One of my favorite books is the one written about Esther, and it happens to be in the Bible. Unlike any other story in that Book, though, God’s name is not mentioned once during the narrative. I don’t love Esther so much in spite of that fact as I do because of it.

In a former life, I wielded my pen (or typing fingers, as it were) like a weapon, taking the “religion” I learned at church and transcribing it onto paper (computer screen), throwing a few mentions of “Jesus” and “God” here and there to convey divine import. Turns out, though, that Jesus isn’t meant to be a blunt object against people’s skulls; true change is a product of loving, not bullying. And while I may have seen my intentions as noble, my heart had yet to be leveled by grace.

Fast forward a few years, years full of the exfoliating effects of New York City, marriage, and parenthood. That hard shell built by empty obedience didn’t stand a chance against what grace held in store: the dark places of the soul revealed through rebellion, cries in the night, a lethal mixture of self-love and self-hatred that begged for warmth even as it shut people out. My rule-keeping didn’t get me anywhere. My brokenness did.

There is nothing trite about multiple doctors’ uncertainty regarding your child’s health. No way to dress up the ugliness revealed in me when The Husband reaches for the Ben and Jerry’s and I think, “But that’s my pint!” Or when he sustains a basketball injury and all I can think about is how it inconveniences me. It’s so easy for me to be my son’s advocate through this healthcare maze, especially when he’s not throwing cups or waking at 3 am. But when he was? Or when I am called upon to bear more of the family weight for one day so TH can heal? I revert back to the toddler phase myself: My time. My schedule. Mine.

When I entered marriage, I didn’t realize I was assenting to a war waged against my self-prioritization. When I became a mother, I didn’t realize I was stepping into the land of Mommy Wars and ferocious protection. I never knew I would be the lady at the front of the restaurant staring at the hostess in disbelief when she offered us a table in partial sunlight. “My son cannot sit there,” uttered in disdain? Did I say that?

I didn’t know what I signed up for: when I married, when I gave birth, when I believed. It’s always so much more than you can see in the moment.

In a recent interview, Paulo Coelho said: “Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know?…the contradictions are a sign of authenticity…So this is what I love–he is a man for all seasons.” Later, he adds, “Faith is not to disconnect you from reality, it connects you to reality.”

I no longer want any part of the prescriptives of mainstream, Bible study-ese religion that calls me to behavior instead of uncertainty; that carries out the bulk of life within a church built by men instead of a world built by him. This is not reality. I link arms with the questioners, the doubters, the broken and the unsure, not the Sunday school teachers with an answer for everything. I enter the hospital not just as a mother protecting her child, wanting the best for him, but also as one who knows that imperfections aren’t the worst thing that can happen. All of these times, they ebb and flow: sickness and healing, surety and uncertainty, patience and ill temper, poverty and abundance; and all I know is that I won’t be a better wife or mother or friend or anything else simply by trying. Though God-given, all these earthly roles are ultimately only accoutrements of a temporal life anyway. What makes them holy is the recognition that in them, and beyond them, I am a soul. A soul in desperate, consistent need of grace. Grace that isn’t an excuse for bad behavior, but is anathema to it–just anathema in the form not of condemnation but of hope. Grace that allows me to see all that I really am–all the darkest parts–and hope anyway. To put them on paper or a computer screen and know they are not what is most true; that indeed it is never what I do that is most true.

Grace that allows me to lay that deadly doing down and just be still. Because grace allows there to be seasons that are a call to action, to ministry, and seasons that are a paean to being still. To moments spent lingering in the doorway and taking it in: TH lifting The Niece up to make a basket while The hat-clad Kid sits on a blanket with The Sis reading a book. Moments when you don’t have to scrawl His name all over everything because the very air holds the promise of more, of his handiwork. Moments when breathing in that air and breathing out thank you is worship enough.

You can’t keep safe what wants to break.   Jimmy Eat World, “Always Be”

The cashier had nearly finished bagging our groceries when The Husband palmed his back pocket and turned to me, eyes wide. “Where’s my wallet?” he asked in that way spouses do because I’m supposed to know where he put his things and he’s supposed to know how to fix mine. He went out to check the car while I hiked The Kid up on my hip and rued the moment I decided not to bring my wallet because the diaper bag is heavy enough already. Seconds later, he called–en route to our house. And that is how TK and I wound up in Target jail on Sunday, gazing at our cart in lockdown behind the customer service counter until TH came back to rescue us and our food.

I know of no greater levelers of playing fields and pride than grace and parenting.

Last week was a tough one. Thursday, in particular, kicked my ass. TK had an early PT session and was especially tearful about it. I, knowing I had a conference with his daycare teacher followed by a visit to my doctor, was already on edge. The sight of TK’s Cry Face frayed the edges of my big girl pants. By the time I delivered him to his classroom and sat down with his teacher, I was a walking open wound. We talked about his neck, about how his therapist is confounded as to his tilt persistence, and then she brought up his lack of spoken words, and the dam I had been working on all day with blocks of pride and self-reliance just crumbled. My throat thickened, my nose ran, and I panicked as I felt the tears coming.

And here’s the ugly, ugly truth behind the panic–because there is no part of me that pride hasn’t touched, no corner of my being unaffected by The Fall–and you should know that. We live in a broken, messy world, but the biggest mess is within ourselves, and here was mine on Thursday: there was a part of me that did not want to give in to the humiliation of crying in front of my son’s teacher for the simple reason that I have a “doctor” in front of my name and she wears an apron all day.

I kind of want to throw up as I write that, because along with racism and classism and all the other un-PC things our world outwardly abhors, these biases are not allowed among “good people.” But mainly I want to throw up because of what it reveals about me: that one of the most painful things that can happen to me is getting humbled. And that I am often not one of the good people.

The woman in the apron came in for a hug and said she understood–she has a son TK’s age. And I saw the bridge that grace builds after the dam of pride is leveled.

Thank God I am not just the person I am at home as I curse at crumbs on the floor, or just the person I am at work when I miss a diagnosis, or just the person I am in a conference with a teacher. Thank God that though my journey started out Javert-heavy, I am on a trajectory that leaves me looking a little more Valjean-ish every day, and this is love’s work. I was once a rule-follower; now I am a grace-receiver. The biggest jumps on this path have occurred during fits of acknowledged brokenness, embarrassing tears, honest appraisals, raw confessions. The world is tidy and ordered to a rule-follower; to a grace-receiver it can be terrifyingly messy and unsettling. This is what coming to terms with my lack of control looks like. But it turns out that there’s so much more wisdom in “I don’t know” than in “look what I did.”

After a tough day at work last week (did I mention that last week suuuucked?), I drove home beaten down, and that’s where the voice found me: at the end of myself. “Good thing I don’t love you because of what kind of dentist you are,” I heard, and I laughed at the simplicity of a message that has circumvented my heart so often. I still, after all this time, tend toward keeping score of my achievements, and this sucks the joy right out of life. Cleaning TK’s scraps of food off the floor is a thankless job with no one watching–no awards show for that–but the other night as I did it, teeth gritted, I looked up and saw his tiny feet waving from the booster seat. Are you slaving away at a hot stove, or feeding your family? Are you wiping floors, or washing feet? 

There is a part of me that thinks I deserve a statue or cape for the stuff I do, when real life and grace and community are found among the self-acknowledged broken, who openly compare wounds with tears and laughter, who daily wash feet and seldom talk about it. Apron or lab coat, there is a place where we are all the same, a moment when we are on the floor. How we view the world from there makes all the difference.

Well, it wasn’t scar tissue.

Another week, another waiting room. This one, the Breast Care Center at Northside Hospital. As I pulled into the parking deck that held my car during a dozen prenatal ultrasounds, I recalled the last time I had been here: one year ago, to see a lactation consultant who would give me tips on how to nurse without trauma (to me or The Kid). If it ain’t one boob, it’s another, amirite? Damn things. An email from the Yankee Mom said as much a few days later, how pleasure and pain can originate from the same source. Then she mentioned another organ that has its ups and downs–the heart–and how I am held closely in hers. And I began to think about all that we women endure for love.

The Husband and I are reluctantly ditching our homebodied, couch-loving ways every two weeks to participate in a small group study on marriage through our church. As we share–something I prefer to do with a wineglass, computer, or both in my hand–and hear love stories and life stories, I am struck repeatedly by how different men and women are. And how miraculous it is when we overcome those differences and stay in relationship: marriage, friendship, what have you. Wars have been fought over less than what happens at some kitchen tables. And yet we approach each other daily, risking bloodshed and heartbreak, to make it work. To let grace work on us.

There were no men present past the first waiting room in the Breast Care Center. Just a bunch of women sitting in robes, what could have been a spa locker room but for the anxiety etched into each face. This is a place where innocent people receive death sentences every day, I thought, and felt my heart tighten. Quickly, I texted The Sis to verify that she and The Bro-in-Law are still on board as guardians of The Kid in case. Then I was called back.

They did a series of mammograms first, all of which had me contorted in positions that make downward dog look pedestrian. “Next one’s called The Cleopatra,” the tech said, I shit you not, and within seconds I was arched backward with one arm in the air over my head. I almost laughed, then I remembered why I was there, and then my boob was crunched flat. So…no laughing. After a brief wait, I was told that the doctor wanted an ultrasound, and a nurse showed me to a private room. I lay on a bed next to a screen manned by a tech and thought of the last time I had an ultrasound. TK was on that screen.

My mind ventured into some dark territory–TH and TK can’t live off turkey sandwiches and cereal!–and the tech asked if I was okay. I realized there were tears in my eyes, I had been busted getting emotional in public, and I was pretty f-ing far from okay. A short wait later, and the radiologist came to tell me that there was a slightly enlarged, slight worrisome lymph node in each axillary area (otherwise known as the AAHMPIT) and I would need an exam by my regular doctor to determine if a needle biopsy was necessary.

Then I went back to the parking deck and got lost trying to find my car.

Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is a dangerous error to confound truth with matter-of-fact. Our life is governed not only by facts, but by hopes; the kind of truthfulness which sees nothing but facts is a prison for the human spirit.” As I wait for a fact-based diagnosis, I think about how well-worn my body is, particularly its heart, by a life that knows the kind of truth that only hope provides. Three days later (the best things can happen in three days), I sit in a gym and hear a sermon delivered in a Mexican accent by a man I’ve never met who is my brother; I receive bread and wine with redemption attached. Some day down the line, whether it’s sooner or later, there will be a grim diagnosis; we are all wearing down. But to have a heart that, even as it wears down, is renewed and forgiven every second by a grace that defies expectation and just keeps showing up? The sturdiest of hopes is born of grace’s faithfulness…is built on nothing less. This is a hope that outlasts matter-of-fact, that overshadows diagnoses, that remains whatever appears on the screen.

TK and I sat on the floor of the gym and had a picnic while we waited for TH to finish up some business. This baby, this boy, who will by grace one day become a man, grins up at me as we share a turkey sandwich. Broken bread everywhere.

“I don’t think I would change anything, really, even though if you asked me back then I would have changed every single thing.”   Tim Burton

Last week, The Kid and I spent a day together shuttling between his appointments: first, with the physical therapist; then, with the pediatric orthopedic surgeon that the therapist recommended take a look at his spine to rule out any malformations that might be preventing him from turning left. You see, after a year of physical therapy and a surgery, TK maintains his characteristic head tilt and preference for movements to the right. (I could make a joke about his conservative-leaning mother here, and genetics, and…well, you get it.) So it happened that on a Thursday afternoon, we scarfed down lunch and jumped back in the car, napless, and drove to a new clinical setting where TK was forced upon an x-ray table twice. I carried him back into our waiting room and he collapsed on my shoulder, sucking his thumb and snoring lightly, and I leaned back in the chair that held the weight of us both. I recalled an afternoon when he was about three months old, and tensions were higher, and we fell asleep on the couch, his head on my shoulder then too. A thought crossed my mind: how many of these shoulder-naps is a mother apportioned during her tenure? And so I soaked in the moment, the limb-numbing, technology-devoid, cramp-inducing moment, and as the heat from his body translated into a sweaty patch on both of us and we awaited the surgeon’s all-clear diagnosis, I gave thanks.

Later that day: another doctor, another patient. My mammogram had come back with a dense spot and they needed a redo. I scheduled it for later this week, then got on the horn with The Sis, an NP; The SS, a prayer warrior; and The Mom, a mother. About a decade ago I had something harmless removed from the chesticle in question, and there was no small amount of relief in the likelihood that the dense spot is likely scar tissue from that. But still: moments like these remind us that we are mortal; that the world is broken; that God is good but not safe. And so I gave it to him, the one not surprised by any of it, and pushed TK uphill toward dinner and The Husband and home.

During this season of Lent, when the behavior modification component of religion kicks into high gear and self-improvement projects in the name of God abound, I find it especially easy to slip into my contrarian ways and consider a different approach. And on Twitter, I found it in Tullian Tchividjian’s feed:

Perhaps Lent is your opportunity to reorient your heart to the gospel by giving up nothing more than your own efforts of self-justification.

I realized what a transaction of faith this would be, rather than a transaction with my own will: I know, after all, when I’m eating chocolate; but how often am I aware of my own attempts to justify my self, my worth, my value? So I start with the obvious and decide not to look at my Site Stats or compare myself with other writers or look at their page views/responses/comments sections. And I trust grace to intervene in all the moments I need it, to shine a light on my unwitting self-reliance and overpower it with the verdict already rendered on my behalf.

And I remember how those attempts to justify myself, so many of them throughout my life, have really just been amputations of grace by my own hand. That Elizabeth Elliot, a widow twice-over due to tribal warfare and then cancer and yet a believer still, voices two annoyingly simple and true statements that can change a life–

Acceptance brings peace.

Whatever happens is assigned. 

And I know that some surgeries lead to dense tissue like mine, while some remove it, like TK’s; but after them all there is a hand greater than ours directing the healing–its nature, its duration, its difficulty. I know that hand works with a will that fulfills prophecy, not expectation, and that this is what Lent, what life, is about: making room for his grace in whatever manner it should appear, whatever mark it leaves upon us.

Before TH and TK came along, I never truly saw how dangerous and terrifying is this world in which we live. But I can’t stop there, because what naturally follows, what gracefully follows, is that I never saw how protected I was within this world, to still be here now. To still be with them. And so we all sit in our waiting rooms, where life really is, and let a head rest upon our shoulders while we find a place to rest our own as well.

Yesterday, The Sis and The Niece came over. The Niece is in that Pull-Ups stage of development, wherein the undergarment reflects both optimism (we will accomplish this potty-training thing!) and reality (yep, that’s a turd in her pants). The toddler’s alert to said pant-package–“I poopy”–often arrives a beat too late, and when The Sis walked back into the room after retrieving a fresh Pull-Up, The Niece had gotten ahold of a piece of fake dog crap we had lying around. (I could tell you the story of how that crap came to reside in our home, but let’s just allow it to be a kind of summary of the way we approach life.) The Niece held out her poop-laden hand toward The Sis, and there was the sharp intake of air that accompanies total shock (and, in this case, misunderstanding). Then The Sis and I burst into laughter as our children looked at us as if we were insane. Not for the last time, I’m sure.

We talked later about how much more fun things are now with these creatures we’ve spawned, how the investments of time and sleeplessness and sanity we made in those first few months have reaped their reward in our children’s smiles and laughter and learning. I am an official fan of the toddler stage, with its speed-crawling and hands-free standing and glimpses of personality. And I love that, having come from a home brimming with estrogen, I am the lone double Xer in between two XYs. It’s like being in New York again, where people say what they mean and loud noises abound.

But a funny thing happened on the way out of the city and into domesticity: that funny fear thing that followed me around all my life followed me into the suburbs, now taking on new shapes and targets. No, I really don’t have the energy to worry about getting toilet paper on my shoe or accidentally farting in public anymore; but those self-stationed concerns are laughable compared with the weight of two lives tied to mine. I used to rush out of work to get to the gym; now I’m speeding to a building full of babies so that I can pluck mine out of the backstory of danger I’ve created in my mind on the ten-minute drive. There is a very real possibility that, left to my own devices, I could drive myself into complete paralysis just by thinking my way there. And if everyone’s well-being really depended on me as much as I act like it does, we would all be screwed.

But I’m not left to my own devices. I just have a hard time letting go of them.

Prayer, along with coffee in the morning, wine in the evening, and Salt n Pepa in the car, is what works for me. In the stillness that accompanies it (because God will show up anywhere, but I get the feeling he doesn’t like being multitasked), prayer reveals that my attempts at providing my own light for the road ahead don’t do anything to change the fact that it will not be illuminated according to my schedule. We’re all fumbling around in the dark, holding up battery-dead flashlights and crying out that we know the way. And oh, how we cry out: on message boards, in comment sections, in gossip and snide remarks, in unsolicited advice. Which is what’s so funny, because we assume that OUR way is THE way when we can’t really even see five feet ahead. Isn’t it possible that we’re each allowed our own path?

My personal path leads me through prayers that remind me of truth: that these bodies we have are just shells wasting away; that it’s the soul within that matters, that sticks, that evil and time and brokenness can’t destroy. And yet we spend so much time polishing those shells, and so little on the eternal part. There is a way to live our choices without looking down our noses at everyone else’s, without muttering and/or yelling in defensiveness and insecurity. I remember a conversation I had with someone while I was pregnant, and she asked what my plan was for going back to work. She cited a friend of hers, who had decided to stay home with her new baby because “she just couldn’t imagine letting anyone else take care of him.” It was the first arrow I endured in the Mommy Wars, and the day I began to feel the temptation to assemble armor and weapons of my own. Naturally, I regularly give in to the self-doubt that increases a thousand-fold once a human being is pulled from your gut or adopted into your heart. But the other day, I read an email that The Kid’s physical therapist sent to his pediatrician in which she described his progress. At one point, she wrote, “Mom, who is a pediatric dentist, feels…” and went on, but my eyes stuck to that part between the commas. I used to equate my self-worth with my accomplishments. But now, as TK has endured a helmet, a neck collar, a surgery, and continuing physical therapy, I think about how my head and neck training has allowed me to have a shorthand conversation–and perhaps a bit of deeper involvement and more authoritative voice–regarding his treatment. And far from being something to brag about or hang my hat upon, this background of mine–this part of my story–is a humbling gift from a God kind enough to know that this particular mom, this particular girl, feels so much better when she has a voice. On a blog or in a PT room. And that, if that’s the only thing my years of studying and practicing afford me, it is so much more than enough. And so much more than he had to give.

It’s my story, the same way your story is yours. If they overlap, great. But one’s not better than the other. Or if you’d rather hear it in the slightly defensive but infinitely poetic words of Salt n Pepa:

So, the moral of this story is, who are you to judge?

There’s only one true judge and that’s God

So chill, and let my Father do his job.

I am a complainer; The Husband is a fixer. To put it more gently, I am great at diagnosing problems and he is fantastic at doing the research required to correct them. Which is why, when I was complaining recently about the body-taxing difficulty of removing The Kid’s bumper pads every time I change his crib sheet (untie, pull off, put back, retie–who has time for this when Downton Abbey is waiting on the DVR?!), TH headed to the internet to find out how he could help. (Why, you may ask, didn’t he just offer to change the sheets himself? Oh, he did. Then I reminded him that he hasn’t taken my course in Baby Bedmaking. So off to the internet he went.)

A few minutes later, he approached me with a confused look on his face. “I just wanted to find out how to make it easier…people yelling about how bumper pads kill babies…” I comforted him and reminded him that message boards are of the devil; they are where insecurity takes its biggest dumps; they are a land full of trolls seeking to justify their existence. In other words, bitches be crazy. “But I didn’t ask if bumper pads are okay! I’m going to use them anyway! I JUST WANTED HELPFUL TIPS!” His attack-and-solve brain could not compute such behavior; this is why Fortune 500 companies don’t have online communities full of CEOs wondering aloud about How to Have It All.

We shouldn’t be able to sum up parenting with a sentence on a message board, or intelligence with a comment on Facebook, or life with a Tweet, or theology with a rubber bracelet. These are all the ways we dumb down our existences into a size manageable enough to control. I struggle every day with the fear that accompanies loving TH and TK to a point that I didn’t know I was capable of; I fight the defensiveness that goes along with reading comments from moms who contend that if your child sleeps through the night before age one you are starving him; I negotiate with the ambivalence that is paired with being a working parent. I take the fear and defensiveness and ambivalence and stretch them into perpetuity, imagining scenarios like the snot-nosed little punks who will dare to give TK a hard time (how long can you go to jail for roundhousing a kid, anyway?). And I know that the world will never let up on its affronts to my need for control. SO. What now?

Saturday afternoon, TH and I were sitting on the couch while TK played nearby. I was probably working on a to-do list; TH was likely managing spreadsheets. A moment later, TK speed-crawled over and pulled himself up on the ottoman. My arm shot out reflexively, as if all of life’s dangers can be fended off with a human brake, and then something amazing happened. This child who, for weeks, squatted carefully to the ground to dismount from the standing position over a period of about a minute–he figured out how to fall. And he effing loved it. And once he realized that he could fall hard on his can and be just fine, he began to let go and stand, balanced, for several seconds. Then again, sometimes he would skip the balancing and just fall for the sheer joy of it.

Before I dove for the phone to video this MASTERPIECE THAT NO OTHER CHILD HAS EVER ACHIEVED, I took a moment to see it with my own eyes. Is it that these moments are so rare, or that I don’t look for them often enough and life is teeming with them? TH’s eyes met mine. “This looks like a blog post,” he said. And I saw him, the man whose story met mine in a city that required me to let go before I could get there; and this child who is half him, half me, barreling into our ordered existence and teaching me how to live. I don’t want to be a girl about it, but damn. I was overwhelmed.

That moment when you find out that there’s something stronger than self-sufficiency or amassed knowledge or public reputation or getting-it-all-right or GRAVITY that holds you up when you need to be upright, and breaks your fall when you need to let go? This life of ours, where a gym is a house of God and our grace lies in messes and a woman full of mistakes can be a mother? This is where I end and more begins.

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When I was eight, I walked out onto a stage and sat down at a piano and began playing a piece I had practiced so many times I’d had dreams about it. My fingers moved reflexively to a rhythm that time and discipline had perfected, and for a moment I was lost in the music.

Then I began to think.

Or maybe fear? I began to fear, though thinking and worrying have been a couple for so long in my brain that one rarely shows up without the other. I began to think about messing up, and I began to fear the embarrassment that would accompany a blunder, and that’s exactly what happened. My hands, now sweaty with anxiety, slipped from their rhythm and I couldn’t recover quickly. I had to start over. But this time, there was no getting lost in the piece. There was careful concentration until the torture was over. At some point, the redness left my face and the tears dried from my eyes, but the damage was done. Fear had robbed me of music.

I’ve never really stopped being afraid of what people think; I’ve just learned to recognize the fear and sing “Beat It” under my breath. And now my fingers travel across different keys in a battle to recognize life’s rhythms, to tell the truth, to recover joy from fear. To document grace.

It’s a form of therapy, I guess, and trust me–I know therapy–but it hasn’t always been. Fear and insecurity can twist writing like they can everything else, and for so long my writing was my attempt at approval or my passive-aggressive verbal weapon or my self-important instructions to a world that needed help revolving around me. An act of pride in various incarnations. It still is, I’m sure, until grace gets its way and the real and raw is recovered. Life banged the milquetoast right out of me, and trite is no longer a blanket I long to burrow underneath.

But the call of conformity will always beckon, and in no arena have I heard it more loudly than this motherhood venture. We women are a crazy lot, aren’t we? And we’re all mothers of something, whether it’s our children or our creativity or our students or our careers. We have it ingrained in us to nurture. But wow. Not since men with small willies has there been a group more inwardly insecure and outwardly overconfident. Please visit ANY mommy message board before you protest. Becoming a mother transforms a woman into a fearful expert. When you find, or give birth to, that thing you’re supposed to mother, nothing else has ever mattered more. And so the fear kicks in, and the consequent attempts at appearing adept. Recently I saw a link to Pinterest fails: women shared the intended “perfect” outcome of a project, then their awful actual version of it. Bravo, I thought. I am so over the competing.

The Kid’s progress report from “school” the other day read: James sure does love chicken fingers! And my first inclination was to worry about a low vegetable intake because damn it if he doesn’t throw anything green right off his tray at Restaurant Mom. Then I thought about how much joy chicken fingers have brought me in my thirty-five years. Later, he reached over from his booster seat and rubbed his sticky fingers all over the countertop, leaving a film similar to the one a certain other male in this household often leaves on the remote control during meals not spent at the table by candlelight (read: ALMOST ALL MEALS). TK is his parents’ son. If The Husband ran the house, there would be more bouncy time but a film over everything; if I ran it, countertops would always sparkle but we would adhere to an endless list of rules. It turns out that even after marriage and motherhood I am still the same person I always was, but with a new name. And more grace under my belt. Both are making a difference. Last weekend, when I first woke up and prepared to attack a growing to-do list, I turned to the window and there were the early-morning pinks and purples that love had scattered across the sky. And I saw them. I poked TH and he turned and saw too. I’m still me, but grace renames me and gives me new eyes to see, new material to write.

And last night, after TH and I put TK to bed, we ate chicken fingers for dinner.

For the second time in the last few months, I’ve succumbed to a stomach virus. At this point I have nothing left to believe but that when these bugs get together for their annual convention, they mark me on their calendar every time. When I hear of a virus going around, I check the fridge for Gatorade and ginger ale because I just know it’s only a matter of time before I get hit. Also, I’m paranoid (generally) and dehydrated (right now), so I’m pretty sure everything I just wrote defies logic.

Most of my “why, God, why?” moments in the past year have come in the middle of the night, synchronized with a crying baby or an alarm in my belly, and I’ve learned that the answers are rarely forthcoming. Then again, if life were really fair, I doubt I’d be sitting, legs propped up, on the couch under a blanket in the basement of the house I live in with my husband and son while someone else cleans upstairs and children die in Syria. So there’s that.

Recently, when the middle-of-the-night alarm was The Kid and I tensed into that runner’s crouch as my mind painstakingly debated whether this was something he’d soothe his own way out of, that question popped into my head: Why? And for the first time in…well, maybe ever, I realized that it’s not the futility of asking it that’s the point–as in, why bother if I’m not going to get an answer?–but the fact that it may be an unnecessary enterprise altogether. Because there were those moments, soon after TK first arrived, when the exhaustion and frustration and ineptitude and darkness all mixed together with his cry and distilled my range of emotions into a moment of martyrdom, converted a blessing into a curse, and revealed my long-bred and deeply-ingrained selfishness. Why is he doing this? I would think, and sometimes ask The Husband, who to his credit did not reply, “Because he’s a baby, you dumbass,” though that answer would not have been incorrect. I wanted a reason, a clear-cut, black-and-white reason because with a reason comes a solution. And at 3 am on random weekday nights I was fresh out of solutions.

But this night, when his cry woke me and I lay in limbo until I realized he wasn’t going to calm himself down, I stood and headed toward him. TH was close behind, and after a few minutes, TK was back in his bed and we were in ours, and the boys in the house drifted off to sleep while I took my usual time doing so. While I waited, I considered how much easier that whole “ordeal” had just been without my typical protestations. And I realized that sometimes the why doesn’t matter–at least, not the why that I would have asked. Sometimes that why moves away to reveal a greater one: because I’m his mom.

And the point of all that is, that if there’s a reason that’s bigger than me and the way I feel at any given moment, then I may just be able to calm the F down once in awhile and trust in that reason coming through and answering all the whys that my heart tends to create in its need for control. Why does TK prefer TH right now, wriggling out of my arms to reach for him? (Shockingly, my reminders to him of who carried him for nine months and was cut open to deliver him don’t make a difference.) Why did I just shut the tip of my finger in the door when I know perfectly well how to close a door without doing so, and now every time I type, a sharp pain radiates through my hand? Why do people we love get sick and forget who we are and suffer for the last years of their lives? Why do I wake up twice a night to pee with the theme song from Men in Black stuck in my head?

What if, behind the silent, trailing-off, heavenly “Because…” that feels like a cold non-answer, there is only love waiting to be revealed in a WHY. that defeats every expectation until there are no questions left?

I had a Moment last night.

These Moments don’t often occur in front of the TV (unless the Dowager Countess is talking); they will show up sometimes during movies (especially in the theater, what with the heightened experience and the popcorn); and they’ve definitely been known to hit me while I’m reading (the power of the written word holds such sway, and always will, the pen being mightier than the tube and all). But on a typical Monday night, in front of an episode of How I Met Your Mother? Absolutely unheard of, as the Countess might say.

But there it was, in a scene with Lily and Ted on the roof, getting all truthful with each other. And then Lily—my least favorite character before now, btw—said it: “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a mom.”

“Whoa,” The Husband said beside me. I felt the collective intake of breath of millions of women, the outrage of mommy bloggers, the sadness of the fertility-challenged. Tears sprang to my eyes. And I felt grateful.

If you’ve been here before, you know that I’m not shy about sharing the emotional ups and downs of being a mother (or being me, for that matter). Remember the post where I told you I threatened suicide? Yeah, good times. The one where I pulled a Chris Brown with my computer? No, YOU go on! Here’s the deal: I tell the truth here because for my first three decades of life, I didn’t. Tell the truth. Anywhere. I carried it around inside myself, covering it with goals and accomplishments and good grades and other stabs at an identity until that all fell apart and I had to become the person I was actually meant to be. And when the falseness fell away, so did my attempts at pretending to be likeable, perfect, smart, together. I was free to be the mess I was, in my life and in my writing, and I found that although such beacons of success as Joel Osteen and Bible Study Brenda (a made-up persona, but I bet you know one) may sell the most books, here’s the thing: people wrote me back. They called me. They reached out, bravely, because they weren’t together either. And in our mutual mess, we found identification. Friendship. Communion. Truth. All by telling it.

So you are invited to kiss my ass if you think I’m going to stop now, or ever. If you think I’m going to join the ranks of “God wants you to be rich” or “Being content in God means always looking happy” because I believe there are times when nothing could be further from the truth. Cut to me, broke in New York or lonely in Birmingham, all the while headed on a path toward my son and my husband. To whom I threatened suicide. Ahem. (Hey, remember when Jesus tore up that temple? Same thing! No?…)

When Lily uttered those words (and didn’t apologize for them by the way, just admitted that they coexist with a deep love for her son), I wondered how much hate mail the writers of HIMYM would receive. All while I sat on my couch, silently applauding. Because here it is: there are things we all think, but are afraid to say. And the not saying them is what keeps us wrapped up in ourselves, frustrated and angry and posturing and defensive. So if you ever need a spot to visit where things are raw and real and not-pretty-enough-for-Pinterest, come on over here. (And if you have nothing nice to say, then come sit by me. I am under renovation by grace, but the project is a long one.) Not telling the truth is what turns you into a disgrace, a Lance Armstrong; it takes everything good you’ve ever done–a story of victory, a narrative of miracles–and turns it into what you were trying to hide from the whole time: exposure as a fraud.

But letting go of the fear of what others think, trusting in a love bigger than yourself and jumping into it? That can lead to a sore back, puffs on the floor, a few psychotic mommy moments, an early bedtime…and a Monday night full of a Moment.