I’m seeing the doctor weekly now, monitoring Little Brother’s progress as it is shown in centimeters dilated (NONE, dammit), measuring his heartbeat and my belly, and I feel it as the world opens up to make a space for him. It’s beautiful, painful, brutal work, arranging homecomings.

The Husband and I talk about packing our bag, and my mind is trying to turn it into a vacation: part of me is already excited about the robe and slippers I bought from Target, about the meals that will be brought to me and the cleaning up that I won’t have to do, even as I struggle with anxiety over The Kid’s transition from only child to big brother, over my impending need to balance two lives where there is now one.

Then again, he’s getting better at transitions. Maybe I am too.

These are the things the OB doesn’t measure: the moments you will spend steeped in regret over the way you handled a tantrum; the amount of tilt his head will display before spinal surgery is necessary; the way his cerebellum extends, like millions of others, just past where it’s meant to and the implications of that on speech and motor activity. The OB can’t tell you that he won’t walk until he’s seventeen months old–and he certainly won’t tell you that even that could be a sign of greatness, not weakness, considering what he had to overcome to do it.

There are some measurements, some lessons, only provided by grace.

Because no one can tell you, either, why one day your eyes will fill with tears of joy because he’s holding a marker and using it to draw–he never did that before! No one can tell you why the building across from the hospital will come to feel like a second home, three days a week, why you’ll know the names of people in the hallways and have a friend on every floor. You wouldn’t have known, would you, that the woman at the daycare in the burka who looked so foreign to you on your first day, that she will come to love your son in a way that eases your heart and mind while you are away from him, that she and his other teachers will cry on the day he leaves, and again when he comes back and says “apple” to them.

His name–James–we didn’t know until after we chose it, that it means supplanter. How perfect. Everything that came before him has been gloriously uprooted to make space for his life; for his growingly-confident run and his increasing persistence and his penetrating uniqueness. His brother’s name, I read, means protector, and we’ll see how that plays out. But for now, I like how what we’re going to call him–Will--reminds me of what grace, through him, has already taught me: that these things happen when and how they’re meant to, when they are willed to; that the ultimate plan is the best one and thank God if mine falls apart in service to it, because look at where we’ve been…and where we are.

No one could have told me that years of feeling out of place, of not belonging, were shaping me for a New York-shaped future, for life on an island that held The Husband and a new faith and deep friendships. That that is where I would find I belonged–I just hadn’t gotten there yet. No one could have told me that being a wife would mean confronting more about myself than about him, that iron sharpening iron can hurt like hell and feature moments of tension that never showed up in New York bars but would bring with them a raw beauty in the midst of ordinary living that buoys me daily and redefines faithfulness. No one could have told me that becoming a mother? Oh, God, becoming a mother. That it would, in some way, hurt all the time, but that the pain is so often indistinguishable from love that you might suspect they are two sides of the same coin, and that what this teaches you about joy and suffering will reshape your entire mindset, your life. No one could have told me that getting the room ready, making a space for them in that life, that the preparations are so insufficient for the real thing, and that making a space for them in the world, figuring them out and figuring out where they fit in–that this takes forever. Every single day of forever. No one could have told me how hard that gift would be to open, and how precious it would be once I did.

Finding a place where I would belong, it used to be encompassed by the future tense, by just the longing part. Now it is taken up with the be-ing. Home is where they are: at the moment, one room where I type with numb fingers and one where TH types, separately, because he listens to music while working and I don’t, and yet this–he–is home. And TK will look up in an hour when I go to get him, he will see me and not say “Mom,” yet, but his eyes will meet mine and we’ll both know, and his hand will grasp mine and we’ll both be exactly where we belong, and headed home.