It’s 5:15, the time of evening that most mommies start staring at the clock to will its hands into faster motion – the time of day, today, that I’ve chosen to sit in my bed with my computer and a jar of pickles.

The 22 week mark has hit, and I’m being about as cliche as I can possibly be. Could I dip these pickles in icecream? Why yes I sure could.

Spring and second trimester seem slathered with goofy juice. For example, I forgot to add the chicken in our chicken pot pie the other night. It must be the happy vitamin D beaming through. And the forsythia. Their yellow flowering twigs shoot up at the edges of driveways, accenting rusty yard cars and frou-frou gated communities alike. Everything seems to lighten up.

I wake in the night, thankful, and put my hands on Seth’s arm. Smile in the dark. He doesn’t even know. Then we wake in the morning, and I snarl at him for drinking coffee, though he sees the grin in my eyes.

The parts of life that can’t be written are hard, but we are still light.

This Lenton Season has been the toughest and therefore the best, a time for bests. Keeping my computer off for some of it has made me different, helped me pray for different things and see home in a new way. My best friend saw poverty in the eyes of a child in Guatemala. It has made me fall in love with her all over again, and with God, too – though pain be rammed through the center of it.

My girlfriends in our “home group” and in my accountability mornings, they bring gladness to me, beautiful feet, have the good news wrapped even in sorrows. I have brothers, too, that are backbone. The Sunday-school teachers for my boys send me off with my mouth full of gratitude.

I have one here that is GF/CF. No gluten. No dairy. I’m a southern woman cooking like I live in a foreign desert land. The sand is rice. Everything crumbles, smells funny. I angle every meal for one child, and he thinks it’s the worst. It’s a stage of battling the nothing-rights. Gratitude. Gratitude. Gratitude.

Some trials can’t be written until they’re over. But gratitude can be.

I love labeled jars filled with white flours that I don’t know how to use.

I love the rare girlfriends that don’t know your space issues and lie in your lap so you can play with their hair, just when you think you might die of missing your little sister.

I love the gentle baby tap dancing inside. When we didn’t get to move when expected and when I’m huffing down the seconds until I get a washer and dryer, those taps unzoom my perspective, make me see the world wider.

When I go to the beach in a few months, in my large body, my eyes might zoom in at my thighs, but I can choose, too, to look out long into the round horizon,

as if forever were right now.