One of the assets of my job is that it provides me invaluable information about parenting. Mostly, how not to do it. When I have a kid in the chair who attempts to bite, spit at, or disarm me (I speak softly but carry a big drill), all I can think is, If I had ever behaved this way as a kid, and the phantom pain in my butt reminds me of the reward for defiance in our house.

I am thankful for parents who didn’t give me everything I asked for. Sure, at the time, I bemoaned (silently) their refusal to buy the latest toy at the store. They have the money! I’d think (having checked their wallets), outraged that any extra dollars weren’t earmarked for my whims. At no time in my childhood did I operate under the delusion that the world revolved around me. My parents were my parents, not my friends. Which is why, since we’re all adults, we can be friends now. Mostly.

So as I hover over tiny faces that howl when I demand compliance with what is not their preferred activity, I think about the kind of parent I’ll be: loving but firm, kind but not coddling, with a self-esteem that is not dependent on my children liking me and can withstand the slings (I hate you!) and arrows (I wish I’d never been born!) of misplaced anger. Oh yeah, I’m a smartypants who knows all about how to deal with spoiled children.

Which brings us to the irony of my relationship with the Almighty.

Thought he didn’t need my input at the creation of the world or any point in the narrative thereafter, I have assigned myself the role of Consultant to God almost every moment of my life. I do it when I get angry over things not going my way, when I try to alter the unchangeable, when I worry, when I fear. In every second that I am not experiencing pure gratitude (so…almost all of them), I am bellowing my displeasure into God’s ear and not so subtly implying that I could do better.

I need to learn how to drink champagne in the presence of God.

Recently we had some family converge upon our house, and the best way The Sis and I know how to deal with such chaos is to sip on something dehydrating and delicious. I had just rediscovered St. Germain liquer, a lovely springtime add-in, and I mixed us a couple of champagne cocktails with it. As we ignored basketball and enjoyed our beverages, I thought about how I used to consider champagne a solely celebratory drink–how I’d feel silly holding a glass of it in public at anything other than a birthday party or wedding for fear of someone asking me what the occasion was and I’d have to answer, “Tuesday?”

Now I reach for the bubbly because it tastes good and, let’s face it, holding one of those glasses and watching the suds rise lifts me right up with them, whether I’m in a dress and heels or barefoot in jeans, sitting in the freshly- mown backyard (thank you, lawn service), reading Ann and watching The Husband play basketball.

It’s time to drink more champagne, and not just because the weather is warmer and the days are longer. No, it’s time to start celebrating all of life, because he is in it all and even though a situation looks dire does not mean hope has run out. When I reach the end of my reasoning, the end of the answers I can find, I haven’t reached The End. I’ve reached the moment to stop, take a breath, and drink in the possibility that there are simply more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, even when I secretly consider myself the smartest person in the room. Or the one with the biggest drill.

Last week I accompanied the Bro-in-Law and Niece to her doctor’s appointment. As she was placed on the table, her usually sunny disposition took a nosedive and the tears began to flow. I had worried about this moment, that all my big talk about being firm with kids would crumble in the face of her limited understanding, her lack of comprehension. Her desperate cries.

I found that while my love ran more deeply and surer than ever, I was still helping to hold her down. It was my love, my understanding that surpassed hers, that kept my hands in–yet on–hers. I couldn’t let go, even when, to her, holding on felt inhumane, forceful. I considered all the metaphorical tables I’ve been on in my life and the cries (and anger) I’ve emitted over the years. All the pushing and struggling against where I was headed. Where is that again?

Yesterday I examined a two-year-old, holding him still as he clamored for his mom. I cringed on the inside at the range of reactions that Mom might display, chief among them being, “Are you hurting him?” But she just laughed lightly and held her son’s hand (down) and said, “Sweetie! I’m as close to you as I can be!” And I realized that all my grasping has been a product of disbelief in what I most deeply hope for, even more deeply than My Own Way: the One who holds all power is with me–and for me. And today, as I walked onto our front stoop and saw the cherry blossom trees I didn’t plant, that mirror the one outside my New York City window–multiplied by two–I realized that quiet trust is the only response that fully answers his unfailing love. Gratitude is an opening of the champagne no matter the day, because I know what ultimately waits for me.

Here are the stats: Montgomery, Alabama is where I was born and raised. Birmingham, Alabama is where I received ten years of higher education. New York, New York is where I worked and met my husband.

Here is the story: Montgomery is where I first heard about God. Birmingham is where he allowed me to become utterly broken. And New York is where he put me back together.

I often refer to the Worst Two Years of My Life because I have a flair for the melodramatic and because, well, they were. And they occurred at the end of my time in Birmingham, when I was in a residency to learn how to repair kids’ broken teeth. Meanwhile, my world was crumbling. My friends and little sister were all getting married and having babies and settling down into their grown-up, stable happy endings as I pretended to be a contestant on my own reality show, Let’s See Who Can Make the Worst Decisions. School was a nightmare–the formerly perfect student seemed to be capable of nothing but screwing up. I was seeing a counselor and occasionally, God, but every day I was more overwhelmed with the desire to escape my own life. I considered quitting school, working at Banana Republic for the discount, becoming a carny–anything but what I was doing. I would often drive to a nearby neighborhood, where a church parking lot sat on a cliff overlooking the city, and sit in my car and sob. I don’t remember what my actual prayer was during those tortured moments, but hindsight and honesty tell me now that I was mourning the shattering of my own plan for my life and taking God to task for not saving me from this mess.

I was completely, utterly defeated. And had I not been, New York never would have happened.

When I told people I was moving to Manhattan, they called me brave. But I knew the truth: I was the opposite of brave; I was running. And within months of getting there, I was broke. But I had a date every Sunday night at Hunter College with the Truth, and it had indeed set me free. I was learning that the God of my youth–the Jesus Loves Me (If I Do Everything Right) God–had been misrepresented. I was learning that his love didn’t always look like success (suck it, Joel Osteen. No really–SUCK IT) and smooth sailing; that we had not in fact struck a deal way back when that exchanged my good behavior for his favors. I was learning how much bigger, more terrifying, and better it was to be a part of the narrative of grace and held by scarred hands that I couldn’t control.

Sometimes it looked like standing on the edge of a cliff and walking forward.

Last weekend, The Husband and I drove to Birmingham for a friend’s wedding. We dropped by J and H’s and caught up with them as their son told stories in his new, non-Southern accent and their daughter sucked down yogurt like she was preparing for a competition with Joey Chestnut on Coney Island. Then we checked into our hotel and as I threatened my hair with the curling iron, I heard TH mutter, “You have got to be kidding me.” Turned out he had brought his suit but no dress shirt. A quick call to the front desk sent him on a walk around the corner to a men’s clothing store specializing in overpriced garb. He came home empty-handed and we considered our options: drive to the mall and miss the ceremony, or improvise.

Minutes later, we were headed to the church: I in my purple dress; he in his suit jacket, suit pants, and golf shirt with a tie around the neck.

It was the right choice for a couple of reasons: one, we laughed about it all night and let others in on the joke (the virtue of not taking yourself and your wardrobe too seriously, especially at a Southern wedding, is not to be underestimated); and two, it got us to the ceremony–the first one we’ve witnessed since our own. And as the words were spoken and vows taken, I remembered why we need to hear our own stories over and over. Stories of searching and finding, of building upon rocks and choosing love when other options would be more convenient. We live in a world where lies are easier to believe than the truth, lies like one bite won’t hurt and the grass is always greener and you’re not being taken care of and this is all there is. Lies of faithlessness and ingratitude and arrogance dressed up as ambition and wisdom and self-reliance.

Sometimes, all it takes to reveal the deceit is a story.

Later, at the after-after party, one of my BFs told me that she gets it now, the enmeshment of TH’s and my lives when we got together and gave each other our time even when it meant forsaking all others. She gets it because she has reached that part of her own story, and I love it when my happy ending  is joined by a friend’s and there are new beginnings and the stories continue (and maybe, just a little, when validation occurs). I love it that I took TH to my former cliff and in a place where so much misery was poured out, I was able to look up, dry-eyed and joyful, and acknowledge the one who wrote the story, who carried me on waves of grace that refused to let up until they led me home.

I have two cities listed on my phone’s weather app, the primary cities between which my heart will always be divided: New York and Atlanta. During months like this, when living in the Southeast affords one an early spring and living in New York affords one more winter, I check the app often to note differences. The Husband emailed yesterday with information of the same: “80 degrees in Atlanta and 40/snowing in NYC. We made the right cboice.” Yes, we did.  But we have our own outdoor issues here in the sun.

Our beautifully brown and ungrowing yard took a turn for the worse this week, bursting forth in glorious green. For two people sans experience in lawn care and landscaping (business and dental school offered shockingly little in the way of such courses), this development was bad news indeed. After a simple question put to my brother-in-law resulted in a fifteen-minute summation of the time, knowledge, and financial requirements necessary to not being The House with the Junky Yard, TH and I looked at each other and said in unison: “Let’s hire someone.” (Then I asked if this meant we would now be splitting the labor of my biweekly housecleaning frenzy. I’m still waiting for him to figure out the right answer to that question, because laughter is. Not. It.)

Our front/back yard combo is…a hair larger than my old fire escape. This feature, desirable during house-hunting (which occurred during winter), is now overwhelming. My neurotic mind imagines all the wildlife crawling around out there in our untamed forest of grass and trees. And then I remember that thing called gratitude and, armed with a folding chair and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, I head out to our patio. My muscles tense, ready to jump as a wasp hovers nearby. I remind myself that there’s no such thing as a killer squirrel. I warm up my throwing arm in case a stray cat ventures across the fence. I will enjoy nature, dammit!

A fly lands in my wine.

I was a child who knew how to extract the sweetness from a honeysuckle blossom, who raced against sunset on her bike, who danced among fireflies. Then I grew up and moved to New York, where outside is (a) the area of transition between point A and point B, or (b) a great place to eat and drink, at a sought-after table outside an overpriced restaurant. I may have forgotten that childlike appreciation of nature. As I fidget in my folding chair and the wasp inches closer, I realize how hard it is for me to just sit still out here, reading my book on gratitude. To just be here within the beauty, to even see it as beauty. My lens needs washing, because all I see is a yard full of work (for someone else) and money spent (for us).

I read more on gratitude, washing my own lens.

A few minutes later I look up and see it. The garden planted by the previous owner’s daughter is overgrown and chaotic, but there is a splash of pink amidst the disarray. I walk up to the picket fence and stare. A dozen blushing blooms greet me, who did nothing to put them there. All the work wrought by another’s hands, the hours of planting and waiting and hoping and pruning, my free gift. TH gets home and walks out to meet me and I show him the flowers. A few minutes later, our seventy-something retired neighbor–the one who mows his yard in a World’s Best Grandpa t-shirt as we watch our grass grow, shame-faced, from our window–walks up to our shared fence with his wife. He compliments our yard and we laugh, then realize he’s serious.

“So much potential,” he says. And I realize how clean a lens can be, to see right through the mess and into the future.

I ask him what the pink bloom is, recognizing the red roses climbing trellises in his yard. “Camellia,” he offers, with some information about their blooming schedule and care. He points out a rhododendron bush as TH and I nod, not really understanding this strange new language. “And that,” he concludes, “is a little cedar tree. About the only good thing you can say about it is that it can survive a drought!”

A memory flashes across my mind’s screen: a time a few years ago when I kept running across, and fixating on, biblical mentions of trees. They’re everywhere in those pages, if you want to know–palm, fig, acacia. Cedars are a favorite, valued for their resistance to insects, their height, and their lifespan. They were used to build the temple in Jerusalem. And we have a tiny one in our yard.

It will take learning and time for me to enter the phase of Full Yard Appreciation. The other day, TH pointed to some purple dots in the front yard and said, “Look! We have flowers!” Without missing a beat, I replied, “Those are weeds,” and watched his face drop. After assuring him that they could be flowers if he wanted them to be (and therefore remain unpulled), I headed to my gratitude journal and wrote, “a husband who looks at a weed and sees a flower.”

All too often I walk about with my head lowered, pointing out life’s weeds. But–my weed-averse husband, knowing my love of cherry blossom trees, has grown adept at pointing them out and watching me simultaneously squeal with delight and grab my phone to take a picture. The deepest and truest part of me always comes back to the tree, how time began to fall apart at the foot of one and how all our restoration was completed on one.

I may still be learning this outdoor business, but I know when to look up and see the trees.

One of my recently developed hobbies is to DVR travel shows.  (Does pressing a button and sitting on a couch constitute a hobby?  I say yes!) Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel stars in some of my favorites (Passport to Europe, Great Hotels), and I watch her narrate her adventures whenever The Husband isn’t around, because he can’t stand her.  (He finds her voice annoying and hates the way she meanders away from the camera after making a cheesy comment.  He is right, but the difference is that I can see past these qualities and he can’t.  I know.  I can’t help it, I’m just so tolerant.)  Imagine my surprise the other day when I played her episode on Honduras and watched as she explored a tiny town called Copan Ruinas, a village I visited as part of a dental outreach trip three years ago with NYU (travel opportunities and free coffee were the two perks of working there. The salary was not).

I stared at Sam (nicknames–we’re cool like that) and ignored her dorkiness as she wandered around the cobblestone streets of the village where our group lived for a week–streets we strode across with purpose in the mornings to fix teeth then stumbled upon with buzzes at night to head home after drinks at El Sapo Rojo. Then she headed to the ruins ten minutes away, which we had also visited, our heads pounding from one too many of the prior night’s Uterus shots (don’t ask). What I remember from my visit there is hearing, in between waves of nausea and sips of Powerade, that the archaeologists’ job is defined by exposing, not rebuilding.  Buried underneath layers of earth and centuries of progress are temples and cities, perfectly preserved by nature and waiting to be revealed by the most careful of hands.  You know where I’m going with this, right?

Sam’s tour guide had a few more degrees than ours did, and he spoke of the only two to three feet worth of progress made in one direction each day, the seeming interminability and tediousness of it all.  Then he brought her to the base of one of the largest temples on the site, and they looked up to behold three stories of ancient grandeur.  Further discussion with the guide revealed the ever-present impetus behind such labor: the excavators, mostly from the area like himself, are driven by a pride in their history and in the revealing of their magnificent heritage.

Naturally, I bundled up all this information and swung it back to my own narrative.  When I moved to New York, I wanted to build a New Me.  Demolish the old mess and start from the ground up on something more…impressive. Within a few months of my being there, I realized that in a city packed to the shore’s edge with people and buildings, there’s not a lot of room for new construction.  But the grit and grime of the city is an excellent exfoliant, and as I lived out my transferred existence I watched the layers of falseness that I had wrapped myself in over the years fall away after a good scrubbing.  All of the effort it had taken to be Not Me was released, too–my new lightness was due to more than just hours of walking.

And so in the aftermath of my own archaeological period, I build another new life with the one who was there for my New York Me revealing.  I don’t have the city  to hold me accountable to authenticity, but I do have him.  And I have the one who engineered the whole thing, who was too full of love to let me continue reading lines from a play I wrote; too full of purpose to let my short-sighted plan stand.  I realize now that working to have it all together, even maintaining that appearance of order, is actually chaos.  Decay waiting to happen, earth waiting to crumble. But this life–the falling down, the breaking open, the journey 1000 miles north and 850 miles south, the always heartache followed by happily ever after, the wiping of counters and scrubbing of toilets–this is not a life having it all together, it is a life together. With him, with all of you, and most of all, with Him. Because when I put pen to paper now, it is not to draw a map of the future but to transcribe my narrative now.  I am learning, in this season of gratitude that I hope never ends, to see the ways He works in this world, to recognize that every time I watch counter-intuitiveness trump predictability, He is in it; every time I witness paradox proclaim truth, He is there; every moment I am involved in making this world a little less cluttered with my mess–my ingratitude, my need to control–I am, with Him, ushering in His kingdom on earth.  Redemption discards my performing as it shows up in my incapability, embracing the Master’s excavation of who I was made to be.

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My life in New York was many things, but most of all it was a story.  And as I’m writing that story, I remember beyond the romance and the friendships to an especially difficult part: my steady financial decline throughout five years there.  I remember getting my first paycheck, seeing how much was taken out for taxes, considering how much I was paying for rent, and realizing, This will just not do. So I found a friend who was looking to move and we became roommates a little further downtown in a much smaller space.  My new apartment had no view of the Chrysler Building or the East River, but it was a thousand dollars less a month for me, and there was a perfectly good subway to take me to Central Park whenever I wanted.  I was back on solid ground.

Then I wasn’t.  When my first tax season in New York hit, it hit hard.  All of a sudden I found myself having to question and defend my reasons for being there, and if they were worth the cost.  Because, there in front of me in black and white and with IRS stamped on it, was the official bill that the city was charging me for life upon its island paradise.  And that bill was STEEP.

I called the Dad crying, I found a friend-recommended accountant, I prayed.  And somehow (hmm…wonder how that could be?) I made it through April 15th, year after year.  But only by the skin of my teeth, as I found myself–a letters-behind-my-name, higher-educated professional–budgeting for gum and toilet paper. New York giveth, and New York taketh away, but that balance remained in the positive column as I found friendship, love, and faith surrounding me daily.  I grabbed my bottle of Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck, threw down my towel, and sat on my fire escape as the world walked by my window.  And I was happy.

But that’s me, a white upper-middle-class female who has never faced the threat of homelessness or had to choose between paying the bills or eating.  I knew that, with all the financial difficulty life in New York presented, I was choosing it for myself and could ease the strain whenever I wanted by simply leaving.  I was poor, but only by Manhattan standards.  Maybe I sat in the rear balcony for Broadway shows, but I still saw them.

And then when the BF proposed becoming The Husband and we said those vows, he did it with the understanding that not only was he gaining no dowry, but he was actually acquiring debt when he took me on.  I owed the Dad some bank for his sponsorship of my New York Assistance Program, and I had spent six years in those hallowed academic halls racking up student loan debt to go along with post-name letters.  So he said I do to sickness, health, and the opposite of wealth that day on the beach.  Good thing his debt was less than mine and his savings greater, because last year we shelled out for our share of the American dream: two cars, a house, rooms (to go) full of furniture, a Georgia dental license, a honeymoon, a down payment (literally, and on our future).  When he opened our tax paperwork a couple of weeks ago, I saw the calculations whirring around his head before he asked it: Where did all our money go? But he knew, and I knew: we were standing in it, were surrounded by it.  In a year, we had gone from an engaged New York couple with two banking accounts, one anemic and one healthy, to a married suburban couple with a joint account that had been left ravaged and gasping for air.

The Sis quoted Ingrid Bergman to me the other day: “Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.”  It made me think of how much of my life was spent heading for something, a race to a finish line.  How after all those years, I finally reached that self-constructed endpoint and was left wondering what life was supposed to look like beyond it.  When so many of the big questions have been answered, we are left sitting on our sectionals in our living rooms and driving around in our cars listening to XM radio as life goes on, stability replacing drama and routine replacing angst.  Each generation amasses more stuff than the one before it, counting vacation homes instead of rationing sugar.  We are overeducated, overfed, over-stimulated, over-blessed.  And we still look around and wonder what more there is.

I know what it’s like to go from thinking that God is good because of all you have, to knowing he is good because he is all you have. To hit every rock bottom there is–emotional, financial, spiritual–and be lifted back up by a faithfulness that includes and exceeds all forms of practicality and imagination.  It wouldn’t be fair, or nice, to wish that kind of descent on anyone else, but what I do hope for is that regardless of the road we each take, it is a path beyond our efforts to keep control and bigger than our prior planning would allow.  Accompanied by a faith that knows the one outside ourselves not as ATM or executive assistant, but as everything.

After the honeymoon, I drove to Wells Fargo (nee Wachovia) and closed my account, receiving for my efforts a sad little check that I deposited into our new joint account across the street at B of A.  Five years, plus the twenty-eight before it, on a sheet of paper to be combined with what he had saved.  All of him, plus all of me.  It may not have looked like much–but it was everything.