I remember that Friday in second grade when I saw the boy who didn’t have money for a snack. I marched over to his chair and poured out half my cheese curls onto a paper towel on his desk. I didn’t even put him on a payment plan or ask if he planned to get a job to support himself from now on, just gave.

I don’t think I’d be so generous with the cheese curls today.

Two decades later, I drove outside of Birmingham’s city limits–way outside of them–and picked up my new dog, a beagle puppy I named Max. I returned him less than twenty-four hours later, tearful and defeated after a night full of puppy whines and sleeplessness. I couldn’t handle it.

A few years after that, there was more crying and sleeplessness, but no return option. I still couldn’t handle it, but the baby was here to stay.

I knew how to care, back when I was seven, and the thing I remember most about it was that it hurt. It hurt a lot, and over the years–years spent “growing up”–I learned how to make it hurt less, and it involved hardening my heart, shaking my head frequently, looking past and around and through until I didn’t have to see. When I was seven, I was told I had a heart that felt things deeply; when I was twenty-seven, I steeled myself against them.

Next week I’ll be thirty-seven, and I’m working on it. I’m being worked on.

Number Two–for whom I am currently enduring a three-hour glucose test and trying not to hurl–will be arriving in a few weeks. Number One–The Kid–has already done the lion’s share of rending my heart open. I took him back to daycare this week for the first time since his surgery, and it has hurt. A lot. In a way that I can’t steel myself against, can’t look away from, just as I couldn’t when he was a newborn and cried from his crib, or when he was lying in a hospital bed wearing a halo. When I left him this morning, waving through the window as he stared back uncertainly, I promptly jumped into the car and cried the whole way to the doctor’s office. (Great. Now I’m crying again.)

We work on protecting ourselves against hurt, against pain, against the quiet moments that leave us alone with our thoughts and our hearts and make us feel too much. We medicate ourselves with our phones–I’ve felt the icy fingers of panic grip me at the thought I’ve left mine at home–with busyness, with work.

For months, at home, I’ve been able to create a universe filled with just my family, with TK and me and no outside forces like circle time or biting kids or disagreeable adults breaking into my sense of control. But this week began a new chapter, and it’s been a painful one. And it’s made me remember that being a parent means signing up for a lifetime of vulnerability, of hurting on behalf of others. Of giving away my snacks, and my heart.

This chapter began at the right time. My doctor said that it was rest or hospital, no matter how badly I wanted to clean, and I wondered if she had a hidden camera in our house. So I dropped TK off, against my will, and dealt with the aftermath by praying and picking him up two hours later. But not by steeling. That doesn’t work when you love this much, because loving this much just hurts. Period. And as I’ve come to terms with the re-intrusion of that kind of hurt, as I’ve rested on the couch through it and felt it, I’ve come to re-appreciate the heart I used to have, the heart I’m growing to have again–the one that feels deeply on behalf of someone else. I’ve come to realize that this isn’t a weakness, any more than TK’s neck or whatever Number Two brings to the table is, though the world may call it that and it may sometimes seem so, because this is how I was made. And something tells me that this particular heart of mine may have been dropped into this house of men for a purpose.

I used to think that the promise of rest–one of the many promises made to those who believe–would look different. I expected it to look like sleeping in on Saturdays, like long uninterrupted nights of quiet and no peeing, of toes in the sand and perfectly-behaved little ones. I was as right about that as I was about what love would look like, or peace, or freedom. They are, all of them, rawer and more real than that, twisty and turn-y and yet direct, wrecking balls and unplanned-for events. At their darkest moments they are bodily fluids and puffy eyes and breaking down in public and healing only after cutting. They are anything but easy. And they hurt.

They are so much more than I thought.

But love, and peace, and freedom and rest? They’re also this: they are TK loving the blocks so much that he doesn’t want to leave school; they are his sudden proclivity for pulling me to the porch swing and sitting beside me, his arm resting on the bump–the uncomfortable, blessed bump–that holds his brother; they are the four of us leaning on each other before bath time in front of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse; they are the moments when I go to pick him up and he lights up at the sight of my face. They are the year between a confession of feelings and a return of them, during which a greater love stopped my heart from steeling itself, keeping it alive as a preface to a life spent together. They are the newborn months, during which the same love kept my heart alive through exhaustion and confusion and fear so that we could all lean on each other now.

They are true rest–the rest of, instead of knowing, being carried.

The promises, not me, are what protect my heart. And I’m learning to see that the promises are always kept.