This past weekend, The Husband and I headed south. We dropped off The Kid with The Mom and Dad, a simultaneous maneuver coordinated with The Sis as she and The Bro-in-Law left The Niece behind at Chez Grands. You got all that? What I’m saying is that we dumped our kids off with their grandparents and got the hell to the beach.

I grew up on Gulf Coast beaches, annually burrowing my feet into their floury sand and letting their waves carry me out and back again. On these shores I pondered life’s biggest questions, like Will I get asked to the dance? and Is God real? My grandmother told me that their salt water would heal anything, and I have borne witness to their effects on a spectrum of illnesses running from the common cold to a broken heart. My own heart found wholeness there, first when it found the answer to the God question to be a resounding yes (even when the dance question was met with a no), and then when I was married at sunset two years ago.

We stayed in Montgomery for one night, breaking up our trip, and I went for a run on Friday morning. Visiting my hometown reminds me why I sought out a counselor–driving through its streets is like taking a tour of my awkward adolescence, and those old familiar insecurities are only too willing to leap back into my mind. I ran past the former house of a high school crush, recalling how often I would saunter by, effortfully nonchalant, wishing he would notice me. My feet kept rhythm with my music and I kept going, further than I expected. This land may be laden with mines, but there’s something to be said for the familiar and flat.

Our weekend trip was painfully brief, leaving us just one full day at Seaside. The Sis and I went on a run first thing Saturday, then met with our respective partners. They headed to brunch while TH grabbed coffee and I settled us into our overpriced, rented beach chairs. For a few minutes, I sat alone and beheld the glassy water, morning’s gift to early risers. I pulled out my journal and the light breeze ruffled its pages. Taking out my pen to write seemed redundant–the gratitude was already flowing. I thought about how easy it is to be thankful on the shores of a perfect beach, sun warming my feet and family on the way.

This is the day the Lord has made…but so is every other one. And whether I can see the beauty in early wakeup calls and mountains of laundry and broken teeth or not, grace assures me it is there. I grew up on flat patches of suburban grass and now reside among wooded neighborhood hills, yet somehow my heart has always felt most at home on concrete urban sidewalks and within warm salty water. I guess if it all made sense, we wouldn’t need grace to explain it to us. What I do know is that home is no longer a city or location on a map for me. When TH and I caught The Kid’s eye upon our arrival at Chez Grands, he looked at us with recognition, a grin, and an exuberant squeal. And just like that, we were home.

This morning, I made one of our “what don’t I do around here?” jokes to The Husband. Yeah…I think we might have to place an embargo on those. Turns out that being married, owning a house, and raising a kid require myriad responsibilities from each of the people involved, and tensions can especially run high during a week when the washing machine is leaking, there’s water damage to the walls, the air conditioner is threatening to shut down, and The Kid has buckets of snot leaking from his nose. We’re all full-time employees around here.

So, as I sit in our lovely sunroom on one of my two days per week off while TH toils away under fluorescent lighting, I think about what he does for me. What men do, in general, for those they love. I glance periodically at the house next door while I consider this topic. Yesterday, I took TK with me to get the mail and saw the She half of our neighbor couple standing in their front yard, staring ahead. My heart skipped a beat because her husband had told us that she occasionally tries to wander off. Would I have to return her home? Within seconds, her husband appeared behind her and placed an arm around her. They saw me and we approached each other, Husband/Wife and Mom/Baby, and I could tell that Wife was a little lost as to who we were. I wondered how many lucid moments she has these days, how many lucid moments any of us have left. Husband gently led her back to their house, a picture of sacrificial love.

TH, like most men, is adept at orienting love with action. He looks for ways to make my life easier: setting out my coffee cup, arranging appointments with the repairman when he will be home because he knows I don’t like people, offering to get takeout when I’ve had a rough day at work. He supports and believes in me in countless other ways that remain between us. And just a few minutes ago, when I sat down on the couch and found myself surrounded by last night’s dinner crumbs, he was on the case with the Shark within seconds. Now that’s love.

In our basement sits a TV that will soon be replaced, if TH’s Man Cave/Cool Basement project comes to fruition. But I’ll have a hard time letting go of that old Panasonic, because of the story behind it: when I was in dental school and moving into my first post-college apartment sans roommate, The Dad came up to help me relocate from one building to another. He asked where my TV was and I told him that my roommate–the one abandoning me by getting married–owned it and was taking it with her. At some point I had to leave and he finished unloading my stuff while I was gone. When I returned, he had left a brand-new television in my living room. This may seem unremarkable–unless you know The Dad and his aversion to spending money. For him, it was nothing short of sacrificial love. Like the time in college when I came home for a visit and we got into an argument, each of us stomping away in fumes. (This was before I realized that sometimes two people disagree because they’re more alike than they are different.) A couple of hours later, I was preparing to head back to school and I asked The Mom where he was so I could give a begrudging goodbye. She pointed me to the window, and I looked out to see The Dad checking my tires for air. And just last month, when they kept TK for a weekend, The Mom made sure to let me know (because he didn’t) that The Dad had swept out our porch and garage. (She, it should be mentioned, scrubbed our toilets and did our laundry. Gems, the both of them.)

We women know how to do feelings: how to talk about them and overanalyze them and correctly identify them. We excel at community and relationships. The men in our lives, though–bless their hearts–they aren’t so good at mind-reading as we’d like. They don’t always call often or quickly enough. But when they get it right…man, do they ever. A few weeks ago, a package arrived at my front door. I opened it to find the most perfect-for-me book inside, a gift from a man who has provided me style tips, witty banter, sporadic communication…and lifelong friendship. I think about him and all the other men in my life as I watch The Kid grab his own package and yell from his stroller and throw things around, Y chromosome fully on display. How thankful I am for my boy. I can’t wait to watch him become a man.

I had a shit day…have you had a shit day?..we’ve had a shit day.               –P!nk

So yesterday I dealt with fecal explosions, plans gone awry, and petulant children…then I went and picked up The Kid. (Ba-dum-dum.) My current workplace is a temporary station of sorts for me as The Husband and I make our plans regarding family size (insert “and God laughs” joke here). Which is funny, because the office building to which I report three days a week is also a temporary station for the company that owns it–and you can tell. Multiple bathrooms were non-functional by yesterday afternoon; our computer system went down briefly; a light exploded and left us examining teeth in the relative dark. By the time I left without letting the door hit my ass on the way out, I couldn’t wait to see a friendly face: TK’s, grinning upon my arrival.

We waited on the front porch for The Husband to get home, TK bouncing on the step below me as I held his arms. It was a moment full of perfection: the breezy temperature, the giggling baby, the home behind us and the man on the way. There are times when I have to squeeze gratitude out with both hands, breaking a sweat with the effort of giving it, and there are moments when I don’t: when I see gifts everywhere, when the trajectory of my life appears to be a straight line leading here. I breathed in fall and baby shampoo and exquisite joy.

Our elderly neighbor appeared in his yard and I waved, picking up TK to let him take a look because he is, after all, The World’s Greatest Granddad (according to his sweatshirt). He marveled at TK’s growth and cuteness, then TH arrived on the scene. We asked how he and his wife are doing and learned for the first time that she has Alzheimer’s. We talked a bit longer, then went to our separate homes.

Not until this morning did I lose it, taking a moment to consider the slow, painful loss that our neighbor faces daily. What a twisted way to say goodbye. Anger rose up in my heart, as it often does when I’m trying to avoid true emotion, and I weighed my options: wiping my eyes and going to the gym; continuing to read my Bible as if nothing had happened; lashing out at God for allowing such suffering. None of the above. I know what my neighbor believes; he and his wife brought cookies and an Olive Garden gift card and an invitation to church when we moved in, and at the time I rolled my eyes internally (I’m quite good at that, like I am at yawning with a closed mouth), my own faith notwithstanding, at the “go to church” attitude of “Christians” everywhere as a sign of spiritual fitness and an answer to all problems. At the time, I pegged them as that generic type of believer–I know way too many–who define faith according to behavior and attendance; who believe because they were told to and everyone else they know does. Who know nothing of painful desperation and loneliness and doubts and a faith that is questioned and rejected and resurrected not in spite of, but because of plans being unmade and life turning to shit.

Now I see their car pull out of their driveway on Sunday mornings and I realize I was wrong about them. True faith isn’t for the simple. It’s for the chest-beaters and tooth-gnashers and “Why, God”-ers who stick around even when there’s not an answer they like. Grace isn’t a bed of flowers as often as it is a rock that will break you before it remakes you. It’s not for the “click LIKE if you love JESUS!” or “God is good because I have a pumpkin spice latte and passed my trig test” set; it’s for the world-weary, bruised and battered. Belief is an act of bravery. It is knowing that as you engage in a jag of ugly crying on your couch, you are not crying alone. That the one crying with you is more broken up about this whole mess the world has gotten into than you could ever be; that one of you has a plan to turn it all around and it’s not you. That the sad will become untrue according to a timetable beyond my imagining but until then, redemption will occur in the small moments. In the ordinary, poop-smeared days. And on that note, excuse me while I go to pick up TK.

It’s me when you catch the fragrance of spring, when tall trees sway

It’s me in the cold winter sting in the alleyway

I am the sigh while all creation groans and waits.

(Melanie Penn, “Ordinary Day”)

“Who do you think he looks like?” people ask me about The Kid, and because I am indecisive I tell them “both of us.” But it’s the truth. It’s also true, though, that he looks like everyone. Several have mentioned a resemblance between TK and my own dad, and I see it–the first male born in an entire generation on my side of the family, with an expression on his face like, “Could you turn it to Fox News?”

It makes me think about all that my parents gave me, and what I want to give TK. Gifts from The Dad: the ability to speak fluent sarcasm; the knowledge that, and I quote, “life isn’t fair”; a sense of financial responsibility that saved my ass in New York several times (in conjunction with grace). Gifts from The Mom: introduction to Jesus leading to my salvation (solid!); skinny genes; the knowledge that I always had a soft place to land when the world was rough. Gifts from both: a refusal to settle for anything less than success, from spelling bees to career choices; unconditional love.

Gifts from neither: their height. (That went to The Sis.)

All of those gifts, by the way, have their human-twisted unpretty sides. Sarcasm can be mean; salvation can parade as false piety; frugality can turn into penny-pinching. And there were times, like when The Dad wouldn’t jump on the Jesus bandwagon or The Mom picked us up in a borrowed, run-down Bronco, when I cried out to God that these were not the parents I ordered. His reply, I like to think? “I know that already. I AM.”

My running account of The Parents’ strengths and weaknesses over the years has been transformed into a humbling gratitude as I’ve parented TK over the last nine months. There are things I’ll avoid doing myself; there are more things that I hope to do half as well. But beyond all that, beyond my own fears and weaknesses, beyond this human condition that amounts to a vat inching up higher every day with its fullness of imperfections, is the consistent work of grace on my behalf and TK’s. A grace that unravels my messes and reweaves them into beauty. A grace that, if it continues to be as faithful as it always has been, will create TK’s strongest family resemblance.

The end of Monday rolled around, and after eight hours of work and another couple of hours wrangling The newly carrier-free Kid from daycare to the pediatrician then back to daycare to retrieve a misplaced bottle then finally home, I placed him in his exersaucer and took a blessed pee break. Which is when I looked up at the mirror and immediately identified with those poor saps who audition for American Idol despite a glaring lack of talent: Why didn’t anyone tell me the truth? Bloodshot eyes, mascara dust blackening my upper cheeks, various breakouts, gray hairs. Hot mess staring back at me. The Kid paged me from the next room (“UUUUUHHHHH!”) and I flipped the light switch.

The Husband and I have been talking about family photos lately, and it was clear we were on different pages when he provided me with a list of three options. One photographer comes to the house for the session. (“I don’t like people knowing where we live,” I told him, flashing back to some of the Lifetime movies I’ve seen.) One was Sears. (“We are not Sears people. This is a joke, right?”) The final was a studio with green screen capabilities. I just stared at him. “So we could get a space background or something. It would be hilarious!” he said. (“Why don’t we just park a trailer in our front yard and sell fruit on the interstate and WHY AREN’T YOU TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY?!“)

I may be taking this too seriously.

Though I’ve documented The Kid’s nine months with a couple thousand iPhone shots, I’ve found this data insufficient due to its lack of expense and professionalism. It matters to me that we capture this time in our lives, and all three of us together, with good light in a pretty setting. It matters, at times, a little too much. Maybe because I don’t want the only documentation of my own reaction to TK’s first year of life to be a pile of just-short-of-crazy blogs, tearful breakdowns over spitup and blowouts, and gray hairs and deepening skin lines. I want to look perfect, carefree, happy. (I am happy, to be clear. I just forget that sometimes when sweet potatoes congeal on the floor.)

I want a pretty picture, dammit.

And we’ll get one, and some of you will see it and press “Like”, and I will feel validated. But on every other day, I need tools to deal with my Diary of a Mad White Woman self, that psycho staring back at me in the mirror, my mercurial reactions to the normal, blessed details of everyday life. And no, concealer is not enough. Concealer, I think, is actually part of the problem. METAPHOR ALERT!

The pouch above my C-section scar, the gray hairs, the shots of me looking so much older than I did a year ago…these are badges of honor. And I don’t mean that in a fake, actressy, “Wrinkles are beautiful!” way spouted in an interview while en route to a botox appointment. I mean that I am not the same person I was a few years ago, or even last month, and there should be proof of that. And on my better days, when I’ve had a decent night’s sleep and don’t have to deal with teeth, I even believe it. I don’t need the smooth lines of inexperience to bolster my self-worth because they aren’t me anymore. And thank God for that.

And you know who else likes this face? This guy–the one in the picture staring at it, sent to me by his teacher yesterday. Good enough for me.

Her email made me laugh and think, like emails do when they’re from friends who don’t pull punches. She mentioned a theme among the blogs she’d been reading lately, besides the back-to-school nature of them all, and it was this: moms teaching their kids to look out for the underdog. To be nice to the outcasts. To be, in a way…the hero.

She wondered why all these people were so sure their kid wouldn’t be the one who needed a hero.

I plunged into memories of my own formative years (still occurring, it turns out) and recalled how consuming loneliness could feel. I flew under the radar at best, crashed among the nerds often, and was never a cheerleader or president of anything in high school. Didn’t have a boyfriend until college. Didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin until way after that, when I found myself walking New York City streets every day instead of hearing bells ring to signal the next class. And I wonder how many words I would be compelled to write if I had ever been voted Most Popular. I wonder if I would have ever walked the route from Union Square to the West Village or known what Gramercy Park looks like covered in snow. I wonder if I would be sharing a home with The Husband and The Kid now.

Being a hero is overrated, I think. But needing one? That’s life. That’s grace.

I battle the urge daily to protect The Kid from all things unpleasant. And yet he has, at nearly nine months old, already had a catheter shoved up his weenie, a helmet attached to his head, and a therapy collar fitted to his neck. So…so much for that endeavor. I don’t know if he’ll spend high school as the captain of the football team or on the lowest rung of the chess club ladder, but I have to remind myself that grace makes it a win-win either way. As I tell him every night, there’s One who does this love thing bigger and better than his dad and I ever could, and that love doesn’t have a Plan B. So wherever TK lands on the social spectrum or any other worldly measurement device, his worth lies somewhere else.

And I wonder sometimes, if we’re being really honest with ourselves, whether all this hero-posturing and outcast-avoiding are more about us than about them. Wouldn’t it be easier, after all, to not have to watch your child’s heart break? To not have to witness them suffering the slings and arrows of popularity contests and social appraisal? Of course: no one wants their child to be unhappy. But I think too many of us are confusing the definition of happiness with comfort–theirs AND ours. And I know from experience that those words are not interchangeable.

How many symphonies or poems or paintings or Facebooks would exist without pain as a preface? And what is grace if not a beauty not just beyond, but behind the flaws and imperfections and apparent weaknesses?

We struggle daily to get TK to turn his head left, the muscles on that side weak because of his position in utero, and I feel that self-perpetuated sense of urgency that is really just fear looking for a place to land. Then I consider that one day, he may have his “Swing away, Merrill” hero moment when he is called upon to save the world from alien destruction–“Turn right, James!”–and I have to laugh at how wonderfully, designedly imperfect we all are. And how thankful I am that someone else ultimately holds the hero card.

Songs can be transformed into anthems, and anthems into hymns…but can the monotony of life be transformed into the rhythm of poetry?

Louis C.K. waxed brilliant about the “vacation” that occurs for parents as they walk from the kids’ side to their side of the car. Well, for me it’s more of a guilt trip. I battle guilt over the seconds it takes me to reenter the car (the heat! the lack of stimulation!) as The Kid babbles happily in the backseat. I battle guilt over his moments away from me in daycare as his teachers text me pictures documenting his ever-present grin. I carry guilt around with me like it’s the latest Coach handbag, and so do you because I see it in your Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds and you know what? We’re all getting a little too comfortable with wearing guilt as an accessory.

Guilt is just another form of self-love. It’s a reorientation of the universe that lands me on the throne, my actions as pre-eminent. It’s the complete opposite of worship.

Any activity with me at its center is, by nature, the opposite of worship. If the world depended on me to keep revolving as much as I act like it does, then we’d all be on the north side of Shit Creek lacking paddling devices. Guilt (especially the publicly pronounced kind), much like competition, is my way of trying to feel better about myself: “I should have done ______ more perfectly. Or just more.” Insert whichever activity applies as _______, for example: running miles, cooking dinners, preventing diaper blowouts, breastfeeding longer (DEAR GOD I AM SO SICK OF THIS BEING AN ISSUE FOR PEOPLE ALL THE BABIES ARE FINE), working more hours, working less hours, selling Girl Scout cookies, whatever. Guilt is my not acknowledging that I do things imperfectly because I am imperfect and that there’s Someone who’s not. Guilt implies that the greater plan is a backup one because it really all hinges on me for things to turn out well.

Guilt is a sickness dressed up as duty. I’m ready to get well.

The only prescription, for me, that cures the ills of guilt is actively turning my eyes elsewhere. Away from the mirror and (again, for me) upward. And this, I think, is the essence of worship, the opposite of guilt: acknowledging all that is not about me. Acknowledging, and then attributing all of the gifts, the beauty and the blessings, to their rightful source. And admitting that the failures? Are just redemption waiting to happen. A reweaving of anthems into hymns occurs at the table of grace, which is also where sad eventually becomes untrue but until then, scars become beautiful and life becomes poetry.

Guilt never wrote a line of poetry.

As I’m typing this, The Sis calls to let me know, in her annoyingly calm and unflappable tone, that The Niece was pushed down at school and is receiving stitches in her forehead. “WHICH KID PUSHED HER?” I yell, searching for my brass knuckles, and The Sis assures me that all is well as I hear The Niece whisper, “Meow? Book?” in the background, her forehead slathered with lidocaine. I ask where the cut is and hear that it’s in the right center of her forehead. Exactly where my scar is from the bowl The Sis “accidentally” threw at me when we were kids splashing in the pool. Matching scars. I would be a frantic mess, but The Sis and The Niece are having a party at Urgent Care. And it reminds me of another party, where a certain Life of the Party witnessed an emergency of the Wine Depletion variety (my worst nightmare). Did he freak out, yell at the caterer? Nope, he just made an arrangement with his Dad (a prominent party supplier) and up showed the wine. This is how parties go on. Not with Guilt as the DJ, because his songs totally suck.

Guilt makes corrections and grace makes relationships, taking its students individually sans red pen. Grace is what converts lists into verse and life into poetry. The mundane is beautiful and scars, not length of breastfeeding, are badges of honor, stories to be told. Grace shows up not to condemn, but to transform the whining into a party. With extra wine.

The age-old dilemma has been solved: it turns out there actually ARE more hours in the day. They just all occur before I want to wake up.

This is what happens when children arrive, as they shift priorities and schedules and overhaul lives from the cosmetic level to the fundamental: everything changes. If, for example, you’re not a morning person (or a morning-night-middle of the night person, during the newborn weeks)? Well, good luck to you, sir. If, mayhap, you prefer to wear clothing unsoiled by spit-up or diarrhea debris? Have fun with your new wardrobe, then. If, like me, you left the South to identify with the breakneck pace of life that embodies New York City and never reset that pace when you arrived back in the land of flows-like-molasses?

Expect to have it reset for you. Expect, in fact, for all of your perspective to be reset. (“You’re welcome,” I imagine The Kid saying right now, from his bouncy seat at daycare as the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack plays in the background like it did when I dropped him off this morning. “You’re welcome.“)

I’ve always been obsessive about time. It kind of matches the way I’m obsessive about absolutely everything else. For me, being on time means being five minutes early. For The Husband, it means getting there. So when we drive anywhere together, I’m either gritting my teeth and clenching my fists, or he’s saying that we’re too early and we should stop by Starbucks. When TK was born, I put him on a schedule immediately. “What a surprise,” said no one, ever. At lunch today, my friend and I laughed over our similarities in this arena and the stress it caused when the schedule was not heeded. “The baby hasn’t read your book,” her mother told her at the time, and how true that statement is. In fact, babies and children don’t read ANY of our books. Rude!

Whether because of his Schedule Nazi or his own temperament (the truth is surely somewhere between the two but I tell TH, hopefully, that it was probably mostly us), TK has been a wonderful sleeper. Mostly. The other night, though, in the middle of his solid twelve hours, he woke up at 2 am screaming. He wouldn’t be calmed by himself or my back pats, so I rebelliously picked him up, wiped his tears, and rocked him. TH waited beside us supportively (because he’s a good man and oh, also? not just a sperm donor) and we put TK down a few minutes later. He grinned at us and rolled promptly over, falling asleep mid-turn. An hour later, I did the same.

Yesterday afternoon, I propped my tired feet up on the coffee table as TK bounced in his exersaucer. He glanced back at me every few seconds, grinning when I caught his eye, then began doing that thing where he checks his hands out: holding them an inch from his face, his brow furrowed, gazing at them as if they’re the most amazing and beautiful work of art ever to exist.

And I now know the truth: they are.

Because, whether I’m counting the hours until I have to wake up, or until we put him to bed, or until I get to pick him up from school, I’m always doing math. And he–he’s always looking around in wonder. He has slowed down time for me, exposed me to parts of the day I only used to know in dreams or bars. Now they’re filled with seconds, some painstaking and some glorious, all weighed down by his presence. In the early days, that presence felt, at times, more than I was equipped to handle. Now? We sit in the sunroom and he turns to me with that grin and my eyes well not with tears of despair but of pure, unmasked joy that rivals his. And I think: I never even lived until it was the three of us.

This morning I placed him in the high chair and turned around for one last look before my exit. “Say you’ll share with me one love, one lifetime…let me lead you from your solitude,” the voices sang in the background–hilariously, I thought, in a room populated by babies. Then I remembered hearing them on Broadway with TH beside me, and how the romantic earnestness of it stirred the cynic right out of me. I looked up at TK and he was doing that lopsided grin right at me and my throat thickened. I walked out reluctantly and began the countdown to our reunion.