On Sunday afternoons, right after I dropped the baby with C, I went to a twelve-step meeting in a vinyl-sided clubhouse across the street from a sprawling cemetery. It was only women. The walls were hung with wooden whales painted with slogans. Feelings aren’t facts. One day at a time. Things I’d heard before. Things that didn’t help, until I woke in the middle of the night and needed them—not as a woman needs wisdom, but as a thirsty person needs water.

In that room, when I described my husband’s anger, my voice got hard and smooth as a shell. When I described the nights my daughter was away, it cracked in two. One piece of me said, It’s unbearable. The other piece said, It’s fine. Both pieces were lying. Nothing was fine, and nothing was unbearable.

The women sitting in that room were a loose net, holding pain but not absorbing it. They’d heard worse. They felt a grace that had nothing to do with getting everything they wanted. It was the grace of surviving things they hadn’t believed they could survive. The grace of one day at a time. The grace of washing stained coffeepots, cracking a bad joke in a dark time, putting one foot in front of another.

Some people called this grace recovery. Some people called it the love of strangers. Some people simply called it God.