Downton Abbey ended its six-season run recently, and as the last shot lingered on my TV screen–Highclere Castle in the midnight snow–I felt surprisingly bereft. So I spent the next few days scouring the internet for material that could keep the show alive a bit longer for me, and struck pay dirt by finding a podcast that interviewed cast and crew members. The last interview was with Laura Carmichael, who plays the (mostly) down-on-her-luck Lady Edith, and when asked about how she played Edith’s evolution from the beginning of the series, Carmichael spoke of finding her footing in the character at the beginning, saying, “I felt I could see her sort of pain really and that that was a way in.”

I loved that line–that the pain was her way in. Sorry, did I say loved? I meant lived.

There is a round hole in the wall of our downstairs bathroom that perfectly matches the size of the knob on the back of the door. This, as you might guess, is no coincidence. Recently I was faced with two small children who proved utterly resistant to my instructions, and somehow the doorknob made brutal contact with the wall. Sue me for the damn wall being so weak. Lately, and despite my loving exhortations to do otherwise, The Kid has become fascinated with the hole and has started dropping things into it. I’ll be in the next room with Little Brother and we’ll hear the sound of a pinball darting around its machine, and I’ll echo my refrain to TK: “That’s bye bye for good, then. You put something down there, it’s gone.” He remains undeterred by the proclamation, and I’m starting to think that this defect in the wall, this broken spot, is going to become the repository for all toys smaller than its diameter. That it’s just going to be full to the brim with stuff, though now it seems a bottomless pit. The other day, TK’s music therapist came over just as the pinball sounded, and I found myself confessing the secret to her: “Yeah, so I got mad, and now there’s a hole in the wall and he puts everything in it.” She laughed, and not nervously. I think she understood.

“Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain/And he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain,” writes Lin-Manuel Miranda in “Alexander Hamilton”, the opening song of the musical. It’s not unlike my favorite Kanye lyric (because I’m nothing if not street): “I’m trying to write my wrongs, but it’s funny them same wrongs helped me write these songs.” I wonder what I’d have to write about if my life had gone according to plan, if it didn’t bear the weight of pain, of disappointment and redirection and mistakes and scars. Maybe I’d share more recipes? And TK, who is talking up a storm three months into the venture, I wonder about him as I push the stroller carrying my boys around the neighborhood and the familiar strains of the alphabet song fill the air around us and I can’t help but think that if he’d talked this whole time, if he talked more even now, that he’d sing less. That we’re okay exactly where we are.

We headed to the gym recently on a beautifully warm and sunny day, the kind of day that used to fill Central Park with runners when I lived in New York, clogging the pathways and leaving me needing some alone time after my alone time. And on this day, I showed the ladies in childcare–the ones who have followed TK’s story as he’s lived it, who have cheered and loved and known–I showed them the most recent video, of him spelling all the words The Husband has taught him, their practice sessions bouncing off the wall between the boys’ rooms as I put LB down at night. I watched them as they watched it, as their smiles grew and eyes filled, and I wondered about their stories, where their own scars were–and if those wounds helped them see the video, help them see TK, differently. Their broken places as their way in. I decided to run on the track because sometimes it’s just too sunny outside, you know? Sometimes a melancholic nature can lead down a path more solitary, and that can be okay. And then sometimes your gym friend shows up on the track to tell you that her son was just accepted to multiple colleges with scholarships. I had thought I was done, but we ran for two more miles as she told me our hopeful future and helped usher me into it, somehow hitting on all the worries of the week, all the holes and broken spots, and filling them with words. And as we kept pace with each other, years apart but living such a similar story, I thought about how the broken places start out so filled with pain…then somehow, when you haven’t even been looking, you turn back and realize they’re full of joy. That they were openings, the whole time, leading straight to grace.