bleeding, because I thought this was a party and was told there’d be cake?

Then I think about life before TK, and of all the words that pop up to describe it the one that sticks is this: easier. And who but grace could have gotten me to the point where I am finally able to say, “Who needs that?” Is an easy life really what I want to look back on one day, the narrative version of being a “perfectly pleasant person”? I think there’s more to my story–to his story–than that.

TH and I pushed TK around the neighborhood the other day, gazing at the fallen trees just fully uprooted by the storm, and I realized that for all that is not in me yet, it is being put there by grace–by marriage, by motherhood, by endless appointments and cries in the night and eyes that recognize mine and grin and there’s that buoy again. I hear through the monitor as TK speaks in his crib in the language none of us are wise enough yet to understand. The Sis calls asking if The Niece left Lamby at our house and after the initial crisis passes, we conduct a FaceTime between them and peace reigns again. These are the places and means of my salvation now. Forward my mail, because this is my new address, where deep struggle and profound joy meet and hold hands and the war-torn among us show up, still standing because our roots run deeper than easy, and we share our stories and they are not so much about what we can’t do but what we can because it was first done for us.