Last week I loaded my phone with podcasts, peed as much as I could at home, and jumped into the car, backing out of the driveway while The Kid waved through his window and I waved back through mine. I headed west on I-20 and a few hours later had arrived, in a homecoming of sorts, on my counselor’s couch.

The last time I was here, TK was five months old and I was ravaged by his first few months: exhausted, intensely ambivalent, recovering from being split open in every possible way. After lying on the operating table, after months of lying on the doctor’s table, you’d think an hour of talking would be easy, comparatively. But opening my mouth? That’s another matter entirely, surpassing even the stirrups in its induction of unwelcome yet entirely chosen vulnerability. This visit, I pushed aside my typical nerves, my internal script-writing, the sweat gathering under my arms, and opened up.

I’ll leave most of it there, except to say that in the last few months I’ve convinced myself that my superpower is “causing symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder”, and that the hour was filled with tears and laughter and truth and stories. Time well spent. Its sense of homecoming lay in the hours I’d spent there before, hours that were drenched in despair, in posturing, in seeking. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes,” Mary Karr said, and I felt the poetry of my life echoing off the walls here: the growing up in Alabama, the returning South five years ago, the asylum I received on a tiny northeastern island in between. That history had been spoken here, even brokered to a degree, that afternoon of my last scheduled visit before leaving for New York, when I crumbled and said I was too afraid to go and was talked gently off that ledge–not onto the solid ground of familiar, but into the free-fall that became the life I was meant for. The life of faith, based not on maps but grace.

We ended the session with a moment of recognition, as travelers, of the beauty that shows up as gift, the passage and sands of time layering above it, disguising it within mundanity and routine until grace updates our prescription and corrects our lenses and we really see. And it took me back to the hour before my appointment, when I checked the map on my phone before realizing I didn’t need it, that although years had passed and homes had relocated, I knew by heart the way to the garden.

The garden. Where I had spent other hours drenched in despair, in praying and seeking. Where I had hiked through woods without a plan, without an endpoint, just hoping I would know when I got to the right spot–an endeavor I was so afraid to attempt in real life. I had seven minutes to wander today before being counseled, and I followed the old familiar trails, peeked into the rose garden, filled my lungs with the rain-soaked air. Thought about how I used to tour gardens as a visitor, and how now I tend them as a mother.

The light fell through the trees in uneven patches, as it often does. I found my way back to the main path, headed toward the entrance that is also an exit, the sidewalk where I had heard it five years ago, the voice whispering spirit to spirit: “Your heart is bigger than you think and stronger than you know.” I had had no idea what lay ahead. Today, I remembered the voice without hearing it. A fluttering sounded behind me, though, as if I was being followed. I turned and saw a leaf skittering along the ground, bounced about by a whisper of wind. Never alone.

Hours and podcasts and traffic later, I pulled into the driveway and waved through my window as TK waved through his. Returned to each other. He met me at the door, grinning. He’s giving out hugs and laughter now, farts especially setting him off, and who knew about the holiness in even that kind of wind? God in gas, and don’t for a second tell me He’s above it, because these moments are the best kind of beautiful, when TK whips his head around at the sound and pokes his butt out to push himself. My God laughs WITH us. Later we play in the front yard by the rose bush, where a butterfly has alighted on a leaf, and TK stares when I point it out–the boy an echo of the mother who gazed at the roses hours and years earlier. He asks us what everything is, and at the end of the day the asking takes on an urgent and prolonged whine and I grit my teeth even in the face of blessing, because I know that this is him being delivered to us, being uncovered and revealed. And I know, also, the irony in having to narrate everything for him, this lifelong discomfort I have with opening my mouth and keeping the words flowing out of it rather than a keyboard, and how grace has a sense of humor but also a deep kindness because this naming everything is making me really see everything.

The naming and the writing and the remembering, they make all the words and history echo through time, and there is a balance between calling a spade a spade and recognizing that where you’re standing is holy ground. Sometimes the words themselves are the spades that break up that ground, opening it up for something new to be realized down the path, where the light breaks through–in uneven patches–but still breaks through into a beautiful later, when the echoes reveal themselves not as interruptions but as the sounds of us all being made.