“Being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone.” –Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

I woke up a few days ago in a bed that was not my own. An unfamiliar room. No husband next to me or four-year-old who had crept in during the night sleeping between us. Total darkness, still air. The clock read 7:24. I felt relaxed. Rested.

Incomplete.

A friend and I spent almost twenty-four hours on a staycation at a local hotel, escaping our lives for a day to refuel and commiserate and support. We deal with special needs every day–our kids’ and our own–and we needed a break. We lounged poolside and bobbed in the water, sacked out on individual beds and perched at tables with meals we did not cook or clean up. We talked about our shared and separate histories, our shared and separate presents. We drank. We listened. We slept. It was so much, yet not enough. I couldn’t wait to see my family again, and I could. I loved the independence, and I felt adrift.

This is my life now, the mystery in which I am daily mired, the ambivalence I walk like a tightrope, the insanity I try to manage: deep, deep love and consuming frustration. Emotions that contradict each other and always run high. An instant away from either jubilant laughter or seething anger.

This morning I parented mostly through gritted teeth and tears. Then, from a couch with a boy on either side of me, Dr. Seuss’s rhymes issuing from my lips as I nearly fell asleep. It’s a lot for one morning. It’s a lot for a lifetime. I’m doing a good job, and I’m failing miserably. None of this makes any sense the more I try to make sense of it. None of it makes sense unless…

Unless there’s more to it. Unless it’s part of a greater whole. I hold the pieces in my hands every day, some of them broken because the world delivers that way, some ragged because I’ve slammed them to the ground in my own ire. I hold them, and I pray that they will be sewn together in a way that dissolves the seams and renders a masterpiece because I can’t do it. I can’t turn this into something beautiful.

I think that may be a start. I’m counting on it, anyway.

The other morning I was headed through the bleary early-morning haze toward Little Brother’s room, and before I cracked the door I heard him through it: “Mama. Dada. Bubba.” I opened the door and stepped through, his grin meeting me through the crib slats. “Mama! Dada! Bubba!” The Kid is doing it too, taking stock of the situation as if to confirm for himself and us that he’s seeing everything, that he gets it, and here is what he sees: our family. “Mommy. Daddy. Will. James,” he says, then turns to The Husband and me, smiling. They know they are a part of something, their worlds now so much smaller than they will be, their universes currently rotating around this family unit that they always return to, that opens and finishes their days. They get it, and I wish I did too, in those moments of gritted teeth and tears: that this is so much bigger than a moment, than a mistake, than me.

I wish sometimes that we would think of it when we talk about politics, and our country, and what’s next: that we fundamentally and perpetually misidentify and mislabel ourselves according to communities that matter so much less than the ones that matter more. We forget to take care of each other because we feel compelled to take care of ourselves. We forget that we are held; instead, we hold. We grasp. We cling. We think we can control the world from a voting booth, that one channel or candidate has all the answers. We strategize how to protect our best interests because we don’t know what they are. We don’t believe that someone else does. We don’t believe that our deepest needs are already met, and our greatest hope can never be lost. So we vote as if our lives depended on it. They don’t.

I wish sometimes that my husband, so sunnily dispositioned, didn’t have to deal with a partner whose bouts of melancholy, of over-analysis, surely confound his even-keeled level-headed kindness. Then I remember that I am part of a unit here. That the first time we saw each other was not orchestrated by either of us, that the friendships that led us to that moment in a lobby were orchestrated on a timetable that defies earthly understanding, that we were each created to fit and balance and be part of the whole. We didn’t engineer this shit. It is not going to fall apart because I have a breakdown. We may end up walking better on hobbled legs than we did on sound ones; or in the right direction, at least.

I wish sometimes that I would see, more often and readily, that it is all so much less about doing than belonging. I wish that I would remember that all the things I said I would have and do, that they have been upended in favor of what I now have and do, and that this is somehow for my freedom. I wonder if the rest of the things I said I would have and do are going to vanish as well, if it will even matter if I never skydive or live overseas or guest star on Saturday Night Live. Maybe by then I’ll look back and see how much more beautiful it was the way it turned out.

I wish. I hope. I pray.

I climbed into my car the other morning, headed away from the escape and back toward my family. Toward church, where we would meet. The drive was empty of traffic–a quiet Sunday morning studded with calm roads and towering trees, green lawns and a new route to the same place. I thought about how I longed to see them, how after a few minutes in their presence I would long for a break. The constant mystery and ambivalence. I pulled into the lot and waited, and an image from the week before came to mind: LB at his puzzle station, placing into my open hands, like communion wafers, letter after letter of the tiny pegged pieces that are so prone to lostness. He knows them now as individuals, As and Ms and Is, but soon he will string them together, see how they can fit to create something new, the way his brother, for so long wordless, now sits beside both of us on the couch and, just when I feel too tired to read another rhyme, chimes in, the words issuing from his lips to tell a whole story.