The Kid has had his head examined. Multiple times. Way back when he was a newborn (three loooong months and another world ago), his pediatrician noticed some asymmetry there, as well as a favoring of one side when it came to neck movements. She sent us to the physical therapist and we did some “necksercises” (my word, I’m already trademarking it, don’t even think about stealing it). There was some improvement, then some regression (he apparently follows my life patterns)–so she sent us to the (insert soundtrack of doom here) pediatric neurosurgeon.

They wanted to make sure his skull wasn’t fused together in the spots where it’s supposed to be, well, NOT, so the neurosurgeon felt around and ordered some x-rays. So our poor little child, who–unbeknownst to us all–would, a couple of weeks later, be lying on a bed in the ER with a catheter shoved up his woohoo, was on that Monday morning lying on an x-ray table as The Husband and I held him still and the beam passed over his skull. He was an angel. I was a wreck. But we were all okay. As was his head.

Last week, we were back to the PT to kick the necksercises into high gear now that we had the all-clear from the surgeon. She recommended a scan of his head because the asymmetry is still there, and damn if we’ll let his modeling career be deterred by THAT! (I am not serious about modeling. I would never let such a vain enterprise interfere with his work for the Heritage Foundation.) So it happened that about a year after I watched The Niece go through the same thing, I was holding TK in my lap as the orthotic specialist placed a gangster-looking hose-thingy over his head and we placed him in the scanner. I held him still, which seems to be my primary job these days, and made a joke about robbing a bank later as the laser traversed his head. A few minutes later we left with a design sheet for his new gear.

And then, this past Sunday: The baptism Mulligan, two weeks after the originally-scheduled one. No ER visit the night before. More family in town to see it. And the crowd of us barging into the gym-turned-sanctuary, believers and non-believers alike, all to watch The Kid’s asymmetrical-yet-perfect head get doused with tap-yet-holy water. As our pastor spoke and the Yankee Dad videoed, our family of three stood in front of our community: the rag-tag, broken band of church-planted brothers who prefer to be honest about what messes we are rather than pretend to be put-together. The water came down upon TK’s head, and his thumb-slurping paused as his face filled with shock at this unexpected turn of events. “What the…?” I imagined him thinking, and his face began to crumple until I shoved his thumb back into his mouth and–you got it–held him still, TH’s arm encircling us both. I thought about the floods of grace in my own life, unscheduled and unexpected and often unwanted, my startled face crumpling with the outrage of it all, and then the peace that descends despite my best efforts to ward it off in favor of the planned. The realization that there is One who knows better, and that this is good news indeed, because it means that these are the moments–all are the moments– when I lie still and let the water wash over me, making everything new.

I routinely miss the trees for the forest. On a resume, this trait might be listed as a strength: I have a big-picture mentality. In actual life, I walk around with shoulders slumping underneath the weight of my often faulty vision (no wonder they always hurt!). Every day can feel like a Monday when you spend it looking ahead at all that must be done. Gratitude can cure this nasty disease, and I’m learning to practice it. Motherhood, though, can intensify it.

I’ve watched one too many Lifetime movies over the years, and now that The Kid has arrived on the scene, my paranoia threatens to cast its shadow over everything and suck the joy right out of life. His helplessness confronts me, demands to know if I am enough.

And then I remember: I’m not.

When I was pregnant and still knew everything and we went touring daycares, our first visit ended with a trip to a fenced-in playground. The school’s coordinator pointed us to the corner of the outdoor space and said, ‘That’s the ecology center.” The Husband and I looked over and saw two trees and a pile of dirt. We held our laughter until we reached the car. Having given up on the enterprise myself after years of sore arms, I just love it when people try to polish turds.

I will never read enough books or defuse enough conflicts or calm enough tempers (mine) to achieve perfection. I have exhausted myself from trying, at various points, to be the best, most put-together version of whatever role I was playing–student, professional, religious zealot–little ecology centers popping up all over my existence and me, digging myself deeper into self-reliance as the dirt piled up and the shovel grew heavier and the scene more hopeless. I look at the years ahead, the million little choices to make regarding TK’s life and the effect those choices will have on him, and my knees buckle beneath the burden. How will I raise him to be an honorable man, a person of integrity, a well-behaved individual in a world full of assholes–and I, chief among them? I can’t even get through a morning without apologizing to The Husband for something.

My shoulders hurt. I’m tired. There are too many people watching. I’m afraid–there was another kidnapping movie on TV last night. I just can’t do it.

I hear TH sleep beside me. I see TK, peaceful in the monitor. I unclench my hands and teeth and other body parts and remember that I didn’t get here by trying harder. The next morning, I look out the window and see the blue and purple hydrangeas in the backyard that I didn’t plant or water or groom, the ones that just happen to match the flowers we chose for the wedding, and they were here when we moved in that December, hidden beneath the ground but waiting to bloom. Everything they needed, already there in the dirt with them. And it occurs to me that I, too, already have everything I need because I have more than myself. As I allow grace to undo and remake me, as TK sees that, we become what we are meant to be. Because that is where grace works–not in seconds, but in stories, a narrative independent of time. Beauty from the dirt; little trees everywhere.

The plan: a baptism in the gym-turned-sanctuary followed by a family lunch. The reality: a 102.5-degree fever followed by a midnight visit to the ER.

Mother’s Day did not go according to the vision I had for it. Does anything, anymore?

The Mom and Dad rolled into town Saturday afternoon and kept The Kid and The Niece while The Husband, The Sis, and The Bro-in-Law and I hauled ass to a local Italian restaurant, gleefully and childlessly stuffing our faces with food and cocktails. Later that night, TH and I fed the baby and noticed that he was on fire. One rectal temp and a consequential browned-down diaper later, we were on the phone hearing that we should head to the ER. 

They flooded his nose with saline and suctioned it out. Then they catheterized him to get a urine sample. Then two different nurses punctured his skin with three different needles before finding a vein for a blood sample. Then they turned out the light, let us know the results would be ready in an hour, and left the room.

Our family of three remained behind, bleary-eyed and exhausted. TH sat in the chair so that I could lie down on the hospital bed with TK. He was wearing a tiny hospital gown (TK, not TH) that makes me cry when I think about it: furry animals and two ties at the back, sickwear at its cheeriest. I thought about the other children who wear these gowns, some for months at a time. I thought about how we had to wait once we were checked in, and how there are families that don’t wait at all because their situation is so dire. I looked down at the ball of humanity in my arms, the head burrowed into my shoulder and the arm slung across it and his breathing, fast and steady after all he’d endured; about my heart beating with more love for him every day just when I thought I was about to run out of room in there. TH beside me, TK in my arms, and I realized that this, this is what Mother’s Day is: this final assault on my overweening allegiance to self, this opening of eyes to all that life can hold. Everything that matters in this room, whether this room is in a home or a hospital.

I thought about all the ways there are to be saved.

We walked out of there a short time later, TK asleep in his carseat as TH and I navigated the road ahead for him as usual. I knew he wouldn’t be baptized the next morning, which was a disappointment but only a temporary one. Like his illness. I remembered what our pastor had told us when he came over to discuss the ceremony with us earlier last week, that the baptism is a sign of a promise. It’s a new beginning. I considered the inconveniences to my schedule that used to break me, and the people who matter more than that now. The next morning, I raced to TK’s room and found him sleeping peacefully. The rain fell down outside, washing everything. It felt like a baptism.

It happened again this weekend: the sound from the other bedroom that stirs me from my light and none-too-easily-attained slumber; a progression from whine to weep to wail as The Husband and I lie in wait, trying to interpret the urgency and looking into the monitor and wondering if this means our parenting pagers are going off, or if he’ll calm back down on his own. He has his thumb, after all. Can’t that be enough?

For two nights, it wasn’t. Two nights: which meant I had a chance to do it all wrong, then get redeemed.

When the alarm sounds, the thoughts fly around like bullets in my head–an apt simile, considering the threats I’ve taken against my own life at times like these. Chief among them is the whine of my own: WHY? Why can’t our offspring stick to the schedule we trained into him? Why can’t I ever get a good night’s sleep, even when he does stick to that schedule? Then I usually drop the F bomb and, if the crying persists, TH makes an attempt to calm him down and is met with urgent head movements toward an absent boob. And so he is re-delivered to me, as he was the day he was born when I was much more well-rested, and he feeds, wide-eyed at 2 am.

But that was only the dress rehearsal. The next night he repeated his performance and I began to lose hope. I remembered internet postings about sleep regression–community forums are where fear goes to take a dump–and I felt the anxiety clenching my hands as The Kid was headed toward me. And I thought:

When did all of this stop being a blessing?

Middle-of-the-night family meetings, TH beside me and TK in my arms, and there will be a time when I’ll look back and ache for it. Which is not to say that the reality of sleeplessness doesn’t royally suck, BUT: there’s a baby in my arms, as previously noted. And an aforementioned man beside me. And they happen to be my two favorite people. Surely I can take a second of my sleepless state to see that? Because the thing is, we’re going to survive these wake-up calls, no matter how many they are, so this is not a life-or-death situation we’ve got here. In fact, it’s just a life situation. As in, this is where life is. Now.

That second night, I got my lines right. I said thank you. I chose to trust that whatever I needed for the next day would not be taken away in these moments, but would show up like it always does. Since when, after all, do I have the right to start hacking away at the Divine character–to begin reassigning it qualities that look more like me?

I opened my eyes to meet TK’s. He looked straight at me, then clenched my finger. The only clenching worth having around here. The next day, he laughed for the first time. And that night, he found his thumb.

I’ll start with the bad part so I can get to the good. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, The Kid did that thing where he wakes up at an unscheduled time and starts crying. My very scheduled mind still resists this interruption, violently. The Husband went to check on him, and I heard soothing noises float from the nursery to my steaming ears. Guilt set in, because I knew I was being an ass and I didn’t want to be but even among the All-Stars there was that stuff about doing what you didn’t want and not doing what you did. I realized, there beneath the too-comfortable covers, that I was a party of one and all my people were a few feet away, so I hurled myself out of bed and met up with them. Our little 2 am baby was in TH’s arms, wide-eyed and ridiculously cute for such an awful hour–an hour when the clubs are closing in Manhattan and I used to be there, spilling out and hailing a cab–and I said it as the culprit of the cries revealed itself in TK’s snotty wheezing: “Well now I feel like shit.”

We put him back to bed a few minutes later and as we drifted off ourselves, I whispered to TH, “I feel like Harry Potter. Every time he cries, my C-section scar hurts.” TH laughed and asked how long I’d been waiting to use that one; I protested that I’d just come up with it; we went to sleep. I realized that within my comparison, TK would be Voldemort, and that at 2 am I was okay with that. But not before I remembered what Tim Keller had pointed out and what I had read, what Dumbledore had told Harry: “…do you know why…Professor Quirrell couldn’t bear to have you touch him?…It was because of your mother. She sacrificed herself for you. And that kind of act leaves a mark…It lives in your very skin...Love, Harry. Love.”

There is the love that allowed me to be opened up and sewed back together–an earthly love that I’d like to see perfected, especially at 2 in the morning; then there is the love that makes all other love possible, the love that was inalterably scarred, the love that promises redemption of even my foulest moods.

TK’s cold persisted, but the weekend improved. The Mom and Dad were in town to keep The Niece for the weekend, and we dropped TK off with them late Saturday afternoon, in keeping with our agenda: Date Night. The four hours ahead of us were not the longest time I’d spent away from him, but it still felt momentous to leave him for a feeding so that we could have a fancy dinner and see a movie. TH and I waltzed into the bistro at 5:30 pm, a horrifyingly early hour that was reinforced by the only other patrons there being a senior couple at a nearby table. I ordered a martini, my first in over a year, and we remembered what it was like to have dinner atop a white tablecloth with a soundtrack of conversation about things other than poop quality. Then we saw The Hunger Games and it almost felt like we were normal people again, people who stroll around in a relaxed state and eat popcorn and peanut M&Ms and talk about politics and cinematography and how consistently awesome Donald Sutherland is. Then I looked at my watch, and it was 9 pm, and I looked at TH and he knew to step on it. And we shared the thought out loud, the new reality that we face: we will never be those people again. We will never be undistracted, or in one place, not when he isn’t there with us.

It reminded me of how I felt every time I flew between home and New York City, how torn I felt whenever I saw the green hills or angular buildings approaching and receding in the plane window. A heart divided.

Or maybe just a heart spread out. Because yesterday, TH brought TK and his swing into the sunroom and I read a travel magazine on the couch as our son slurped on his thumb and slept beside me. TH played basketball outside the window, each shot punctuated with a thump, the rhythm of grace, of all of us in one place, cradling me and reminding me of how much bigger love is than I ever knew.

Weekends are beginning to regain their value now that I’m going back to work. Not sleeping-in-until-10 value–we’ll never see those days again. But the laziness that comes with being together, the three of us in one place, taking our time and sipping our coffee (TK loves his babyccino while reading the Times) and lying in the hammock–these are weekend moments. Moments when the rushing around of weekdays subsides, when not every second is filled with activity but we are allowed to just be and let our little family take shape. We can linger over The Kid’s flirty half-grin and gurgling laughter and marvel over how much better life is after the first three months.

We can do some of this every day, of course, and we should–joy doesn’t take Monday through Friday off. But there’s a bliss in Friday afternoons, the kind that’s been there since we were kids bounding off the school bus toward two days of playing. TH pulls into the garage and TK and I greet him, less of a weepy mess than we were at the beginning and more of a “guess what he did today” exhilaration.

Also, there are cocktails.

But The Kid…man, is he something. Gone is the fuzzy-eyed alien phase. Now each day holds a new trick, like the other night when I finished feeding him and we sat on the couch watching TV (he loves Sportscenter if Daddy asks, but he also likes Glee–shh!). I would smile down at him and he would turn from me to the TV, as if he were bored with my face, then when I turned to the TV he would look back at me and grin. There are times when his smile–always higher on one side and bordered by a dimple–is so big that it seems the happiness is stretching him out with its fullness.

Thank God I love him more every day. There was a time I thought we would have to take him back to the hospital–and I didn’t have a receipt or anything.

Anne says, “It’s great to feel better, to be back in the saddle again. And it’s so hard to let chaos swirl around without needing to manage or understand it. It’s so hard to get quiet enough, free enough of the bondage of self…It’s like Sam opened this window for us, and all this grace flooded in.”

The gifts are so much easier to see when they aren’t soaked in frantic tears and total sleeplessness. It’s not lost on me that I prefer to have presents delivered straight to my lap, unwrapped and ready to go. It’s also not lost on me that the best gifts I have received in my life–the gifts that changed me and freed me from that distorted devotion to myself above and at the expense of everything/one else–have taken awhile to open. Damn, TH took a year to come around, and there are still days when I catch him trying to escape. (So I run a tight ship around here. So what? Who cares?) The grace that’s flooding in now, though–the moments when I realize that my heart will never be “free” as I defined freedom before–this grace alters reality and makes the mundane holy. When you arrive at the terrifying point where nothing will ever be the same again? That’s when you know the story is getting good.

It’s impossible, really, this relationship I have with The Kid. The moments of exhilarating joy, his laughter my greatest accomplishment; then the crying that unbolts me from my hinges and pushes me toward a straitjacket. The bipolar nature of being a mother writ large and small–across the days and in the details, every moment tempting me to label it a failure or success. Last night, he cried uncontrollably (operative word: control) for an eternity when we tried to change his bedtime. An hour later, he fed sleepily and passed out for ten hours.

But the crying. I watch the monitor, agitated, while The Husband watches the TV. And good God do I ever take it personally. Every wail, every kick a jab at my need for a reason. I turn to TH and sigh heavily, frustrated by the very thing that balances and saves me: his peace during storms. The peace I covet, am made for, am being constantly challenged to embrace. My mission, should I choose to accept it. My transformation waiting to happen. Grace is standing quietly by, gently nudging me to let it do the work of turning the cry into a moment of gratitude. Instead, I clutch the monitor and feel my blood pressure rise.

This is not a test. Why do I turn everything into a test?

Last weekend, TH returned from Home Depot with the idea we had months ago, bagged up in tangible form: a hammock for the backyard. I saw it as an emblem of our survival of the newborn period, a sign that it’s time to relax. This was hours before TK threw us for the night-waking loop, but I didn’t know it as I lay between two trees, suspended in air, held by the rope that wove through itself so it could carry me.

TH had created a pathway to the hammock, a series of brick steps toward relaxation, an oasis in our midst. That’s kind of what he does, what he brings to the table around here. Moments of calm in a sea of storms.

I wonder how many of those storms I stirred into being. How many times grace and redemption have woven through each other to carry me.

I told The Sis the other day, that it feels like once you’ve crossed over one hump, another awaits. That it seems to be two steps forward then one back, all the time. One enemy vanquished, another waiting in the wings. A day later, KA wrote her assessment: “status = in transition. Pretty much always.”

And here I sit, hands grasping monitor as I silently demand that he cross the hurdles I’ve erected, when the hammock beckons me to stop the leaping about from tree to tree, the efforts to control everything, the need for constant landing…and just stay between the now and not yet, held.

I have finally gotten around to reading Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, and thank God for it, because there is apparently something called 4-month sleep regression and the White Coats are threatening to come get me again. The Kid had Round 2 of his immunizations on Friday–yes, Friday the 13th–and things started going downhill soon after. My version of downhill, at least, which to most people probably looks like a slight decline of the road with no readily available snacks or bathrooms for a mile or two.

I’ve long lived with an undercurrent of anger nipping at my heels, threatening to expose me for the wreck that I am, and I thought that once I stopped trying to pretend to be what I’m not–once that whole charade fell apart and I started being honest and even got a blog where I tell the truth publicly and frequently–that the anger would dissipate, like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz when the bucket of water hits her. But, much like Wicked proved that scene to be a parlor trick, I’ve learned that my anger issues aren’t ever going to just pack up and march off into the sunset. I realized recently that the ugliness rears its head when I’m engaged in an activity that makes me feel like I’ve got to prove myself. Like working out at the gym or cleaning the house. I’ve got to be in shape…I’ve got to have sparkling toilets. I talked it out the other day with The Husband, also known as The Least Angry Person I Know, and he tried to understand the foreign language I was speaking as I described why I yell at the vacuum cleaner. And last night, when TK began to cry out and TH went to soothe him, then bring him to me for a feeding, I didn’t have to describe the anger. It spilled out of my mouth and all over the comforter. Infancy, sleep deprivation, uncertainty–all of it has a way of bringing that latent anger to the surface. TH understands this about as much as I understand what he does for a living, but we tell each other about our stuff anyway because that’s what we do–we share life, even when it gets ugly (usually for me), and so when he put TK in my arms and I wailed, “I don’t UNDERSTAND! I can’t DO THIS ANYMORE!” and I entertained thoughts of climbing in the car and just leaving, he listened and waited for the storm to pass. And I nursed and looked down at TK, who had the nerve the grin back at me. I looked at the two male members of my family, patient and happy, and thanked God for putting me here even as I lamented being the odd/angry one out.

But I didn’t have to wait long for commiseration to arrive. I just read Anne’s words:

“…one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage…I have always known, or at least believed, that way down deep, way past being kind and religious and trying to take care of everyone, I was seething. Now it’s close to the surface. I feel it race from my center up into my arms and down into my hands, and it scares the shit out of me.”

This morning I was driving him to daycare and an old man in a tank of a car decided he would just come on over into our lane. He was on my right side–on The Kid’s side–and I lay on the horn, yelling horrible things at him and thinking even worse, and I realized that, for all my moments of rage at the ways The Kid’s schedule interferes with mine, not only would I never hurt him, but I would be hard-pressed not to kill anyone who would. And as I returned to the quiet house, to dirty diapers and soaked towels, to a bone-aching weariness, I sat down and closed my eyes and tried to file through my rolodex of Truth. The one that’s so hard to locate at three in the morning. I placed myself back in that moment when TH lay beside me and TK lay in my arms and he grinned up at me, and I remembered what happened next: I smiled back. And it struck me that anger is not the deepest part of me, even when it’s the loudest and most accessible; that grace is working even when I’m too tired to feel it; that gratitude will always show up when invited. That sometimes, at three in the morning, I will be awake when I don’t want to be. But I am not left alone, without commiseration or comfort. I have the words on my nightstand and the man beside me and the boy in my arms and the truth in my heart down deep beneath the anger. Everything that matters filling this space as I wait for the light to come.

(If you are unaware of the TV series referenced by the above title, might I suggest a Netflix queue addition? J.J. Abrams, your genius knows no bounds.)

Earlier this week, I lifted The Kid up to find a baby-butt-sized imprint of mustard poo on my Central Park Half-Marathon t-shirt, and the temptation to see it as a metaphor was strong. Especially a few hours later, when my mileage of 2.0 was a post-pregnancy, post-childbirth PR and the idea of 13.1 remained a laughable pipe dream. What was funnier was that I didn’t care.

Life these days is like a shoe that’s starting to fit. This is welcome news for a girl who spent her first few decades trying to wear the wrong size. Things are starting to come together, the rough edges softening and coalescing with each other as everything comes to a head in The Kid’s grin, in my newfound ability to make him laugh–my new personal record and the one that makes 13. 1 fade into the background. Yesterday I went to spin for the first time in almost a year and ran into our realtor, the one who sold us this house, and showed her pics of TK. She oohed and ahhed appropriately, then we went to our respective bikes and I proceeded to not pass out–another goal attained.

I went to lunch with a high school friend earlier this week, and we talked about how Atlanta is different from our hometown, and the thought of those teenage years in Montgomery brought back all the feelings of awkwardness and insecurity I felt then, not knowing who I was yet but reasonably certain that I was doing everything wrong; feeling completely inadequate and sure that I was woefully alone in that struggle. I had a list of goals to attain then, boxes to be checked off, and none of them were Dodge spit-up faster or Balance work and child-rearing or Teach my son to be a decent human being. And yet these are the ins and outs of my life now, the little victories that define my days.

A friend from dental school reminded me recently, as I lamented my return to teeth and the ghosts of mediocrity that plague it, that our years in the lab and with patients were coupled with instruction that pointed out everything we were doing incorrectly. I think about how grace led me to a career defined by filling holes and redefining small-scale anatomy–the perfect soil for nitpicking and second-guessing and self-doubt–and I know that there are reasons that haven’t been revealed yet. I think about how grace, also, outfitted me with this desire, this need, to write; how the literary path is paved with more rejection letters than book deals; and I know that “I have not yet arrived” will be a mantra I can proclaim for a lifetime.

But then I pick TK up at school, and he laughs in his car seat as I talk to him, and The Husband gets home and we sit on the couch, a party of three, and I know that, also? I absolutely have arrived. I look at them both and the thought echoes in my heart, clear as a bell, despite the flaws and inevitable mistakes: I’m going to be pretty good at this. That in grace, every second is an arrival to exactly the moment for which I am meant. Not a new version of me, but the person I was becoming all along.