“Nothing’s gonna change my world.”

Tuesday marked the six-year anniversary of my departure from New York. That afternoon, The Husband and I boarded a flight that lifted us off the city concrete and dropped us into a new life. A suburban, family life. The anniversary of that day–that ending and beginning–is freighted, as so much of life is, with ambivalence. “In New York you can be a new man,” sings the cast of Hamilton, and if the tune had existed then, I would have marched along Manhattan’s streets belting it out in my head. The city was, for me, my own personal Reconstruction period: after coming off several years of what felt like decimation and dismemberment, years full of daily trouble, I landed in a place where I learned that trouble doesn’t just have to undo; it can also remake. It can be a preface, not a punishment. So when we stepped aboard that plane, I and the man who had been first my friend, then my fiancé, and now my husband, we headed toward what I thought was our happy ending. I had learned all the hard lessons! I had a ring! My uterus was move-in ready!

I didn’t know that you can be undone more than once.

Last weekend TH and I flew to St. Louis to watch one of our New York friends get married. We missed our flight, which was new for both of us. (Thanks, TSA!) On standby, we missed the next flight too, finally boarding a plane that landed us four hours later than our original plan. Our flight, late and unintended as it was, was aboard an aircraft with screens at each seat, so I was able to watch the first half of Brooklyn. At one pivotal moment, the main character was approved for entry to the US and stepped through a doorway into the light. She glanced back at the immigration queue she’d just navigated and all that lay behind it: her old life in Ireland. Then she stepped forward into the light of her new life.

I wish I were that graceful about it. Usually I’m having to be pulled, kicking and screaming, by Security (Security is my pet name for Jesus).

St. Louis was another first for TH and me. When I visit a city, I worry about two things (among a hundred): terrorism, and that the alcohol will run out. Happily, neither worry proved valid. True to form, we eschewed the touristy stuff (an arch that sways in the wind? NO THANKS!) for our stuff: late-night room service dessert and refueling of our introvert tanks after a cocktail party. Time at the hotel gym. And, notably, a full movie. In a theater. WITH POPCORN. It turned out that the theater was a charming local franchise with an organ player who played tunes before the movie started, and after we watched Captain America and Iron Man duke it out, we exited to find an usher waiting with a tray of mints. Then TH touched a screen and a magical car materialized to take us back to our hotel (yes, it was my first time using Uber). Yay for new things!

Would that all new experiences were so delightful. Now my move-in-ready uterus is blocked by tied tubes and has expelled two human beings. The first one, The Kid, has challenged every plan I made, rule I set, and book I read. He has undone me, and the harder I fought it, the more it cut me. Now I watch as the wheels of his not-playing-by-the-rules brain turn and I’m finally allowed glimpses of the beauty of what was once so terrifying, so destabilizing, so upsetting to my sense of order. Five months ago, he wouldn’t utter a word. Now he talks to me from the backseat, and I repeat what I think I hear–“Wow!”–and glance back at him for confirmation. He stares at me, practically rolling his eyes, then–slowly and intentionally, as if I need some extra help, he E-NUN-CI-ATES: “WIIIIILLLL,” he repeats, pointing to his brother’s empty carseat. As in, “You dumbass. Where’s my brother?”

Of course, lately he refers to Little Brother mostly as “Uh Oh Will,” because here’s a new thing too: LB seems to have been designed with the factory settings laid out in all those books I tossed into the trash, and where TK was cautious and obedient, his younger sibling is a fucking HURRICANE. “He’s so cute!” people tell me as he grins coquettishly at them, burying his head in my neck full of scratches that HE put there the last time I made him do something he didn’t want to, like nap. He bolts for the street so often we are relegated to the backyard, and TK casts an aggrieved glance toward the gate, looks back at me and moans, “Front yard?” “We can’t,” I tell him. “Because your brother’s an ass,” I want to add, even as the little twister runs his chubby legs straight into me and bursts my heart with his double-sided cuteness: salty and sweet, fiery and snuggly.

We returned from our trip this past Sunday just in time to meet The Mom and Dad in a parking deck and transfer the boys to our arms. Then we carried their grinning faces into our church, which we joined this week after a year of attending, and befriending, and learning. And as our friend preached his sermon, I couldn’t believe that he mentioned something that wasn’t new, something TH and I had heard when we first moved here and were church-hunting and failing at it. That sermon had included an illustration of a backpack. It was a how-to lecture, really, like so many sermons are, and it was weighed down with rules. With the Law. With shoulds. But on this day, in this new church that no longer is, we heard grace. We heard him talk of backpacks weighing us down, and a grace that takes them away because it is finished, and I nudged TH: “Full circle.” He knew, because it’s become a sort of code for us–“backpack”–the endowment of rules without good news, of weight without glory, of Old without New.

And as I felt weight being lifted off of me, the words all carrying truth I’ve heard before that is somehow brand new every time–like the wine and bread–I felt familiar old worries sink in. Like the coming summer, and the fact that we don’t have every day planned out. Then that familiar old voice whispered something new yet eternal into my heart: a truth. What will I do? I was asking myself, as I heard the answer: Just enjoy them. And in a heartbeat, what would have once been an imperative, a rule to follow, an obligation I would never fulfill…it became the unlocking of a doorway into something new. Freedom. Not you HAVE to enjoy them, but you CAN. “Now it springs up, do you not perceive it?” the prophet wrote. “I am doing a new thing.” The future echoed, truth making all things new, and all undoings re-makings.