Plans in Pencil

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.   –Frederick Buechner

Planted in the middle of last week was a day in which things just would not work.

I had switched my day off around at the last minute because an appointment was available at the Children’s audiology clinic, and said appointment was the next thing on our to-do list for The Kid. Since I prefer to write my plans in stone, rather than the pencil grace asks of me, I was already a little shaken at this sudden turn of events. And, like a villain on Smallville or something, I seemed to bring a weird brand of chaos with me wherever I went: after soaping my hands up in the bathroom at TK’s daycare, I placed them under a non-working faucet. The wireless at Barnes and Noble failed me. My blessed bathtub’s drain plug whimpered and died. Then, I went to retrieve TK for his appointment and we sat in fifteen minutes of traffic due to a broken traffic light at a major intersection. We crossed this hurdle to arrive in a spot-free parking deck, the same one that usually saves a place for me right by the entrance.

You will not be shocked to hear that I didn’t handle it all very well.

But I guess one of the benefits of TK not speaking yet is that he can’t repeat the off-color remarks I make, and once we passed through the automatic doors of the clinic, I remembered that prayer I’ve been meaning to pray lately at times like this, times when nothing seems to be working right: thank you. It’s counter-intuitive to be sure, especially to a brain like mine that would rather change course to avoid an obstacle rather than tritely “turn it into an opportunity” or “turn that frown upside down”–but it’s so much more than that. It’s setting up shop right beside the chaos and taking a moment to look up, hands raised, in faith. The battle within raged, over expressing gratitude always vs. willing the elevator doors to open. When they did, TK’s neurosurgeon stepped off. And just like that, the traffic and the deck and the lateness converged in a moment that allowed me to ask him some follow-up questions that arose from our visit two days prior.

The clinic took us in, all twenty-minutes-behind and pit-sweat and crying-baby, and TK and I were soon ensconced in a sound-proof booth with images from Finding Nemo and short bursts of sound. We looked like we were about to cut a demo. He passed the test with one ear; we have to go back to retest the other in a few weeks. Given the day, that sounded about right.

And today, we celebrate (?) our triumphant return to physical therapy. As the visits line up and TK’s frustration with the clinical setting reaches a fever pitch, I often yearn for a world filled with soft surfaces and smooth edges, for clear skies and plans that don’t shift. Then TK grabs my finger, or The Husband’s, and shuffles around the yard with a mixture of determination and glee on his face, and I know that the victories that come after apparent defeat, like the first blooms after a deep winter, are the most sweetly felt. And that the thank you that follows is never more sincere.

Because I know the facile belief of immaturity, the Sunday-school felt-lined Jesus who looks like a nice man; I know when church was a building and I could hide there from the world and depend on my good behavior to save me. But now? Now I know the brand of belief that survives deserts of apparent separation and doubt; I know the man who welcomed children on his knee and turned over tables in passion; I know that the church (much like soylent green) is people–and broken, wounded people at that. I know what you’re afraid of because I’m afraid of it too: of failing, of being ridiculed or despised or at the very least disapproved of, of looking like an idiot, of being let down. I know that some friendships last and some don’t and the girl who writes pinterest-y in an email because she knows that we will both laugh the same way at it is the one I want beside me, because neither of us has any interest in dressing things up to be pretty when they can be real. I know that this world can be terrifying, but I also know that it can’t be written off because he doesn’t write it off. And he doesn’t write me off, either. So whatever the worst thing is that could happen? Won’t. Because when I turn around and look at the story I’ve lived, at the mistakes I made and people I hurt and bridges I thought I burned in my misunderstanding of what it really means to believe–I see that nails and wood are stronger than I ever knew.

Will physical therapy work? Will speech therapy work? Is marriage work? Those answers matter so much less now as a tiny hand grabs mine, as your story and mine meet and are woven into a greater one, and as I see the stone-rolling, the real work, has already been done, and not by me–because that’s how grace works.

The Kid was scheduled to be baptized last year on Mother’s Day. Instead, the story went differently: a night in the ER, a catheter in the wang, and a sluggish Sunday afterward. This year, our Sunday was spent celebrating, while the back of our minds held onto the knowledge that in twenty-four hours, we would be meeting with a neurosurgeon to discuss future possibilities for TK’s spine.

We’re only prepared for the plan that we write, and insufficiently at that. We’re never really prepared for the reality that exists outside of our expectations.

Last night, The Husband and I bathed TK and my gaze fell down the stairs and out our front-door window, where the fading sunlight cast its beam on a lily growing beside our porch. We can only have the view we’re afforded from our particular vantage point, and waiting rooms and hospitals have dominated this family’s perspective over the past seventeen months. That’s just the way this story has gone so far. But as I watched that lone lily dance in the breeze, and the light cover it wherever it went, I knew. That I am clothed. I am covered. The beams of love, in both their soft light and ferocious intensity, will not let me go. I turned to the boys beside me, felt the water splashing from the tub. Will not let US go.

And this morning, as I pumped a stationary bike and hurled silent curses at the instructor who yelled out insane resistance levels, I knew then, too. It is written, I heard, because that’s what my heart has been told lately. As someone who deals and trades in words, who examines them like shiny objects and places them like puzzle pieces, the beauty that our stories are written is not lost on me. I cling to it, rejoice in it, in the gorgeous finality of it, that what happens is exactly what is meant to. That my eyes, TK’s neck, Merrill’s swing, these are not meaningless mishaps that must be fought against and apologized for–no, they are there by design, to make us the people we are meant to be. When I accept and embrace these apparent interruptions to plan, when I trust that they are there because love told them to be, when I know that grace will redeem every last second and each tear–this is when I come to life. This is when the slog of life becomes romance.

But that’s all hokey sentiment when you’re sitting in the neurosurgeon’s office waiting on a verdict, right?

Not so much. Because grace transforms even your hearing, so that you can listen to the M.D.’s interpretations and secretly smile, because he is only translating a divine language into vernacular–and what does he know that the Author doesn’t already have written on His hands?

This is why I praise, why I believe: not because the report was good, but because whatever the report was, it was written already. Out of a love that my black-and-white, good-and-bad, need-for-answers heart is only beginning to understand.

But why do I rejoice? I rejoice because the report was good, y’all.

The vertebral anomaly isn’t severe enough to require spinal surgery. And it’s stable. The other stuff, we’ll follow up on with an MRI in six months. He can do physical therapy. He may never play football. I can live with that. I’m already anticipating the arguments we’ll have with him over it, and I’m giving thanks for every damn one, because it will give us the opportunity to talk about what else he is meant for. (Remind me of this when I’m banging my head against the wall over my beautiful, sullen teenage boy.) We’ll be regular visitors to more waiting rooms over the years, will know the neurosurgeon’s office well. He may always have a bit of a tilt, the surgeon said. “That’s just part of him. It’s who he’s going to be.”

Divine to vernacular.

I’ve nearly filled my current journal, and the last page holds a list of prayer requests I had for my son while I was still pregnant. “Head tilt” and “C1 vertebral anomaly” are nowhere to be found on the list. Plans in pencil, indeed. I remember a visit to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in my twenties, when I was lonely and angry because the story I was living was not matching up to the plans I had made, and the words fell on me then, too, as if they had been spoken in my ear: Your heart is bigger than you know and stronger than you think. I had no idea how this promise would be proven true. How I was made to be this man’s wife, and this boy’s mother. My daydreams then were about Prince Charming and a white horse/nice car; now they’re about a hot bath and hearing “mama” for the first time. My vantage point changes, but the story doesn’t.

It is written. It is being written. And every word of it is grace.

I was sandwiched between The Husband and another guy, a middle-aged man on my right next to the window who, between his carry-on briefcase and book at the ready, appeared to be a seasoned traveler. Also, he was wearing the introvert’s cloak of invisibility: no eye contact, no speaking. Well done, sir, I thought, and settled into my seat with my own book.

TH and I were flying out of a rainy Atlanta to a sunny Fort Lauderdale, from which we would drive two hours in a rented Mustang convertible (well done, TH) to convene with our New York crew for a friend’s wedding. But first, we had to get out of town, which occurred in several stages: first, diverting The Kid’s attention with a booster seat and tray of food and The Mom and Dad. Then, arriving to the airport and a delayed flight. We decided to make lemonade out of airline lemons (or sangria out of lemons, in my case) by hitting the airport bar at 10:30 am, thus kicking off our vacation a few hours early.

But the plane…there was the rub. I’ve written about it before, but it keeps getting worse: the more loaded my life becomes with people I love, the more fearful I am tempted to become. In a former life, I was an expert flier. That guy in Up in the Air TOTALLY would have gotten in the security line behind me. I was all-efficiency, ID out, shoes off, laptop separate. And then, on the plane? Aisle seat, ignoring safety spiel, no nerves. I took pride in my calm attitude, especially as it was absent elsewhere in my life. On a plane, though, I let go of life’s reins and just relaxed.

No more. As the plane reached cruising altitude and hit rough air, one hand gripped the seat and the other, TH. I felt the traveler beside me glance my way, felt his pity and wanted to scream: “I USED TO BE LIKE YOU! I USED TO BE GOOD AT THIS! AND THEN I HAD TO GO AND LOVE!” I wanted back onto the top rung of the traveling pecking order: the calm, cool, collected, ear buds in, cute bag at my feet, secretly smirking at the anxious Annies around me, who were all wide eyes and “Are we gonna crash?”-thinking. I wanted to be the Traveler Who Has It All Together.

I’m not her anymore.

Our descent into Fort Lauderdale occurred over Atlantic water, and I was only half-joking when I whispered to TH, “The pilot knows we can’t land in the ocean, right?” Which was when I realized it, that all the seat-clutching and white-knuckling of my life has to be a bit of a kindly laugh for the one who’s actually holding the reins, the one who knew how aviation would work long before Orville and Wilbur figured it out, who knows exactly how The Kid will manage with or without a wonky vertebra, who is telling a story with each life and will decide not only how much turbulence is manageable without my help but also will never abandon me through it.

I sweat on planes now. But as TH and I sat in white chairs on the sand and witnessed two people make promises to each other that will become harder and more full with time, I realized something else that wasn’t true before: I cry at weddings. Because now I know.

This morning TH and I (and TK, from his booster) watched the news coverage of One World Trade Center and its spire’s completion, bringing the building up to its full measure of 1,776 feet. The measure of courage and hope, of refusing to live in fear when there is plenty to be afraid of. 1776–the height of bravery, the year of the birth of a nation that just doesn’t give up. And I, a thrice-over bungee-jumper in a former life, turned to TH and said, “I could never be up that high.” I knew that it wasn’t always true, but it is now. Which is okay, because the view from where I am is pretty impressive too.

Friday night I found myself at a Taylor Swift concert, a notable occurrence because I don’t get out much–especially to large events, which are laden with people and loud noises (neither of which I like), and usually start around 7 (when I should be drawing my baaath) and end way past my bedtime (9:00). But one of my college friends has connections within the pop wunderkind’s kingdom, and so a few of us reunited in downtown Atlanta for the show.

Wading through the crowd at Philips Arena was like getting slapped in the face with a million blond ponytails full of glitter. While I wore my sensible but trendy “silk” pants from Target, I observed pre-teen girls (and their as-yet “straight” boyfriends) wearing Tay-Tay paraphernalia: red tutus, the sundress/cowboy boot country-pop combo; T-shirts bearing lyrics and album titles written in puff paint; signs begging for attention; and the piece de resistance: a duo dressed as bottles of Swift’s personal fragrance. My eyes darted wildly around in search of a bar.

Around 1:30 am, overtired, overstimulated, and away from my own bed, I realized that I was not going to fall asleep. I frantically dialed The Husband from the hotel room bathroom and told him I was heading home. A few minutes later, after the valet’s concerned pleas to be careful (glasses-sporting and makeup-less, I was not looking my sanest), I was on the road. The next morning, after sleeping in while TH manned breakfast duty, I ventured downstairs. “Watch!” TH stage-whispered in my direction, sitting on the kitchen floor and holding his hands out toward TK, who stood shakily then WALKED FORWARD TWO STEPS. My haze of sleeplessness was temporarily shattered and we fell as a family of three to the floor in an exuberant group hug. Had I not been dehydrated, I would have cried.

Because, as many of you know, TK is sixteen months old and a bit late to the walking game. But he also carries within his body a structural anomaly (I prefer to think of it as a design) that his doctors haven’t made sense of yet (hopefully they will after his MRI today–12 pm EST for all you pray-ers, thought-senders, and rain-dancers) but that undoubtedly has thrown a challenge between him and ambulation. To look at him, you’d never know it: he’s full of awareness and curiosity and grins and laughter and (if I may say so, and I may) good looks, and only a slight head tilt to the left belies any hint of trouble. None of us really know how fraught with or free from difficulty his daily movements are because he functions so well. But as his parents who have sat with him through hours of physical therapy and x-rays and evaluations and surgery recovery, TH and I know his story. And, as we celebrated on the kitchen floor, we felt the sort of victory that only those who are intimately acquainted with uncertainty can fully appreciate.

When Taylor blasted through her mic on Friday about love, my friend turned to me and snorted. “Come back to me in ten years and talk to me about love then,” she said, and I nodded an amen. The kind of love that sells tickets is belted out in an arena by barely-out-of-their-teens wearing lavish costumes and hoisted onto audience-sweeping mini-stages and accompanied by light shows and, at the end, blasts of confetti. As that confetti swirled around my head and eventually scattered around our feet, I looked down and thought about the love I’ve come to know, the love my friends have come to know: the love of waiting for answers, lying on cold tables, sitting in paper gowns, logging endless miles and collecting business cards and doctors’ names, feeling tension across the room from each other and letting commitment work on it until it gives way to forgiveness. Sure–glittery, confetti-strewn love is fun and pretty. But I prefer the real, raw thing. I prefer the kind you drive home for at 1:30 am, tired and ornery, so that the next morning, almost as if someone knew it would happen, you’re there for the true event.

Later on Saturday, a friend emailed me, exhausted from the social stamina of inhabiting a party for two hours, seeking refuge in like-mindedness, and again I nodded an amen. There are friendships that stretch across time because of what you’ve experienced together and how you’ve grown up alongside each other, in spite of personality differences and bedtime predilections. And there are friendships sustained through the speaking of the same native tongue, through a nearly identical view of the world. With one friend, you bond over “remember the time…” even though one of you could talk to a wall and the other can barely stand to leave her house; with the other, it’s more “I read this and knew you’d get it” and shared rueful glances across a room. Depth can be added by years or similarity, the way rooms become fuller as a house becomes a home.

To look at me (as long as it’s not 1:30 am after a concert), you’d wouldn’t know my structural design, the introversion I struggle against: not the generic “I’m a little quiet” sort but the kind that grows forlorn without frequent solitude, that often prefers music to voices, that leaves parties exhausted from the effort of finding words that flow so much more easily from my fingers than my mouth. Not many know how fraught with difficulty my daily movements in the world can be, how one step forward is a victory preceded by so much uncertainty. I’m thankful to have people in my life who are unlike me; otherwise we’d all be sitting on the couch in our PJs with the TV on, trying to avoid life and each other’s eyes. But I’m also thankful for the people who get it, for whom throwing a party is an act of bravery, who call me afterward to talk about how hard it was. Who leave the light on because they know there’s a chance I’ll roll in at 2 am, crowd- and battle-weary and needing to be back in my place, among my tribe, in my home.

“I spent a large part of the first half of my life as a city dweller, a large part of the second half as a countryman. In between, there were periods when nobody, including myself, quite knew (or cared) where I was…I have finally come to rest,” E.B. White wrote, and as one who lived anonymously in the city and under the radar with friends more fun than I, here is where the gratitude lies–in holding both close: the auditorium where grace is spoken to a crowd and the church where the pastor knows my name; the friends who draw me out and the ones who sit quietly beside me; and the family who hold a place, into the small hours of the morning, into which only I can fit.

Our air conditioning went out last night.

Days after our flipping of the thermostat switch from red to blue in honor of the arrival of spring, the bitch went out. Cut to me lying in bed at 2 am drenched in sweat and wanting someone to punch. These are first world problems by which we find ourselves surrounded, these “A/C going out”s and “high pollen count”s and “diamond shoes are too tight“s. But I had spent a day among the cavity-laden masses while afflicted with the same problem–too little freon–and it was the eve of The Kid’s MRI. TK was crying intermittently but often a few rooms away, whether from impending heatstroke or a runny nose or nothing at all, who could know? The world just felt more hot and uncomfortable and not to my liking.

The fault lines of my soul, the brokenness that runs along the flaws of my personality and points of my faithlessness, run exposed during these seasons of confusion and uncertainty. I remember when electricity going out would be cause for childhood celebrations–flashlight wars and indoor picnics by candlelight; when overheating was cured by dips in the neighborhood pool; when adult-onset allergies had yet to arrive; when searching for answers was the grown-ups’ job. Nights when being among my favorite people was celebrated with a slumber party; now I throw in earplugs and take them for granted. I don’t do well with not being let in on the administrative end of running the universe.

This morning, we denied TK food and drink per orders and filled the diaper bag with post-procedure snacks and toys and books and drove to yet another medical setting. We watched the excitement over a family car trip and new surroundings transform into frustrating hunger and, finally, tears as they tried to take his vitals and he realized this was another of those days. Then the doctor came in and listened to his chest and spouted some dire risks about colds and drool from teething and ended his speech with a two-week postponement. Listen, fucker, I know teeth–and this won’t be over in two weeks, so why don’t you pick another arbitrary date? I wanted to scream at him, in that non-WWJD way of mine that happens when I’m backed into a corner or fighting for my child or just having a bad day. He left the room and I broke down the way only a Type-A mother at yet another dead end can, and TH comforted me as only a man who loves that kind of woman does. And TK grinned as he shoved the formerly forbidden animal crackers into his piehole.

I know the truth that is my soul’s native tongue: that in the defeat of our own plans and expectations is where new life begins; that learning what love is involves learning what it isn’t first, and then learning to bear its beams because damn if they’re not brighter and hotter than we ever knew.

I know all this, knew it when TH grinned at me in the way only he is allowed to and shrugged, “Plans in pencil.”  But I still needed to pout a little. Mourn not getting my way, my answer.

And then, to realize that I have it. “You wanted to fix this,” the voice told my heart from the unholy track of a treadmill hours later as The Mom swooped in to take care of TK. “You won’t be the one fixing this.” And in that moment, the beam of love hit me with all of its truth-baring discomfort and transformed my mourning into gratitude. Because it had just felt like a setback. When will I learn that it’s never just what it looks like?

Then, the surrounding like a slumber party of favorites: The Mom playing with TK in the next room as I write this, texts from friends who understand and say exactly the right thing (which is often, simply, “I’m sorry”). Unprintable wisdom from the SS (unprintable because it’s too good not to let her post it herself). And all that I know awaits me from my tribe: from The Dad, who taught me that laughter is a form of love that too few speak well; from The Sis, who has a way of distilling the emotion out and placing it aside just long enough to get to the raw point of it all. Countless others, whose depth of friendship has grown only through the honest dialogue that brokenness brings. And so we wait a few more weeks for an answer already known by the author, and we limp along in the meantime with the same wounds as before. We will always have them, though, whatever medicine and this world provide, because it’s the broken places that let the grace in, and let us not forget it.

Because isn’t holding it all together overrated anyway? That thought hit me on Sunday, just after they prayed for our family by name, and then the sermon spoke those exact words in a reminder that God has not only a sense of humor but impeccable timing. There we were, TH and I, in between two couples who are friends, who have kids TK’s age that they each almost lost before birth. Behind us, the baby whose parents were told he would never be born cooed, and my friend turned to me and we smiled at each other because these miracles happen every moment if we care to look. We are the openly war-torn, the has-beens and addicts, not the pearl-clutchers and rule-followers. So we stood, this band of the broken whom grace has made family, and through my tears I spoke the words, and just like that suffering turned into a song.