“‘Maybe sometimes–the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want it to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?…Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to [a] long-term pattern we can’t decipher. Huge, slow-moving weather system rolling in on us from afar, blowing us randomly…But–maybe not so random and impersonal as all that, if you get me.’“  Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

It ended up being the perfect spot for the collage: right there over the changing table. Isn’t it funny how things can accidentally end up in their perfect place?

The halo-centric masterpiece was finally hung this weekend, thanks to The Husband, and though The Kid’s remaining changes on that table are hopefully few (potty-training, here we come!…?), there will be time enough to battle flailing legs, protesting screams, and the occasional laugh all while gazing at the story it tells: the weeks of what-we-never-wanted, harder-than-we-could-have-known, more-than-we-ever-asked-for. I look at it when I’m feeling weighed down by my own failures, especially at the end of the day: the flashes of temper, the heaving sighs, the weight of it all, terrible and glorious, bearing down on me and turning the days into minutiae when I won’t let them be more. I think about what was hard then, and what is now, and wonder how I can forget that there’s no comparison?

From the other side, the after it, the view is almost too much to bear. TH squeezes little feet into pajamas and I rub vitamin E into scars and the pictures threaten to undo me: the hours after the surgery, tubes and half-closed eyes, three days on a hospital bed. And the grin that none of it could take away. When I look at that, then down at him, the kicks and screams–they aren’t fun, but they sure look different. From here, from Now.

And it colors all of life, the Before and After, the waves that feel like they’re displacing us only to land us in the perfect place. Standing in a north Atlanta gym, singing the same song that echoed in a New York City auditorium, the accompaniment more acoustic now, less jazz, but the words the same. Five years and a lifetime later, and it feels like yesterday: awaiting the words about grace that always ended at the cross, stepping out into the Manhattan evening and down into the subway, dinner with friends like TH. Now it’s more words on grace but they’re followed by lunch next to a highchair, pouring milk into a cup and wiping off tiny hands, rushing home for nap time. So much more to do can feel like so much less freedom, but if I had wandered those city streets any longer I would have just gotten lost; instead, I ended up here–and that can feel hard or it can feel full. Can feel right.

This weekend there were multiple meals out, multiple highchair extravaganzas spent shoveling food down my mouth and wiping it off his, and there’s the before and after of motherhood: the distracted, never-concluded conversations, the short-term memory lapses that make the twenty-four hours allotted to Drew Barrymore’s character in 50 First Dates look like an eternity. These messy blessings, these mixed bags of highs and lows and easy and hard, to think that I was headed for them the whole time: running around Central Park, waking up to hangovers and regret, winning spelling bees and failing to know my identity, falling down and not seeing that there was always someone to pick me back up.

I think about it now, at the end of days when I actually didn’t screw up too badly and at the end of days when I know I did, when I beat myself up over a look I gave or a tone I took and stretch it out over the coming years, wondering how I’ll ever be the wife, mother, person I want to be; need to be. And then I remember that I won’t. That I wasn’t that person back then, either, but look where I landed anyway. From where I stand, I can look over and see the same person beside me every night. I can look down and see the grin that is half-mine and all-gift. I can take the cup and the bread in a different room and know that, like the grace they represent, they will never stop filling, never stop being poured out. Never stop being all I need. From here, I can see that the bread, the wine, the narrative of my life, speaks a language of forgiveness, of being enough when I am not. From there to here is a story, a song, and its loudest note is redemption.