Next week, my son Isaac will turn four. A week later, we’ll celebrate a first anniversary. The first anniversary of when Isaac got sick. He woke up that morning perfectly healthy, and by late afternoon, he couldn’t walk. When I took him into the doctor the next afternoon (thinking the whole time that he probably had a virus and they’d call me a Nervous Nelly behind my back), he was immediately whisked to the hospital and diagnosed with a serious bone infection. He stayed for two weeks, had two surgeries, and left with a semi-permanent IV tube inserted in his arm. Once we were home, he endured six weeks of thrice-daily IV infusions, and slowly learned to walk again. The day he got the IV tube pulled from his arm, his femur, weakened from infection, crumbled. He ended up back in the hospital and emerged encased in a huge blue body cast, where he stayed for the next nine weeks. He finally started walking again in April, more than six months after MRSA came knocking.

Until last October, life had been relatively easy for our family. We’d had no serious trials, no major skeletons lurking in our closets. So when Isaac got sick I felt so …. untested. I felt determined to put on a brave face, a happy face, because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. I’ll never forget last Halloween. Isaac’s infection levels weren’t coming down like the doctors wanted, so he had an MRI that morning, and ended up on the surgery schedule right when the other kids were going to be trick or treating. I kissed him goodbye at the door to the operating suite, dashed home, took Bryce, Annie and Maren out, made small talk with the neighbors and thanked ward members for their help and prayers, and sobbed as I raced back to the hospital in time for Isaac to wake up. It wasn’t so much that I was tired (though I was), or scared (terrified is more like it). It just seemed like I was experiencing such dissonance– pretending everything was normal and I was functioning when everything was so wrong.

We all like to present our best faces to the world, and admitting that my life was falling apart was hard. In fact, I couldn’t do it. When people asked how things were going, I said fine. Isaac was in good spirits. The other kids didn’t feel too neglected. No we didn’t need dinner brought in. We were fine, fine, fine. I continued training for my first marathon. Other than having a kid who was seriously ill and couldn’t walk, life seemed pretty normal.

Except that I was scared, and afraid to admit it to anyone. I was terrified to be anything less than strong and resolute, and I put on that happy face each morning like it was lipstick.

I’m always amazed when Segullah arrives in my mailbox, because each time, there’s an essay or a poem that resonates with something I’m experiencing in my own life. In this issue, Elizabeth Cranford’s poem, “The Semantics of Blessings,” expresses a feeling I wish I had been brave enough to  tap into– frustration, irritation and grief in the time of trial, and dancing with deep pain instead of pushing it away. I particularly love these lines: “Do not steal my fire and ice, make null/ my trial, void it with another name/ than pain.” I did that. I wanted to anesthetize our suffering, instead of recognizing that “The cut of a blade, opening bright red/ is revelation, not later epiphany,/ but present sense, the now of living…”

It may seem kind of weird to celebrate the anniversary of what has been, by any objective terms, one heck of a year. But maybe, just maybe by acknowledging the trials instead of trying to bury them behind smiles, that too, is a kind of blessing…

How have you, Dear Readers, learned not to run from your trials, but to wear them, and bear them, without the reflexive brave face?