The nursery is coming together.

When we first moved in, the room served as an office of sorts: the big computer sat atop the desk that had been in The Husband’s New York apartment. He would file important papers in the file cabinets, and I spent the last few months of my first pregnancy writing a novel there while an apple crumble candle burned beside me.

A year ago, we made preparations for a nursery there. TH moved the computer downstairs. The room upstairs awaited its new furniture when the test was positive. Then that faded away, and the room served as storage–and a reminder of something lost.

Now it’s a nursery.

The Kid likes to venture in there to turn on the little green lamp and make drums out of diaper genie refills. I don’t think he gets it yet, that this is where his little brother will sleep (we hope), but then again, he probably gets a lot more than I give him credit for. So who knows?

When we moved here from New York, we were overwhelmed with space and slowly crept into it, spreading out with the years and filling square footage and closets. Now that the two have become three, and soon four, we’ve each contracted back into our own spaces to make room for new life. One year ago, I was hoping the spots didn’t mean what I knew they meant; now I feel the kicking, see the image on the screen, and who can know when something falling apart is actually leading to everything coming together?

TK’s last music class was yesterday, and he chose to spend it hanging out by the cubbies where my purse sat and held the promise of a sandwich for him that he later ate in the ophthalmologist’s waiting room. After that, he fell apart in my lap as we sat in the clinical chair together, drops and light in his eyes and tears from them, and then it was over and everything was fine. The peepers got a clean bill of health, and we held hands and walked to the parking deck, where an hour before I had dropped my ticket between the driver’s seat and console and barely kept from snarling at my bad luck. At how I had to move the chair backward and forward until I could hike my belly over the seat and fish out the piece of paper, wondering why stuff like this always happens to me, and then it was in my hands and I realized I hadn’t sworn once. Hadn’t yelled either. And though comparing yourself to the downtrodden of the world over a five-minute inconvenience isn’t noble, there is grace in the process. In the fact that moments later, I remembered what I had read about the opportunities to choose between bitterness and gratitude and that there would be more chances to choose the latter. That this is grace. That the fact I’m seeing it now not as condemnation, but as invitation, is another way things fall apart so that they can come together.

In the evenings, before bath time, we turn on Mickey and TK leans against me while we do his exercises, and five minutes in my back aches and my neck is tight and as he loosens, I constrict, and it’s all so worth it. I stay for a while after, as his weight rests against his brother and the tiny legs inside register his presence–and this is grace. The staying and seeing.

Last night, we finished dinner and put on bathing suits, gathered our gear. TK was in the stroller and the lot of us were halfway down the driveway before the sky opened up and the rain pelted down. And once again, what would have felt like condemnation became an invitation. We unbuckled him. “Let’s let him play in it.” His grin glowed through the gray as he stomped through puddles and got soaked, and the purity of the moment overwhelmed me: his joy transforming foiled plans into something better.