I feel like I keep telling the same story.

I’m not the only one–Hollywood seems to share my “problem.” Reboots upon reboots, sequel after sequel. Have we run out of tales to tell?

The Husband and I saw a movie at the theater this weekend–a momentous occasion of late, especially considering that we went at night, a time typically only populated by my bath and bed. But Saturday, at the ungodly hour of eight pm, we found ourselves–after two glorious wine flights each–in leather recliners watching 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Talk about retelling the same story, except…not? TH and I saw Cloverfield when it came out in 2008, back when the theater was a block away and there weren’t two small people blocking our path to it. We watched from New York as New York filled the screen–a tumbling, broken, cracked-open New York assaulted by aliens. 10 Cloverfield Lane tells the same story from a much different vantage point, and at another point in time during that event. I listened recently to a podcast interview with the director of Cloverfield and the producer of 10, JJ Abrams, who alluded to the idea that the goal is to create a bunch of films set in this same universe–this alien-invasion story that’s really about human beings. And I’m drawn to the idea of the same story being told over and over, somehow without repetition because the characters’ perspectives make the retellings worthy.

I keep telling the same story, but not.

Every year, we celebrate a birth, a death, a resurrection. Every year, I walk The Kid through the doors of the children’s hospital and hold him still as they struggle to find a vein, then place him inside a machine that will map his brain and spine. We’ll do it again next week. It’s starting to feel repetitive–except there are differences.

This year, The Niece went to TK’s preschool class with him at church. When The Sis went to get her, TK ran up and hugged her. That didn’t happen last year. Last year, we weren’t even at church.

This year, our friends read Scripture and preached the sermon and fed us lunch afterward. That didn’t happen last year–we didn’t even know them then.

This year, I sat in a women’s Bible study–I usually hate those!–with a group of people who asked where Little Brother would be during the MRI. And when I told them, they all volunteered to keep him so that TH could go with me and TK.

This year, LB’s not the only one saying “mama” and “dada.” This year, at that lunch, TK climbed up and down the ladder of the play structure, while I hovered nearby then realized he had this nailed all by himself. So this year, I poured myself a mimosa and watched him go.

This year, the resurrection means more than ever. Next year it will mean even more.

This year I’m feeling things more deeply, the evening of Easter feeling almost like the evening of Christmas, that post-holiday slump filling the emptiness after celebration. This year, I know more than ever that the joy and pain aren’t separate but are, as Nouwen writes, “more alike than they are different.”

This year is the same, but different.

This year, TK is into locations and directions: knowing his left and right, recognizing after one trip the route to a place (and we take the same route to a lot of the same places), protesting when I change a turn or omit a step. This year, he likes to say it over and over: “Daddy up. Mommy down,” as TH gets ready for work upstairs and the boys and I sit at the breakfast table. This year, he says, “Daddy work. Mommy home,” and I think, Oh buddy–that’s a loaded idea. Then he grins at me, because it’s the stuff he’s always known but now he knows how to tell it. And I tell it too, seemingly over and over, this story of his that I won’t allow to be told by default, not by brain maps or radiology reports or IEPs or diagnoses but by the little changes that occur over time, this unspooling of a life lived every day, maps on hearts.

I understand his obsession with locations and directions. I want to know too, all the time, where this is going. Where we’re headed. Then the cross’s shadow hits me, in a different spot this year but somehow always reachable by it, and I drink the wine and eat the bread and I realize that I already do know where we’re headed. That I can tell the same story over and over and it not be the same because grace refuses to be predictable. these deaths and resurrections constant but always different, somehow all telling the same story but the life they bring, it’s always new.