I’ve been thinking about New York lately.

Emotional whiplash is natural when the span of a year brings a cross-country move, a wedding, and a pregnancy. In the debris of hoped-for and delivered blessings, my contrarian human nature looks frantically about, like that period of time after a breakup when you aren’t quite healed and are prone to delusions about the relationship you just escaped. New York wasn’t a bad relationship for me, but it was a huge chapter in my life that is now filed in the drawer marked Past. Despite that filing, though, I find the city sneaking up on me in thoughts and dreams, images from that old life contrasting markedly from the present one. I remember wandering aimlessly past Gramercy Park toward Union Square and the West Village; evening happy hours and weekend brunches; Saturday afternoon football viewings and long runs in the park. These memories intersperse themselves throughout my present daily routine: feedings and burpings, farts from the Pack ‘n Play, trying on the Baby Bjorn with him in it; alternating between swing and bouncy seat in search of a soothing mechanism.

I wouldn’t call it a longing for the past or even a direct comparison; after all, one of the reasons I like to revisit that time in my life is because it carries the origins of our story, The Husband’s and mine, and when we’re faced with shit-filled diapers and midnight cries, we need to remember where we came from so we don’t take each other for granted now. Because I knew, even then, that those magical first days of being together and falling in love would–if we were lucky–give way to something else altogether. This is, after all, what happy endings look like: not pop songs and credits rolling, but bleary eyes and loads of laundry. Hollywood skips that part.

The path of least resistance involves looking backward; remaining Here isn’t for the faint-hearted, especially when Here involves a lack of sleep and a hefty dose of suburban mundanity. It’s just so upper-middle-class American of me to hope for a particular outcome my entire life and then nitpick over it when it finally arrives. This kind of security, this abundance of blessings, is what sends so many ungrateful souls into the arms of lesser gods–the idolatry of fancy cars and toys, of extramarital diversions, of mind-numbing television, of bottomless glasses of alcohol: we want more than whatever we have because we fail to see the more in what we do have. Faith trusts that a bigger story than the one we see is forever being told, even through apparent mundanity. Faith always sees the more.

Yesterday, for the first time in nine months, I turned on the faucet in the tub. I brought The Kid upstairs and placed his sleeping form in his bouncy seat in our bedroom, and I submerged myself in the hot water and bubbles. For a moment, I imagined this experience as it was nine months ago, two years ago, a lifetime ago. I guiltily considered my independence then, allowed myself to feel its brand of freedom, and the black-and-white, better vs. worse, right/wrong version of myself demanded comparison.

Then I heard TK coo in his seat from the bedroom, and felt the love flood depths of my heart that never existed prior to Here, prior to him, prior to us. And there was no comparison.

As for TH and me, the moments of laughter and intimacy we shared at trendy restaurants and in bars have been exchanged for what I dared to look at last night: late hours in a nursery, watching him change our son’s diaper and hand him to me for a feeding; staring at TK’s wide, wondering eyes as they survey the scene. Then I turn to TH as he, unasked, pulls up his usual chair and reads beside us, pausing every few minutes to look at us. The new language and moments of intimacy, of life together; the mundanity transformed to More by gratitude, grace, and looking around at Now in wonder.