Some people have panic attacks; I have New York nostalgia attacks. One hit me yesterday in the Fresh Market parking lot, that bastion of suburban shopping and green groceries, where we go to assuage our guilt over plastic consumption and inadequate recycling, where we seek to be environmentally conscious but also well-parked after driving around in our SUVs for fifteen minutes until we find the closest spot. Or maybe you just go to get good meat. I don’t know.

Anyway, I had just picked The Kid up from “school” (he aced his Trig exam but is having trouble conjugating French verbs; pray for him) and he was sucking his toes in the backseat as I gritted my teeth in the front. In my most measured, faux-friendly voice, I carried on a one-sided dialogue with the citizens around me: the woman parked in the spot beside mine, entering numbers into her circa-1978 checkbook, blocking my path to removing TK from the car (“Ever hear of a debit card?”); the man in his truck with the turn signal on, waiting for her to leave so he can get the front parking space in the ten-seater row (“It would be a shame for you to have to walk that extra thirty feet!”); the mom who’s rolling deep with her squadron of children, blocking the entrance to the store (I don’t like any kids but mine and a few others–and yes, I am a pediatric dentist, which is not a conflict of interest so much as it is an explanation). By the time we made it safely back into the car and a woman in a Tundra sat blissfully ignorant behind me, just gazing around the lot for the next close empty spot, I was boiling over. “This is why Mommy doesn’t like people,” I told TK, who responded by batting at his carrier toys and grinning, and I fantasized about my route home a few years ago: Grand Central, Park Avenue, brownstones, legs and feet.

Despite the flood of humanity pouring onto its streets every day, New York is an easy place to be alone–you’re just surrounded by other people while you’re doing it. But those other people have about as much desire as I did to interact, which is to say none, and that’s the way I approach much of life: solo. It’s easier that way, since I have an idea of how things should go and would rather not watch other people mess them up–and the city is just fine with enabling that short-sighted pride. Being single, as much as I often resented it, was easy for an introvert like me. Then God gently laughed at my plans and moved me to Atlanta with a husband and son. Now, solo doesn’t cut it. We’re an ensemble, and I must learn to coexist in a more raw and real way than can fit onto a bumper sticker. It’s less dinners out and drinks later, more “I want you to WANT to do the dishes!” And the diapers.

Life is easier to control, or delude myself into thinking I control it, when I’m the only one manning the wheel. Now I’ve got one person who depends on me for life and another who depends on me for dinner, and I often delude myself into thinking I’m doing everything by myself. “I’ll just do the everything,” The Husband and I often joke back and forth to each other, as I secretly mean it and count how many bottles I’ve cleaned and diapers I’ve changed. Because love isn’t love if you aren’t keeping track, right?

And I think about how all this awareness of my broken spots, how it would all just be an endless parade of flaws were it not for grace–it would be a hopeless list of the ways I fail every day, except that there’s redemption. Grace always finds me and saves me from the solitude I both crave and fear; even writing has become a group effort lately. And at home? They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but I know that monotony can breed ingratitude–and I struggle against that thanklessness every day, in the midst of a life I dreamed of having. Then, like clockwork, the roses arrive–every Valentine’s Day and birthday. TH’s car lands in the garage every night. TK grins wildly when we approach his crib every morning. And I realize that the reason the flowers are more beautiful each year is because there is a beauty that surpasses monotony; it is a hard-fought, scarred beauty that arises from daily commitment and constant forgiveness. And I can do those too–in a way I never could solo.