Last week I bounced The Kid out of one of his regular therapies to try something new–another kind of therapy. A friend who knows TK had told me about an Outward-Bound-type afternoon camp for kids with challenges/gifts like spectrum disorders, anxiety, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. I thought the camp sounded great (for me, too, though there was an age limit), and I got a hall pass from his Tuesday therapist to try it. So I left Little Brother with a sitter and headed west with TK.

Google Maps failed me. I struggled to find the street number of the church whose playground was the meeting point. We passed a school, then an unmarked building beside it. I cruised that parking lot no fewer than a half dozen times, which was unfortunate because (a) it was not the destination, and (b) the school next door had a playground, natch, and it was in plain view of TK’s searching eyes. Within five minutes we were both crying: he from the certainty that I was keeping him from the right playground, and I from the uncertainty that I wasn’t. Either way, our twin anxieties reached a fever pitch right there in the car, his urgent pleas stoking my frustration, my expletive-laden anger barely kept under my breath, our begging each other to just look. Or listen. Or go. Or wait. It felt like hell. And this was a few hours after I’d gone to the ophthalmologist and found that I’d been wearing the wrong prescription for a year.

I finally stopped and asked a traffic cop if he knew what I was looking for. He pointed me in the right direction, and we landed in a spot about fifty yards further than I’d driven–just past the traffic light where I’d turned around twice, fearful of going too far. I parked and turned around to TK. “I’m sorry it took me so long to find the right place,” I told him. He looked back at me, his tears drying. “Mommy went the wrong way,” he responded solemnly. “Yes I did,” I replied. “And I got frustrated.”

For the next thirty minutes, he played and climbed and ran and occasionally circled back to me to recap: “Mommy couldn’t find it. Went the wrong way.” It was funny the first few times. Then over the next week, I heard it more: “Mommy couldn’t find the playground. Went the wrong way. Mommy got frustrated.” We watched an episode of Daniel Tiger, who happened to also be frustrated and sang a song about it that I can’t get out of my damn head. I grew weary of the refrain: my frustration, my propensity to be lost, my wrongness. It began to sound less like an observation than an indictment. Not that I’m defensive or anything.

I seem to keep getting reminders that I’m looking in the wrong place, listening to the wrong voice. Two weeks after the rest of my family, I got a stomach virus last week that knocked me flat for twenty-four hours. All the plans I had flew out the window and I could no longer look around at all I had to do but only stare straight ahead. At my TV, which played The Hunger Games. Which was kind of awesome, interrupting sprints to the bathroom aside, because who gets to watch movies on a Sunday afternoon anymore?! Then there’s my phone, whose camera I broke during an ill-advised temper tantrum; I happened to throw the phone indiscriminately across the room and it happened to perfectly hit a steel drawer handle, which broke into pieces as my phone’s screen cracked into about fifty fissures. Now my camera won’t cooperate for photos unless I flip the screen into selfie mode. There’s a metaphor here, I just know it.

Little Brother turned two last week and we flipped him around too, his carseat now front-facing, and the once-reliable mid-morning nap afforded by our errand-running disappeared for a couple of days: I would glance at him in the rearview mirror and see him staring around, saucer-eyed, in wonder at this new view. And then there’s TK, whose teacher told me that he has been protective of one of the smaller guys in his class, a boy in a wheelchair. When he requires extra assistance to get out of the chair or be pushed down the hall, TK will come alongside him and “supervise” the teachers’ assistance or walk beside both boy and teacher in the hallway. When I asked TK later that day about his friend and what he likes about him, he told me, “He rides a motorcycle.”

In moments like these my eyes overflow by the beauty of all that I’ve seen so dimly, so wrongly, or allowed to remain unseen altogether. TK looks at a wheelchair and sees a motorcycle, and I want my vision changed to match his now.

A Thursday morning, and I’m doing laps at the pool when I see a woman at the other end sitting on the edge of my lane. I paddle back from my end toward her so that she’ll know this one is occupied and move along. When I reach the end, she’s smiling down at me. “Oh! I didn’t even see you!”

I took it a little personally. It’s hard not to when you’re the sole woman in a house of males, the mother of two young boys: the frustration over not being listened to, or of being seen primarily as an object to be climbed upon. My fellow swimmer was playing into one of my biggest complaints and, I suspect, one of my deepest hurts: feeling invisible. I smiled thinly and headed back toward the opposite end, the water enveloping me, and there in the waves I’d generated I heard a voice speak into the place that is deeper than sound: “I see you. I see you.” It took my breath away and gave me new life, like it always does, this never-not-surprising reminder that I am seen and loved and not forgotten; that this being seen changes everything. It changes my 3 am-anxiety attacks about moving to Australia; it changes my worries for my children; it changes my marriage; it changes my drive to the damn grocery store. It changes everything, because it means that the truest thing about me is not that I look at my phone too much or that I have an unruly temper or that I miss so much. It swallows all that up because it means that the truest thing about me is how loved I am, how held and protected and seen.