The moment occurred on I-85 somewhere between Atlanta and Montgomery, as The Kid and I headed west toward The Mom and Dad’s house for a few days while The Husband was away on a business trip. TK was talking to himself in the backseat, the radio was playing a good song, and everything (for a day that began in tears when I heard the door shut behind TH and feared being alone) just felt good. Peaceful. On a road trip with a two-year-old behind me, and a pre-newborn in my belly, this is no small thing.

I turned, looked at TK, squeezed his knee. He stopped talking and grinned at me. I thought of all the road trips before this one, of cries from the carseat and Goldfish passed back, adjustment of sunshade and mounting frustration. Of how hard it can all be sometimes: how I can make it that way, but also? How life can. How the overwhelming weight of this parenthood venture can feel like one big complication. How right now, with the road clear and TK playing happily inches away from me, nothing felt complicated. Two and a half years, unexpected struggles, pain and healing, and I realized, finally, in an open clearing, that I don’t just love this kid–I really, really, like him.

Nothing else starts out that way, with the love first and the like second. It was a marker that TH was different: the fact that, despite only meeting him days before and talking to him for a few minutes, I actually liked being around him. Strangers are typically guilty until proven innocent with me, but I immediately liked this guy. Friendships start out like that, with a liking, a likeness, before plumbing the deeper terrain of love. But with a child, in the ever-complex land of parenting a life, we are called to love first. And it’s a brutal, heavy, asking-all kind of love that can leave us breathless in ways good and bad. We are made to give all up front, then watch as they ebb gently away into independence and turn into real people.

TK is becoming himself, and I’m finally letting him, finally not fighting it or directing it or demanding of it what it’s not. And it turns out that I like that guy he’s becoming. It’s a comforting revelation that I don’t take for granted. I mean, I don’t like many people.

We stopped at a Chick-Fil-A in LaGrange, Georgia, and after he chaperoned me to the bathroom, I accompanied him to the indoor playground. He ran up to, smiled at, a three-year-old boy who was game to play but did ask me why TK doesn’t talk. My shrug belied the complexity of the answer but also honored the truth: it’s okay. Because he will. I’d love if it were tomorrow, but for now, he communicates via the word apple and sings and laughs, and this is what we get–and it’s closer to everything than to nothing. We were told “goodbye” by the other patrons, encouraged to have a safe trip, even invited to a family pumpkin patch nearby in the fall, and my cynicism gave way to enjoyment as we walked to the car, TK’s hand in mine, his brother stomping healthily away at my bladder. It is all so much closer to everything than nothing.

For the next few days, we were coddled and cared for, fed and cleaned up after. TK and I sat beside each other at the breakfast table, each somebody’s kid, and ate together. He occasionally cast conspiratorial glances at me, shot me the side-eye, from under his lashes, and when I laughed he’d do it again. He explored the backyard and I explored Us magazine, and he’d run back inside to me, burying his face in my lap and sitting beside me on the couch. I uttered so many prayers of thanks–not least for this time together, the two of us, before he becomes a big brother and I a mother of two, before the family dynamic shifts and I become a (temporarily) sleepless version of myself. I felt myself fill with the simplicity of just him and me, of the non-fraught moments that are all too rare.

On the drive back, he played with his feet and I sang from the front seat. I thought about what road trips used to be: the ninety-minute trek between home and college, the ninety-minute flight between the South and New York, the single bag and solitude. Yeah, I make it harder than it has to be, but life is just that hard sometimes. When it is, though, I have to tell myself, whether it’s tearful drives or doctors’ waiting rooms or miles-long runs turned into minutes-long walks–I have not been reduced to this. I have grown into it. There was just me for a while, then there was TH. Then TK, and soon, Little Brother. And like his kicks from within, like the sound of breathing next to me once we make it back home, like the babbling from the back seat all remind me, I am not alone–and this is always, always a gift. A gift that, even in solitude, I’ve always had–the gentle tugs of grace calling me, pulling me along, all my life as they do now.