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.