It comes on fast. First, acute, undeniable soreness. I go into action: apply heat, take Advil, drink water, rest as soon as I can. Maybe, this time, I can keep it away. By night, the fever begins to climb. By morning, when I can call the doctor, the fever has spiked and my whole body feels hit. The fatigue is overwhelming.

I’m describing mastitis, an infection us breastfeeding moms are most susceptible to when milk stagnates. I produce a lot of milk, and I’ve had mastitis ten times since H. was one week old.

Now she is one year! She says versions of “Mama” and “Dada” and “that” and “dog” (could be another version of “Dada” :). On Christmas Eve, she took her first two steps. She moved with quick bursts after that—three steps here, six there, then just one and a giggly plop to the floor. A month later, she walks from one side of the room to the other, her destination not only in her sights but within her reach.

In today’s culture, we share these proud moments, don’t we? Upload the video, introduce a blog post. Much has been written about how we depict our lives online. There was the recent controversy over Facebook’s “Year in Review” highlighting aspects of people’s years they perhaps didn’t want to relive, or rather didn’t want to relive with such a jovial tone of celebration. I get that. I have been off Facebook since Lorenzo died. As most anyone reading this knows, that does not mean I hide my struggle, online or off. It just means it’s a trigger and we try to minimize those when we grieve.

So I found it refreshing when a friend I have long admired posted a picture on Instagram that did not depict the first steps or the lost-tooth grin or the face covered in birthday cake, but the willful child who has been kicked out of three ballet classes and won’t comb her hair and has otherwise tested her parents in ways her well-behaved sister simply hasn’t. The photo garnered 41 comments of solidarity.

After Lorenzo and before H., I didn’t understand parental complaint. I still don’t if it’s about the standard motions of childrearing. What my friend posted and the gratitude with which she shared wasn’t complaint, however. It was vulnerability. It was permitting herself to capture where parenthood is also hard, to show that we don’t have to pretend that it isn’t, in order to also make her way back to the place where she could “practice more patience, more determination, more unconditional love.”

It took so long for Ryan and I to get to these joys and challenges and their mixture. That striving for parenthood in all its messy glory has led to some self-censorship, some dismissal of the struggle. Because I am so lucky to have H. Because I am so heartbroken not to have Lorenzo. When I am up in the night, I am grateful to be sharing the darkness with a breathing child. When I am treating my infection, I power through because good God, how fortunate I am to be breastfeeding at all. This restriction and constant reframing is not unique to parenting after loss.

The ultimate reframe? These struggles are nowhere near the struggle we would have faced. Our child’s chest is not being cut open. His severely malformed heart is not being put on bypass. His brain is not being deprived of oxygen. I am so starkly aware of this contrast that it has been hard to acknowledge how rundown I am here in this “normal” parenthood. That help would, well, help.

Because we do anything for our children, we sacrifice elsewhere. We miss the family gatherings and side-trips around our new home. We stay close instead. I take every test in the book and the doctors don’t find an underlying cause. Mystified, they send me home with something slightly different to try. But I have accepted that it is a constellation of factors that likely won’t change until the milk is gone.

So, why don’t I wean? I need to, but H. no longer accepts bottles since breastfeeding was advised over pumping, which I had been doing too much of in an effort to outrun the infection. She won’t take a cup. She hasn’t taken readily to solids. She explores and is coming along, but not in a way that is nutritious on its own. So we are at the center of a perfect little storm. My milk is what she needs most and I need least, but until we get a few more bridges in place, we can’t break the cycle. We have tried everything and are working with professionals. Incremental progress is being made. I also see how strong-willed this walking, talking one-year-old is. There are no magic tricks to pull. Had I weaned six months ago, forgoing my own will to nurse for the full year the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends for breastfeeding, how differently the rest might have gone. But we don’t get to go back even if we feel like we are walking in circles. We make the best move we can according to the facts we have at the present moment. That is the crux of decision.

Right now, only a matter of hours can go by before one of us is in physical need of the other. That is at once a beautiful and frightful connection. What is more primal than the means to survive, to nourish our children and ourselves? And what would happen if I couldn’t get to her? When the emotion builds, it helps to remember that “one of the common myths about eating is that it is easy and instinctive. Eating is actually the most complex physical task humans engage in… Just swallowing, for example, requires the coordination of 26 muscles and six cranial nerves.” (“Feeding Strategies for Older Infants and Toddlers,” by Kay Toomey, PhD.) Our body prioritizes its importance third, behind breathing and balance. We all have to learn how to do it. As with anything learned, we go at our own pace. And we may protest.

What all this comes down to is permission. Permission to ask for help, to acknowledge where things are hard and where they are beautiful. I see the same mix in that photo of my friend’s daughter—face in playful defiance, body crouched as if she is ready to bound into the air, free tendrils of hair harnessing a similar energy. She is flanked by two poised ballerinas, but she is the one you can’t take your eyes off of—her wildness seems like a green shoot of power that may take her much farther than the obedience required of ballet class, farther than her parents imagined as they struggle with and cherish these longs days, but short years of parenthood, as the saying goes.

None of us know ahead of time just how our hardships shape or prepare us. We take one step at a time, unaware if we are painting ourselves into a corner or if the picture we end up with will set us free.