I’m in the trenches of motherhood these days.

Apparently, if you take two small children on a month long “vacation” cross-country, they will need a solid month to recover from it. Or something. I don’t know, actually, but I’m hoping it resolves within a month.

The potty training regression started the moment we reached home soil. The tantrums are in full swing. The baby needs to be held if I expect him to be happy. The toddler has decided she has outgrown naps (although her behavior at 5pm suggests otherwise) and her brother is suddenly cluster feeding where he had been sleeping through the night. (I’m writing this at 2am, having just put the toddler back to bed again where I immediately swapped her for her brother. Again.)

Lord, have mercy.

The other night, as I was plugging my phone in for the night and bracing myself for the beginning of a tumultuous bedtime routine, I saw the announcement. A friend is experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. Her much hoped for baby is not going to survive.

Lord, have mercy.

Minutes later, I sat rocking my nap-deprived toddler as she squirmed and writhed (“No! Awake all night!”) Bagpipes blared from my husband’s phone as he bounced the baby to their own nightly routine. He caught my eye across the room and gave me that tired smile—the one that says, “Hey, do you suppose we will actually get a moment alone together before we fall into bed exhausted?”

I held my daughter in my arms and my friend’s news in my heart. I could no longer feel the frustration that had been building for the last couple of hours.

This season is hard, but it’s not the crying-myself-to-sleep-because-I-ache-with-the-emptiness-and-God-when-will-it-stop hard it was three years ago. It’s not the hard my friend is walking through as she awaits the inevitable death of her beloved child. No, this is the kind of hard that I, in the depths of my despair, once swore I would never take for granted. But here I am—a fallen, fickle (and currently sleep deprived) human, forgetting those desperate promises I made in the dark.

I rocked my little miracle child and I channeled my would-be frustration into prayers for a woman who only wishes she could experience grief so trivial and fleeting.

“God, give her this kind of hard,” I prayed. And because of the season I’m currently in, it’s what I’ve continued to pray as I mop puddles of pee off the floor and try to manage dinner prep one handed and guide a cart containing two shrieking children through the grocery store.

“God, give her children to rock and cradle in the wee hours of morning. Give her sleepless nights and endless days. Give her interrupted mornings. Give her pots and pans strewn across the kitchen floor. Give her ‘one more’ book. Give her fifteen minutes of bundling children up only to have them insist on going back inside a mere five minutes later. Give her raspberries scattered across the floor at the grocery. Give her tiny hands constantly catching in the tangles of her hair. Give her a sliver of space on the edge of the bed.

“Give her long-suffering sighs and a moment to take a deep breath and remember that this is everything she prayed for when her dreams first turned to ash in her hands.

“God, please. Give her the blessing of this exceedingly mundane, but entirely miraculous, hard.”