I love it when family members do boneheaded things.  Their mistakes are insurance against my own future goofs, so that the reaction of “I can’t believe you did that!” can be met with my reply of, “Well remember when you…?”

This inclination toward familial schadenfreude is the reason I wasn’t put out when The Sis called last week, out of breath and shivering, asking if I could come let her into her house. She had lost her own key somewhere on Woodstock Road while running, and rather than deal with a frustrated husband, she rang me.  I was putting off my own run and watching $40 a Day on the Travel Channel, in other words excuse-less, so I jumped in the car, laughing my ass off the whole way.  When I arrived thirty minutes later, her face was pink with cold and my canine nephew was barking his head off from inside the house, stuck in between the rock and hard place of lacking verbal ability and opposable thumbs.  I stayed until The Sis thawed out and I had a chance to throw in a few more laughs at her expense–knowing she will do the same the next time my elevator stops short of the top floor.

On the way home, I blasted the music and sang along as only one with windows sealed shut can.  One song ended and was replaced by a noteless tune that I could barely hear.  I looked at the screen and saw the title: “Heartbeat.”  This was the mp3 that The Sis sent me around this time last year, the recording of The Niece’s heartbeat from inside her uterine apartment.  The heartbeat I listened to while sitting in my New York apartment as it played on my computer; the heartbeat that matched my footsteps as I walked the city streets and it traveled through my iPod headphones; the heartbeat that slowed down for seconds that felt like an eternity as I sat by The Sis’s hospital bed, silently freaking out as the nurses approached her room.  The heartbeat that, after a cross-country move and a 180-degree turn of life, I now hear in person, her fat-rolled chest pressed against my cheek as her breath hits my hair and her baby scent fills my nose and her fart blows up her diaper.  And we are a family, growing by the minute and all right next to each other, at home.

Yesterday, The Husband and I joined our new church here in Atlanta.  We stood at the front of the room in our winter clothes and repeated vows, vows that took me back to a moment four-and-a-half years ago.  I stood at the front of a church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on a summer evening, hands pressed against the ill-advised skirt I wore in a lapse of memory that didn’t take into account the old building and its multiple floor vents.  I repeated vows and became a member of Redeemer as a couple of girlfriends sat in a pew near the front and smiled.  I was living paycheck-to-paycheck in a city that challenged me and wore me out and chipped away at my fakery as it revealed who I was made to be.  I was single and tired of looking and it would be over a year before I’d even lay eyes on my future husband.  I was forging a new life in a new home a thousand miles from my old one and I had no idea what lay ahead.

And now…another new home.  An arm around my side.  A life ahead whose outlines I can draw in pencil but whose details remain to be colored in by the only hands capable of doing so, hands that created me and held me and were scarred for me so that I could stand in this room and the one four-and-a-half years ago and look upon family in two locations, family bred not by genes but by the call to belief, by the kinship of a kingdom that echoes throughout time from the mistakes of the past to the glory of the future.  Each new day an arrival, one step closer to home.