To look deep into your child’s eyes and see in him both yourself and something utterly strange, and then to develop a zealous attachment to every aspect of him, is to achieve parenthood’s self-regarding, yet unselfish, abandon…the parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances. There is more imagination in the world than one might think.         Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree

We weathered a few storms last week.

Thursday night brought some fierce winds, a torrential downpour, and an extended power outage. The Husband and I scooped The Kid out of his crib and the three of us, one sleeping peacefully and the other two, parents, rode out the storm in our basement. Candlelight bounced off the walls and TK’s breaths punctuated the stillness. The weather passed, though not without effect: the power remained out for twelve hours, the cable and internet for two days, and then there was the matter of all the debris and fallen trees throughout the area.

A few days before that, though, TK woke up and I went to scoop him out of his crib. Before I reached him, a wave of vomit-stench nearly knocked me over, and I saw that he had puked on his sheet the night before. I felt like a total asshole, naturally, because he hadn’t stuck his head in the monitor’s screen and called out, “Clean up on aisle five!” like he really should if he wants me to know about such events, and he had coexisted with the barf for hours without my knowing. The virus that led to the hurling persisted for days in TK’s diaper and attitude, and one morning an hour before I was due to wake up, his cries rattled on. TH had taken his turn, so it was mine, and as I rocked my son in the last moments of darkness, the sun creeping its way along the eastern horizon, the poisonous thought entered my mind: I can’t keep doing this.

This, of course, could mean any number of things, given the week: sleepless nights, pre-dawn wake-ups for work, leaving work early to pick up a sick baby, standing in front of a gastrointestinal firing squad that has claimed TK and TH and waiting…waiting… Much like Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, I felt I was in one of those spots where something’s gotta give. And joking with TH aside (“I love you both, but I’m going to have to leave”), the family-abandonment plan is not on the table.

The debate rattles on over who has it easier–working moms or stay-at-homes–and as someone who has done both, I can tell you that neither is a honeymoon. You can find me flinging my middle finger out the window toward the pool set on my work days and bobbing alongside them, TK in arms, the next; and the point is not who’s working harder but that we’re all struggling in our own ways, and kicking ass in others, and each of us has “our people” with whom we identify most, but that doesn’t have to end in elementary-style camps with “Do Not Trespass” signs and kicked-away welcome mats and arms-crossed glares. This road of motherhood is gloriously, horrifically, asking more of me than should ever be allowed in polite conversation, and pardon me if I don’t compare to-do lists with you or keep score but instead just show up here once a week to drop a truth bomb about how hard and wonderful it all can be. And when I ask myself in the middle of the night if I really can keep showing up for the job, I need more than a message board to provide the answer.

I can’t keep doing this, I thought. I don’t have it in me. As if love, showing up as sacrificed sleep and plastic gloves and endless laundry and neuro appointments and physical and speech therapy–as if love is Gatorade and the last plant just shut down and I’m left to wring my hands, alone and exhausted. Maybe it’s all easier for you, or maybe you’re just better at hiding when it’s hard, but for me it’s a daily struggle against selfishness and the other ugliest parts of me, a daily crisis of faith in which the truth quietly bobs nearby, like a buoy, waiting for me to stop my self-inflicted flailing and just grab on. Because right now, I’m not being asked to make grand gestures or flying leaps but daily yeses, one foot in front of the other, boots-on-the-ground faith, which can be painful when I show up in the wrong footwear, blistered and bleeding, because I thought this was a party and was told there’d be cake?

Then I think about life before TK, and of all the words that pop up to describe it the one that sticks is this: easier. And who but grace could have gotten me to the point where I am finally able to say, “Who needs that?” Is an easy life really what I want to look back on one day, the narrative version of being a “perfectly pleasant person”? I think there’s more to my story–to his story–than that.

TH and I pushed TK around the neighborhood the other day, gazing at the fallen trees just fully uprooted by the storm, and I realized that for all that is not in me yet, it is being put there by grace–by marriage, by motherhood, by endless appointments and cries in the night and eyes that recognize mine and grin and there’s that buoy again. I hear through the monitor as TK speaks in his crib in the language none of us are wise enough yet to understand. The Sis calls asking if The Niece left Lamby at our house and after the initial crisis passes, we conduct a FaceTime between them and peace reigns again. These are the places and means of my salvation now. Forward my mail, because this is my new address, where deep struggle and profound joy meet and hold hands and the war-torn among us show up, still standing because our roots run deeper than easy, and we share our stories and they are not so much about what we can’t do but what we can because it was first done for us.