“Tell me my beauty!” she says, eager, hopeful as we all turn to face her. She has been waiting on this for a year. I know because I have, too. We all have. And so it begins, “You are classically beautiful, storybook beautiful, like Audrey Hepburn or Snow White with your dark hair and fair skin.” We rush to shower her with adoration. “And your freckles. I love your freckles!” “And your eyes. We know you have a thing with your eyes, but they are gorgeous.” “Seriously. The color. So gorgeous!” “And you have the best smile. Like you smile with your whole body. Completely infectious.” It’s a tradition we’ve started along the way, the first time in New Orleans in a dark bar where liquor loosens tongues and the space between strangers pulls you closer to the ones you came with.

I am not graceful. I am nearly always the opposite. Clumsy, rushed, awkward, fumbling. It has been that way since I can remember, spending full nights into day-breaks pleading to reside inside the husk of someone else, begging for a body that knows how to move without being noticed. Or questioned. Or mocked. But here I stay, trapped inside this one, just slightly out of tune, enough to blend and enough to bleed, watching the others glide effortlessly by.

Five of us sit, silent in a 10 x 10 hospital room. Our foster son is on an operating table down the hall having a minor procedure which feels major given the previous months of recurring illness and sleepless nights. We are hoping this one finally does the trick. The last procedure, six months prior, brought little improvement. This day feels different, though, and I have hope, so much hope for so many things, a number of them in contradiction to one another. I hope for resolution to this little guy’s ongoing sickness. I hope for growth and stability for his mother. I hope for permanency for our foster son and for his family…and also for our own. Living in this world of unknowns that stretch on 90 days at a time has beaten me down. I hold all these things at once, constantly reframing these hopes, these portraits of permanency, into a picture equaling the very best outcome for this child all the while knowing that “best” is a subjective word.

It was Sunday. Our family had pulled itself together, dressed and pressed, all in clean underwear, and ventured to church. This doesn’t happen every Sunday. It doesn’t even happen every month, but somehow, we got ourselves spit-shined and into the car on time. The boys were excited to play with other Sunday schoolers, and I was excited for 45 minutes of kid-free time and a hot coffee...and the Lord’s message, of course. My tired soul needed it. The littlest one started screaming before we hit the door of the 2’s room and continued his hysterics across the vibrant carpet to the corner where he stood sobbing into the wall. The stone-faced woman assured me all would be fine. She wasn’t convincing. But that coffee...we slowly backed away and moved on to the next room. He was young. He wouldn’t remember.

Yesterday, I cried into the arms of my six-year-old. We were on snow day 12 or maybe 27. I’d long since lost count. We'd been riddled with fevers and vomit and rashes and runny noses since the onset of winter. Cancelled school made these days drag on even longer. Surrounded by buckets and couches-turned-sick-beds, I was certain I would never make nightfall when my husband was due home on a flight sure to be delayed given the Armageddon-esque weather patterns of late. The sitter I’d lined up for the afternoon had cancelled with the pending blizzard, forcefully crushing my aspirations of accomplishing anything for the remainder of the day with the ding of a text. I hadn't accomplished anything in weeks.

I’m learning to parent like I’m dying. Tomorrow, or next Tuesday, sometime soon. Death is imminent. And really, it kind of is. In the grand scheme of things, the hundreds of millions of billions of souls floating back and forth from Earth to sky, our death is imminent. We are all dying. Every day. Every second. This morning, I laid on the floor with my middle child, his chubby fingers stroking my shoulder. He picked up my arm as he always does, turned it inward with both of his hands, straightened it and kissed the folded skin of my elbow. Twice. Three times.