The Kid loves puzzles. His favorite toy at speech therapy is an animal puzzle that makes noises when the pieces are fitted into their correct spots. Moo! Quack! Meow! And TK grins, turns the puzzle over, and starts again.

Last week, inspired, I picked up a similar puzzle for him at Target: a transportation-themed one with pieces including a motorcycle, a train, a sports car. I brought it home and turned it over on the floor in front of TK. He watched as I placed an ambulance into its proper position; blaring sirens rang out immediately. I was so excited, and not a little pleased with myself.

He bolted from the room.

There is a part of me that will never cease in its quest for perfection: perfect home, perfect dinner, perfect wife, perfect mother. I’ve identified this quality, called it out and shamed it. But it creeps in anyway, accessing some back door of my ego, an insecure lock not screwed into grace tightly enough. This need for perfection makes everything personal.

TK ran from my perfect gift and I was all, What the HELL?

When I told people, eight years ago, that I was moving to New York, I heard the word brave a lot. It’s actually pronounced ‘desperate’,  I thought in response, but accepted the compliment because brave was one word I never felt described by.

And now, with a wall in our kitchen taken up by a calendar full of appointments and a dozen CHOA specialists’ cards, I think about what it means to be brave. I’ve always secretly discounted it, writing it off as one of those Disney-themed qualities when trust and faith seemed more admirable virtues. Doesn’t brave just mean you don’t want to do something but have to anyway?

Then, over the past few days, I’ve watched TK slowly approach his new puzzle, steps closer each day, inching toward the pieces and gently running his fingers over them, then backing away. And I think there may be something to this brave thing.

My friend emailed me last week, after a late-night urgent care visit rendered a diagnosis that left her unsettled. Sometimes the bravest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask for more when you’re a people-pleaser who doesn’t want to rock the boat. I know, deeply, how it feels to let things go because you don’t want to be given that look or cause a scene. And now I know how it feels to not have that luxury because it’s not just about you anymore. “I think we’re being called to a new kind of brave,” I wrote her, and as the words appeared on my screen I knew their origin and it was not my head. Grace often lights candles first, a steady flame flickering just before it is set ablaze to illuminate everything.

I thought about my return to decade-old textbooks, my scrawled notes and bookmarked sites and the frenetic urgency of someone trying to figure things out, get this situation–his neck–taken care of, put behind us. I’m like all fingers-through-hair and wild eyes. Meanwhile, TK laughs and runs and approaches the pieces.

I read about Hannah pleading for a son and then promising him right out of her hands and into the only ones that could save him, could tell his story perfectly. I read old words like they are new, because they’re now about him, about being knit together just so. And in finale, I read, simply, this:

Joy is the way to live bravest of all.

And I realize that brave is not to be discredited, but rethought.

Fixing things may or may not be an option, but this neck will always be a part of his story, and for right now it remains un-figured-out. I sit with him on my lap and Dr. Seuss on his, my left arm propped on his shoulder to prop up his head, always, and I’m positioning myself to get it right when his tiny hand grabs mine and pulls it toward his belly. He wants it to rest there, holding him. I wonder who else wants me to rest, to be held.

I begin to see this tilt in a whole new light, candle flickering to flame, and I notice how he peers at everything; the inquisitiveness that marks his personality and the bone that tilts his head, and maybe it’s time to stop being frantic and start inching toward it, embracing it.

When I do, I notice the resemblance: a mother who looks askance at the world, her son with his own oblique pattern. I am not a perfect mother, but if you want to get all Good Will Hunting-meets-grace about it, I am the perfect mother for him.

What if I call this good, if I love this time for what it is rather than what it isn’t yet, if I stop trying to race to the next part and accept now for the feast it is, with its mismatched placemats and chipped china and broken glory? I watch as he approaches the puzzle a hundredth time, grin playing on his lips. Smiling at nothing? Smiling at everything. “Count it all joy,” wrote another James I know. His hand grazes the piece, head tilted and gaze fixed ahead, and I love it, how perfect the whole thing is.

These bruises make for better conversation…we all got bruises.

My child is turning into a two-year-old.

#sweetboy #preciousbaby #blessed #HOLYSHIT

There seems to be a force taking over his personality, and even though he isn’t speaking yet, that force finds plenty of opportunity to rear its ugly head. Last week I clipped The Kid’s fingernails and he sat quietly, watching me, with a beatific smile as angels fluttered their wings nearby and sunlight lit our faces with a heavenly glow. This week I had to hold him down as he kicked and screamed and I prayed not to draw blood. He seems to have more direction than I do, forging ahead on a path only he sees, attacking a to do list filled with items like Bang wine glasses three times and Kick puzzle piece in a circle. There! DONE.

I remember my days in the city, when New York refused to let me live on autopilot, forcing a constant vigilance with its unpredictability.

New York has been replaced by a toddler.

I picked The Kid up at school last week and it was one of the days when he saw me and his grin lit up the room as he sprinted into my arms. One of the good days. He gave his characteristic grunt of excitement, the one that demands a grunt in kind as response, and as I did respond I was delighted to hear the rest of the class chime in. A real trendsetter, that TK. He’s starting his own language.

Then one of his “friends” (they insist on calling all the kids friends even though there are some that will likely be incarcerated soon so no thanks, you will not be invited to our birthday party) came up behind TK to give him a drunk toddler bear hug and they were both knocked off-balance but it was TK who took the brunt of the fall, hitting a bookcase with his face on the way down and narrowly missing his eyeball. A few hours later he had a puffy, bruised eye and a red scrape along the side of his cheek. And I remembered with regret all the times I saw a toddler with a similar bruise and glanced askance at its owner, silently wondering…abuse?

This was two days after his Botox injections, a three-hour ordeal that involved thirty seconds of actual procedure, which meant that The Husband and TK and I survived the bulk of a morning in a small room with only each other and books for entertainment and we didn’t kill each other. Again, I find New York replaced, for if you can make it there–and by there I mean a Children’s Hospital exam room–you can make it anywhere. But the injections were administered and now we wait for them to take effect and we watch to see if they will succeed in correcting his head tilt. I study him constantly, hoping for a dramatic change but looking for even a tiny one, as he continues to navigate life with the stumbling steps of a toddler plus a few challenges thrown in. He is all toddler, all boy, scraped knees and bruised face and mood swings and unfounded opinions, and the exhaustion of sleepless newborn nights is replaced by the exhaustion of following his steps and fighting his fire with mine. (Spoiler alert: I carry a blowtorch.) I know that this stage of life, this fall season, is about learning to get back up more than it is about avoiding going down, but when you’re a parent every cut and bruise is echoed onto your own heart anyway.

I want to prevent every tumble and heal every scrape and just fix this neck thing but I know that he deserves better than that. He deserves the fullness of the life he was meant for, all the twists and turns and ups and downs that will make him exactly who he was meant to be. I know that the signature of love is on his soul and every other part of him, yes, even his neck. I know that the hands that still bore scars after resurrection so that the doubters could see do not dole out accidents; they only give grace. And so, even as we research and deliberate and wait, I know that this storyline will go just as it was meant to and that there is divine beauty–and rest–in that.

I would love to fix it all for you…

Please don’t fix a thing whatever you do.

After the open-heart-surgery-sans-anesthesia that was the fingernail clipping episode this morning, I tossed TK into his stroller and we circled the neighborhood. I listened to music with one ear and him with the other, and at one point I looked down at him and he grinned up at me. The angels fluttered; the light glowed. My brain automatically acknowledged his lips’ turned corners as a smile even though it was upside-down. My heart, with grace, is slowly learning to do the same.

*the first up

My grandmother is the one who told me that salt water cures everything. This week at the beach, our first as a family, will be divided into the time before and after her funeral.

I spent the summers of my childhood on this shoreline, and after growing up over a half-decade in New York City that spanned my late twenties and early thirties, I was married here. I have spent my life waiting and hoping for this trip: The Husband and The Kid and I gazing out at the Gulf that rocked and cradled me, that stung me and knocked me down, that lapped at my feet and chased me back to shore. Though the city is more of a reflection of my inner life–the buzzing and frenetic activity, the constant on-ness of a never-quiet Type A mind and its internal narration–the beach is a reflection of the life I want, the life that my faith promises is possible: the reliability of waves that sometimes roll, sometimes crash, but always show up, their rhythm ceaseless and steady.

The last of my grandparents is gone as my young family is beginning. The end of my grandmother’s life was marked by vanishing memory, physical pain, and a slow disappearance of the woman we knew. Salt water doesn’t cure everything.

Tomorrow, The Sis and I will drive three hours to our hometown for a graveside service, then we will drive three hours back to our families–our home. We’ll head back to the shoreline that TK is beginning to love–his fingers busily scraping sand, his toes dipping into salt water, his laughter accompanying the churning waves. My inner control freak has brought my city-mindedness to the shore: sunscreen-applying, hat placing, shadow-casting. I am a buzz of activity, propelled by worries of skin cancer and drowning, and fear is something that can be passed down a family line–but I want to face it now. Misunderstanding and conflict can characterize a family and divide it, and it’s easy to forget who taught you to ride waves when your inner critic is the loudest voice, when that fear takes the wheel, when all you can think about is what you want to avoid for your child. There are no perfect families, only those that pretend to be. Each family is broken in its own way, and there are varying levels of admission of that fact. Every person is broken in his own way, and many of those people are parents.

My family of three walks along the beach and I think about the last beach trip with my grandmother, another trio on the shore consisting of her, The Mom and me. I was more someone’s child then, and now I’m more someone’s mother. I’ll teach my son to ride waves, and I’ll teach him that sunscreen is non-negotiable. I’ll teach him that there are worse things than being imperfect–surely there will be opportunities to lead by example on that. I’ll teach him that families have ups and downs and sometimes it’s more important to say what needs to be said than to pretend everything is okay. Hopefully we will end most days with laughter and most summers with salt water. Maybe I’ll end up on the right side between casting a shadow and providing shade. 

Later in the day, TK plays with TH on the sand and I watch from the water. The Niece races toward me, squealing in glee. “Want to learn how to ride the waves?” I ask her, and show her how to bury your head right into the crest. She laughs but prefers to let her dad lift her above the breakers–that’s how she’ll ride for now. There will be plenty of time to plant her feet in the ground and feel the swells rush over her. I turn toward the water’s spray, everyone I love within feet of me, and think about the waves that brought me here, to this shore–waves of people on city streets and water in salty oceans in which I have existed. And though there have been times when the rush of sea and shadows of clouds and brightness of sunshine have felt like enemies, I know that they are where life is–that because of grace, every moment and imperfection and crash can lead me home rather than do me in. That, like TK and The Niece, I am always someone’s child, and there has never been a time when I was not held, when I was not headed home.

The Husband and I returned yesterday from a weekend full of fits and starts. We flew northeast for his friend’s wedding, and the trip kicked off with a 72-mile trip that took three and a half hours. As we drove from New York to Connecticut, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, willing myself not to puke all over our rented Impala or the highways of Stamford and New Haven. When we arrived at our predestined Holiday Inn Express, I’ve never been happier to set my feet down on steaming black asphalt.

Car trips and I do not mix. Neither do traffic and I, or uncertainty and I, or waiting and I, or lack-of-control and I. I am the oil to this complications-filled world’s water. What can ever be done?

The heat wave that has been plaguing the Northeast was just beginning to lift, but the lift was slow and we spent most of the weekend in varying stages of discomfort, sweat a constant companion. Only among privileged first-world citizens would such problems even be noticed, but we made the best of it like the troupers we are, pausing to appreciate both the Atlantic horizon and the crack-shaped pants-sweat of the guy in front of us at the airport. I mingled and laughed as a hot breeze blew in from the yacht club’s harbor, my feet aching in high heels. I guzzled cold drinks from fine stemware even as perspiration threatened my foundation’s matte finish. TH and I threw our belongings back into our bags as the luxury hotel relocated us to an upgraded room with working air conditioning. We sat on chairs in the sky, smiling though delayed. We put up with this kind of stuff all weekend long, and I for one didn’t complain once.

Right.

From the dead center of a “difficult” situation, it’s so much easier to focus on the sweat trickling through crevices than to see the ways in which I am kept, held, provided for. There were so many moments of uncertainty: will we ever get out of this traffic? Will we ever get off this bus and to the party? Will this plane ever take off and, if it does, will it land in time for us to pick The Kid up from daycare before they call Child Services?

Will the test results be good? Will I ever have a child? Will the remission last? Will this marriage work out? Will I keep my job?

The questions bombarded me as all around, answers abounded dressed as mundane moments. Blessings masquerading as the ordinary. The cupcakes consumed overlooking Rock Center; the lilting accents of foreign friends who use words like cinema and lovely and remind me of how beautiful language can be. The memories shared over patio tables and bottles of wine and knowing smiles as new ones are made. The news of a baby boy as I head toward my own, who drops his treasured puzzle piece when he sees us and comes running. The vows taken that remind us of ours, three years and forever old, and the foundation upon which they were made. That foundation, which remains regardless of delays and weather and my own ill temper. At any given moment, it seems there are more questions than answers. And yet I sit here in our home, one man at his office and one boy on his cot, and I know that even though some days it feels that all I’m armed with is hand sanitizer and good intentions, I have so much more.

TH rented our car from a one-off shop in Queens that an online customer reviewed as “sketchy, but it all worked out in the end.” Kind of like our weekend. Kind of like life. The sun sets one day on the west side of Manhattan and I watch the streets turn golden in its glow; the next I see it peeking through the trees outside TK’s window as we tell him good night. No matter how far we feel from home, we are always there.

I still remember the two-letter grading code I was assigned in dental school: MY, appropriately enough, because I allowed it to define my worth for four years. Every time grades were posted, a cluster of students could be found searching for their scores on a piece of paper with those codes listed. And more often than not, my code screamed, “Mediocre!”

It felt brutal, especially since I spent my earlier years destroying curves in various classes. School was easy; I felt its favor and I reciprocated by allowing it to form the basis of my identity. Numbers and letters consistently told me I was smart, and I comforted myself with the evaluation. Until MY came along, and I had to take ownership of my new place, in the middle of the heap. Stripped of the accolades my performance had always provided, I felt lost.

I’m a lifelong approval addict, and grace is my sober companion.

But no matter how much permission grace gives me to redefine myself based not on what I do, but what has been done by someone else for me, I still have moments when I flail. I lose sight of the lighthouse that has always led me home, and I think my legs and effort will get me there. And they so cannot. Last week, I was asked to give my job more of myself than what we agreed to. I felt the pull in opposing directions: the manager who would owe me, and maybe even like me more, because of the potential sacrifice; the time I would have spent writing and mothering and, to be honest, putting my feet up for a damn second. The Sis called and dismantled what I called a dilemma immediately. “It’s hard to justify turning down the money,” I said. “You already make enough money,” she replied. “You just want to please everyone. Stop.” And just like that, I felt free. Because when what we’re doing is allowing the world to define who we are, there is no such thing as enough and there never will be.

After three decades of black-and-white, performance-based, right-and-wrong living, I found myself living paycheck-to-paycheck on an island full of over-achievers; and because grace has a kickass sense of humor, this is exactly where I learned that it’s not a list of accomplishments or a series of perfections that gives me worth. Now that I’m off-island, I carry the grace revealed to me there as I fulfill roles for which no book or studying can prepare me (believe me, I tried): marriage and motherhood. And rather than three flights up, alone on a fire escape, I find myself in a home with two guys who see the whole of me daily. Which has got to be scary for them, what with the “in-progress” state I’m in, but it’s real. And it means they know me. And all the hidden places that used to lie protected underneath layers of performance are becoming more exposed as I find a love that never lets go. Because they, and my sober companion, aren’t going anywhere.

The Kid’s physical therapist has quite an eye for CT scans, it turns out, which is a good thing because apparently the radiologist who first read the scan did not. So in addition to the cervical vertebral malformation at the top of his neck, we’re now seeing a thoracic one at the bottom. What feels like a curve ball is, I know (and have to tell myself over and over so I keep knowing), the continuation of a pre-planned story and space for more grace to be revealed. So we’ll see another neurosurgeon next week and find out if the plan for him has changed. Meanwhile, he wants to walk everywhere, and just last night I checked on him and found him sleeping with his head turned to the left. I cheered silently and told The Husband triumphantly, because what is “normal” for some is a victory for us. Your C, my A. And I couldn’t help but remember the part in Silver Linings Playbook when the dance has ended and the scores are averaged and Pat and Tiffany jump up and down screaming and the announcer wonders, “Why are they so excited about a five?”

courtesy hypethemovies.wordpress.com

Your five, my ten.

“Everybody’s got issues. That’s what makes us normal,” a coworker said recently, and I loved it, because I don’t know about you but I think “perfect” is pretty boring. So I’ll be right over here, with my eyes darting back and forth and my temper threatening to flare and my sweetness nonexistent, and if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me and we’ll work on it together. TK may be there too, head tilted left as he circles us in a victory lap because every lap is a victory in our book. And at the end of the day we will not be receiving a grade for our performance. We’ll be sitting at a banquet of grace, where disabilities are redefined as strengths and the plot points are not safe, but they are good, and curves are just sections of the path where we see the light more clearly.

The Kid is not speaking yet. Not actual words anyway, because apparently “ooh” doesn’t count. Depending upon whom you ask, this is cause for anything from mild concern to major alarm. But I, a natural and genetically enhanced worrier, am not worried. See, I know a thing or two about late-blooming myself.

When I was growing up, sweet little girls were all the rage. If I wanted to be approved of, talked up, noticed, it would have to be as a sweet girl. I targeted this as the utmost compliment to attain. Which was a problem for me, because an inner turmoil raged between the part of me that wanted to be sweet and the part of me that knew I wasn’t. I felt I was something less, but really? There was more going on than just sweet.

The responses that came naturally to everyone else–the socially acceptable words and actions–seemed fake to me. I could spot a cliche a mile away, could tell when someone was hiding behind politeness. And because my first instinct–to offset the artificial with some realness, to attempt banter rather than small talk, to allow my words the edge they seemed to want to carry–was greeted with wary eyes and misunderstanding smirks the few times I ventured there, I began to hide my real nature underneath quietness. If I couldn’t be sweet, I would just be…there. Quiet and submissive and under the radar.

And so, over the years and underneath the facade, I grew angry.

When I finally felt safe enough to come out of my shell, I came out swinging. My wit donned a meanness that was really just self-defense, but it fell sharp regardless. People tolerated me but didn’t feel safe around me. And I didn’t understand why I vacillated between these two extremes: taciturn and insulting, close-mouthed and uber-sarcastic.

Some of you, at this point, are all “what the hell?” Or heck, probably. Because this is not a familiar language to you. But some of you, you know that undercurrent of anger I’m talking about–the price you pay to keep things hidden. The fear that someone will figure you out for who you really are and stone-cold reject you when they see the ugly truth. For me, it took two years of counseling and a half-decade in New York’s bootcamp of grace to realize that sweet is just not something I will ever be and that there is such beauty in that. In letting go of preconceived ideas about who I should be, in finding out the person I was actually designed to be. In shelving the pretending game.

New York City and grace are hella exfoliants.

I’ll never be the girl whose Pinterest page is the envy of everyone; the girl whose blog references only Bible verses and Christian needlepoint phrases; the girl whose chin is always up and whose grin is always plastered on. My God is just way too big for me to get away with that shit.

No, you will find me as the girl who is struggling not to rage while sitting in traffic. For whom, some days, the closest thing to worship is not complaining about everything. Who loves Jesus, but drinks a little. Who overshares–especially about the ugly parts–on her blog. Who finds the gospel in TV shows and movies and bars where people don’t even realize they’re talking about it, but they are because it is every story ever told and will not fit inside your church’s coffeehouse.

I am the broken, the struggling, the sharp-edged and mistake-making. And for so long, all I did was run from that and wonder why I was so tired. Now I embrace it even as I wait and watch for grace to smooth the edges down just enough, take the uber out of the sarcastic but leave the wit, and suffuse me with not sweetness, but occasionally–if I’m really open to it, especially in the torn places–maybe a little warmth.

So when I say I don’t worry about TK, you can believe I’m not pretending. Oh, I’m sure I’ll worry about plenty, but I know that grace is the balm for that. It always is, for those hidden places where defensiveness and fear would have me lash out or hide or say it doesn’t matter when it does. Because it does matter that TK talks–but when it happens is not so important to me as what he’s going to be saying. And I know that he comes from a father who is full of both kindness and wit and a mother who is…getting there. I know that grace has used some of its most gorgeous wrecking balls–a city, a husband, a son–to take what I was and use it to make me who I’m becoming. Shattered dreams traded for better ones. My narrative embedded in a greater one, the greatest one, spanning history right alongside my thirty-five years.

When TK talks, it will be with the voice he was given in the time that is right. And if we do what we were made to, he will speak the language of grace fluently.

The day before we were to leave, an email popped up on my phone. I snuck away from work and teeth because it was from The Kid’s teacher, and it was a video. My boy was walking.

He’s taken those myriad first unsure steps, the wobbly efforts mired in hesitation and caution. He’s lumbered around the house and backyard with his hand holding our fingers or pushing his toy lawnmower. But this–this was new. This was wobbly, sure, but it was solo and it was confident and it was joyful. I grinned widely there in my hiding place at work, then I played the video for the staff and counted down the minutes until I would witness this miracle firsthand. Sure, kids learn to walk every day. But the road our kid had to getting there was strewn with tests and evaluations and uncertainty. And now, at this particular finish line, our celebration was the sweeter for it.

We had to leave him for the weekend, since The Husband and I were booked on a flight back to the city we left three years ago. It’s a trip we told each other we would make annually, but we all know how that goes when life happens. Still, two years later, we arrived at LaGuardia, this time without a baby on board. And when our cab delivered us to midtown and my feet hit Manhattan soil (which is concrete), TH and I smiled widely at each other. Back to where it all began.

And I do mean ALL. The gifts this city gave me are invaluable: the recovery of a formerly misunderstood faith, reinterpreted by grace. The confidence born of independence, of making it here and thereby making it anywhere. Friendships with future bridesmaids and lifelong confidantes. Oh–and a husband.

We ventured down to the subway, feeling like locals again. In the light rain and cold wind, we gazed up at the new World Trade Tower, finished in time for our arrival. We walked through Tribeca and Soho and to Babbo, where we grabbed unlikely seats at the bar and lingered over an early-bird dinner served by a waitress with an attitude. We met friends old and new and drank too much. We went to brunch at Stanton Social, where I threw up in the sink. Sorry, Stanton Social. We lingered on our hotel’s rooftop pool deck. We sat at the Burger Joint. We walked through our old neighborhoods, and around Gramercy Park and down Irving Place and through the West Village. We woke up for a 9 am movie accompanied by bagels from our old neighborhood shop. We marveled at all that had changed (my old wine bar closed–I guess my patronage meant more to their income than I knew; plus–Citi bikes!) and all that hadn’t (somehow my apartment was going on without me, along with the drycleaner downstairs).

And our last night, before a dinner at Alta, we stepped into the Hunter College auditorium and claimed seats down front, in the area where I stood next to him the night after we became more than friends and wondered what was next. We listened to that old story that never changes, yet somehow always tells us something new–the anthem of grace, spoken in a familiar voice. Home stretched across hundreds of miles.

I have to admit, I was scared to go. My worst-case-scenario brain imagined plane crashes, terrorist activity–you name it. Frederick Buechner said, though, that “you do not solve the mystery–you live the mystery.” And the not knowing is where courage is born; the acts taken in courage are flags of hope planted in what looks like uncertain ground but turns out to be sacred. Sacred enough to become the footprint of a tower rising 1,776 feet high, changing the Manhattan skyline forever, as I gaze at it from a cab window and head toward a boy whose every step is an act of grace and a song of joy.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. –G.K. Chesterton

“Yo, J.C., you takin’ any requests?” asked Daryl Dixon, who had gone from being a one-episode blip to a character poised to earn the hero mantle. Because sometimes the hero is the guy with a dead squirrel in his back pocket and a necklace made of zombie ears. Often the best characters are the messiest, most broken ones. And always, the best path is the one that isn’t predictable or straight.

Friday morning, I began the blood-pressure-raising, sweat-ring-producing task of navigating Atlanta downtown traffic to attend a dental convention. And every part of that is just as fun as it sounds. Meanwhile, The Husband underwent a CAT scan and headed home for a breakfast sandwich. An hour later, inside a hotel ballroom where I was sitting on the floor for a lecture to which I had arrived late, I received TH’s text. He would be undergoing an appendectomy later that day. I headed back to the parking deck and home to shed m’business pants, then to his room in the ER, and we began the process of waiting for surgery. Fifteen months ago, he did the same with me. At the end of that procedure, we had The Kid. At the end of this one, we were minus one appendix but plus one chance to improve my attitude from last week’s “woe is me” response to TH’s basketball injury. That recovery of his took a day. This will be at least a week. Well played, JC.

The lecture I left, apropos of something, was about the effect of dentistry on the spine. Techniques to better manage the load placed on the back when one bends over constantly while staring at tiny objects (insert crass joke here). I’m thankful to be in a marriage that shares the load of daily living; but sometimes–like when your spouse is lying on an operating table, and shortly thereafter–the weight becomes unevenly distributed. “When they said in sickness and in health, I really didn’t see this kind of shit coming,” a friend jokingly told me, and neither TH nor I saw what was coming after I got off the table over a year ago and we carried TK into our well-ordered life. Headed downtown, covered by three navigating systems (car’s GPS, phone’s GPS, and TH on speaker), I doubt I’d have made the trip had I known I’d be turning right back around. It’s a good thing we can’t always see ahead where the road forks.

There are the moments when you’re lost because you haven’t found what you’re meant for yet, like those Sundays spent following the rules when I was growing up, or those years in New York before I met him, or the seconds I wandered the ER hallway with TH once again directing me by phone while I proclaimed, “I WILL find you!” in my best Daniel-Day Lewis voice. And there are the moments when you’re lost because you are waiting for clarity or the results or assurance, like the hour I spent in the waiting room until a kindly doctor in a tie and fedora came out and held my hand in both of his and said it all went perfectly. Or the time tomorrow, when TK will be getting a CAT scan of his own that will provide more material for the biography of his gloriously imperfect neck, and TH and I will pretend to read or check our email or whatever it is you do when what you’re really doing is being reduced to whatever you believe most and crying out for help. There are operations that bring new life out of you and operations that excise what is unnecessary, and the recovery through what is left behind after both takes time and is full of grace.

This time, after this operation, I was the one waiting in the room while he was in recovery, and when they brought him back to me, all I could think was that he looked just like TK did after his surgery. And that who I am now is the person who takes care of both of them, except for the times when I need them to take care of me, and that’s how load-sharing goes in our house. Then I thought about all it took to get me here, to this hospital room late on a Friday night, all the moments of lostness that have been and that are to come; tomorrow, for example. What I’ve learned from my own navigating has only sent me in circles, circles where I’ve felt like an impostor because I was one, holding my head up and putting on a show of perfection and acting all whole, like I was a masterpiece of my own creation. Then came the tripping and falling and looking up and seeing that there was a hand waiting to lead me the whole time, a road I was meant for full of twists and turns and scratchy underbrush, and while I may not carry around dead squirrels yet I sure as hell have plenty of scars from the trip. There’s no perfection on this road, at least not mine, but there is recognition: recognition of something bigger through moments of feeling lost; recognition of a plan that takes my load from me and redeems everything behind me; recognition of people with faces and scars like mine who walk redemption’s messy road with me.

But I’m just gonna let something brand new happen to me.  —Cee Lo Green (yes, I just quoted Cee Lo)

I never wrecked my car in New York City. Not once.

This was, of course, because I had no wheels in New York. But here in Atlanta, I do have a car. And I have rammed it into three things in the two-point-five years I’ve owned it: our garage, a Suburban in a parking deck, and most recently, The Mom’s car. Last week–January 2, to be exact–I began the new year and my first post-holiday day back at work by backing directly into her car as she watched The Kid fifty feet away. Crunch.

I’ve been comparing my current life to my New York life ever since we left, not as an act of regret or even nostalgia so much as an unavoidable study in contrasts: single vs. married, childless vs. parent, city vs. suburb, lean vs. padded, vehicular vs. ambulatory. There was a lot that was easier about my half-decade in the city. You would not have found me, for example, on my hands and knees in the kitchen, picking scraps of meat off the floor while a one-year-old gleefully tossed more of them at my head. You would not have found me comforting said one-year-old at four in the morning as he screamed in reaction to a bad dream. You would more likely have found me running around the Central Park Reservoir on a Tuesday afternoon, or eating a late dinner in the West Village before going out on a Saturday night with girlfriends.

I considered these differences on New Year’s Eve, as The Husband and I drank champagne in front of a Dexter marathon and The Kid slept off his surgery upstairs. I used to celebrate every new year a couple of miles from Times Square, all heels and cold legs and loud laughter. Did I miss it?

There’s that element of mystery that’s gone now: after all, I know who I’ll be with at the end of each night. In my city years, that mystery looked more like uncertainty, and I rarely enjoyed it because I was trying to turn the page and get to the end faster much like TK does now when we read together. I overdid everything in New York–drinking, dating, running in blizzards–and now when I think back on that time I feel the sense of heady unknowing, of excitement born from endings unseen. But then I remember the reality of coming home alone, of wondering whether all my nights would end that way, puking in a sink, and I realize how easy it is to romanticize what was at the expense of what is. Life can be in the past, in the future, or it can be right where you are. TH and I finished the bottle of champagne and fell asleep as firecrackers exploded outside our window on January first. I’m not a part of the fireworks display so often anymore, wrapped as I am in a suburban cocoon minus the street-provided “F-yous” that made me simultaneously weepy and more alive.

I remember the few occasions I crossed the river and saw the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn: a sight impossible to behold from the island itself, within the shadows of skyscrapers. Now I see that skyline in my mind and behold trees and rooftops in reality. TH’s car enters the garage with the familiar sound of the door opening. TK sits on my lap and listens as I read him stories. And this, this is being alive. One day I’ll tell him the one about a boy and girl meeting and falling in love in a city, how the boy proposed on a rooftop on a cold December night, how they told that city goodbye to get on a plane and start a new life that begins with the word Family. The three of us will board our own plane and behold that skyline together. And I’ll know then, as I do now, that I haven’t missed a thing.