The OB sat across from me in her corner office, smiling and well-rested and with clean hair, and delivered me a verbal list of the things I get to do now: baths. Exercise. Sex. Cease iron pills. Pump to keep up my supply. A return to normal life, six weeks after being opened up to make way for a new life. And I thought, GET to do? All of those but the baths and iron sound like work.

And so Little Brother melts into our family and we begin our new normal. A new normal where every stage is so temporary without feeling like it–sleeplessness, crying, constant diaper changes (and that’s just me). The Kid acknowledges his existence, sometimes a little too enthusiastically–we’re teaching the word gentle when it comes to doors and babies. We are shifting around, adjusting and resetting, to become a family of four. Because the becoming, it doesn’t happen overnight, or once you leave the hospital, or after six weeks. It takes…always.

And sometimes it takes just one day to show you what you have, remind you that this life really is beautiful, especially when you aren’t all struck down with a virus that renders your family a tableau of pain.

I remember being sick when I was a kid, and how it was sort of a treat: staying home from school and watching cartoons while subsisting on a diet of ginger ale and saltines. Being taken care of, looked after. Now it’s The Husband and I doing the care taking, and when you’re both struck down, along with your toddler, and the only “well” one in the house is the little guy with the lungs and the repetitive need to be fed even as you fear you might puke right over his head…well, that’s something different. New, scary, overwhelming. When did I grow up?

Twenty-four hours, a night and a day full of that, and you are leveled. But somehow, not reduced. A few pounds lighter, maybe, but not reduced, because the loss isn’t just fluids but also skewed perspective and unrealistic expectations. A bit of ingratitude and monotony-induced myopia. Suddenly the world becomes clearer, once you’ve stopped viewing it from the lid of the toilet bowl, and the new normal is a place you’d gladly hang your hat.

“Redefinition is a nightmare,” writes Anne Lamott, and isn’t it the truth–how painful it is to grow. How so much of that pain has to do with the insidious, often-subconscious offense taken because we thought we were already done with the hard part, that we had evolved past the dark places within ourselves, only to find that hard parts don’t stop and dark places don’t disappear. But what they don’t have to do is define us, or be the truest thing. The biggest thing. And so grace enters in, sometimes in the form of a whisper and sometimes as a raging virus, and reshapes our lives and hearts so that we don’t forget what is truest, what is biggest. Like the way we sleep beside each other, and take care of each other instead of just being taken care of. How this is a gift, this burden of care taking, and how–when it is passed on to us like a heavy torch and fear (I’m not enough?!) gives way to realization (I’m not enough.)–we see, clearly now, as if a veil has been lifted, that we’ve always been taken care of. In not just the absence of hard parts and dark places but within them. That this is how we know what is truest and biggest–because, after the storm, it still stands. We feel like shadows of ourselves, but we look around and see that what cannot be shaken, remains. Words that used to sound instructive now read like poetry; tasks that used to feel like burdens take on a lightness; food that you let become tasteless is now full of flavor. Life, relived.

The next morning I’m up before the sun with LB, our latest stage of temporary, and he eats and then sleeps and I make a cup of coffee–did it always smell this amazing?–and take it into the sunroom. I turn on Christmas music, pick out a picture for our Christmas card, listen for the man and boy upstairs to stir awake. The light dawns, slowly at first and in spots so that it almost feels just temporary, before its full brilliance fills the room to stay and the new day begins.