It’s bittersweet, more sweet than bitter, bitter than sweet. It’s a bittersweet surrender.

When I moved to New York, I would lie in my bed with the window cracked open because I was too cheap to turn on the air-conditioning, and I’d listen to the sounds of the city outside my window. At first it was an onslaught for my ears: yells, laughter, music, the occasional retching from a patron of the bar on the corner (the times that patron wasn’t me). After a few weeks, the city’s sounds became a symphony that lulled me to sleep: brakes squealing and cars honking made me feel less alone as I drifted off to their music. When I’d come home to visit and lie in my childhood bed or in the guest room at The Sis’s, the silence would overwhelm me; the absence of the city actually kept me awake. I was reprogrammed. I had changed.

Now I sleep with earplugs. The only noise that breaks through them are the (all-too often) cries of my own children. I need silence again–I’ve changed back. But not totally…

This past weekend, upon some hardly concealed threats, The Husband booked a hotel room for me and I camped out there Friday night. I spent most of the time lying on the bed, reading and watching TV and trying not to spill wine on the sheets. It was glorious. And it was quiet. Too quiet. I felt assaulted by the silence, by the absence of my children’s laughter before bedtime, by the emptiness without their calls of “Mommy” in the morning. Don’t get me wrong–it was amazing and I’ll do it again in a heartbeat. But it wasn’t everything. And so, on Saturday morning, I pointed the car home and I went back.

I know I will always go back, not because I’m perfect, but because I’m not. Perfection is never leaving in the first place–and let it be clear that I’m not talking about parenting here. Perfection left that building a long time ago, Pinterest boards be damned, and it ain’t coming back, no matter how your kid’s Hollywood-studio-budgeted birthday party turned out. I think the point of our changing and changing back and leaving and coming back is to show what, to show who, never changes and never leaves.

And thank God for that, because it is a weight off my shoulders.

I got The Kid’s OT evaluation emailed to me last week, and it showed the changes: improvement in every single area. A lot of it dramatic. And I watch him climb the play structure at the playground, his anxiety there a thing of the past (even as mine thrives). The road ahead is long, but the one behind is too, and both are brutally beautiful. So much else has changed: I used to narrate our car rides and every other experience, describing all I saw in the desperate hope that he understood and it would unlock his own words. Now? He narrates from the couch, from the toilet, from the elevator, from the backseat, reminding me which way to go, telling me who lives close to where we are and what exit we’re on and how Beth’s house is close to horse riding and, when a car cuts me off, “That driver is CRAZY!” because I said that long ago (might’ve included an adjective ahead of crazy but you don’t know my life) and when we pass the library, whose workings I described to him LAST YEAR, he tells me he wants to go there and get a card. All those months ago, listening? You’re damn right. Understanding? Every single word.

I’ve changed too: I see the world through his eyes now, noting every fire hydrant to either show him later or tell him about now; in Sydney, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning when I spotted a cafe car wash in our new neighbo(u)rhood. There is no earplug that will block out their voices, no distance that can separate us, not even a hotel that can keep me from going back. They have wonderfully ruined everything that used to be just mine, and made it ours.

There is no going back, and when it’s all said and done and I’ve had a night off to rest from it–there’s really no wanting to. There is us now, this messy and glorious reality that holds me within it, and even room service–oh how I love you, room service–can only compete for so long. There is that moment in the pool every week, that becomes moment after moment, of finding the spot to return to that keeps me breathing, keeps me going (mostly) in a straight line, keeps me in my lane. The place, the people I keep coming back to: this is home.

And when I drive back on Saturday morning to the sound of “Bittersweet” that just happened to cue up–the inextricable beauty of the not-so-polar-opposites, this bitter and sweet life–they meet me at the door, TH and Little Brother and TK, who grins and pulls my hand and says it: “Mommy came back.” And I pray that I always will while I know that what matters more is the One who never leaves.