Today, I am thankful that love is stronger than a feeling.

No one can adequately describe how hard it is, these first two weeks. And I say two weeks because that’s only as much of it as I know so far. The adjustment to the reality of your heart operating outside your body is a brutal one, filled with worry and questions and a roller-coaster ride of emotions played out moment by moment. The Husband and I have been subsisting on gifts of food and DVD episodes of How I Met Your Mother, and (spoiler alert) yesterday when Marshall’s father bit it, TH turned to me, wide-eyed with concern, the remote in his hand as he prepared to press STOP. I just shook my head and whimpered, “Noooo…..”, glancing at The Kid in his little carrier and feeling the ever-present tears rise to the surface.

But. There are the moments of salvation, the times when TK grips my finger with his tiny hand, the times when TH holds him on his lap and in their faces I read our future and I know our family of three is more than what a fleeting emotion says. And there is the grace and gratitude in knowing I am doing all this with the right man, the only man with whom I can make it out of these first few weeks and all the rest alive. Because through it all, we still love; and even more importantly (or maybe just redundantly), we still laugh. And there are the moments when I have a vision of words that will pour out in their own time, ideas that will play out here, hopefully soon. Then there are the two hours from two days ago, when The Mom babysat and TH forced me gently into the car and we went to Target and hit up Starbucks as we walked around. As usual, he took his time while I felt the urge to rush, and I realized after a few minutes that this was his gift to me, these moments away…just the two of us, living out grace in the diaper aisle.