Nope.

“He won’t play with me,” The Niece announced, standing alone beside her new Frozen dollhouse (about which The Sis had just whispered to me, “Can you believe how much that plastic piece of crap costs?”). But a few minutes later, The Kid did want to play–at least, beside her. His Y chromosome had homed in on the architectural details of the house, and he set about trying to detach various parts of it from the base. Meanwhile, The Niece just wanted to talk about the characters and their placements. When she realized what TK was doing, she began to cry.

“He’s tearing it up!” she wailed.

I understood. I can’t stand it when life’s wrecking balls–now more commonly known to me as grace–start decimating all the pretty scenes I’ve created.

And when I told her the next part–that some boys like to take things apart and put them back together, that’s just what they do, and that I would never let him break this gift she had been given–I had to wonder, once the tears subsided, if I wasn’t also talking to myself.

Because nothing in my life has been broken that either wasn’t meant to be, or wasn’t put back together better than before. And also? This difference between them, this desire to admire on the one hand and disassemble on the other, this is built into who they are. And freedom, I’m learning, is not what I thought it was; it’s not doing what we want. It’s being who we were made to be.

This understanding has not come easily, but only after dawning realizations and painful conversions, the transformations that occur less often against idyllic backdrops and more frequently in the trenches of daily life, the #nofilter reality that doesn’t get posted to Instagram, the failed recipes that never make it to Pinterest, the family moments uncaptured by cameras and absent from Facebook. These moments are early mornings and late nights, vomit and blowouts, kicked-in trashcans and thrown-across-the-room computers, tense discussions and brittle detentes. Save your “magical experience” descriptions of childbirth, please, because I’m scheduled to experience it as a sequel next week and I’ll count as magical a fine glass of wine or a sunset from a rooftop bar; the bleeding and the pain and the sweat and tears are something else altogether. But they are something else. And there is the not-so-small matter of how they lead to life.

There was a time when life, and freedom, looked like this: sleeping in, walking to Central Park, tapas and champagne at 3 pm on a Sunday just because, cans of Italian beer on a boat headed for Capri. Then being free meant sleeping in, rolling out of bed together and grabbing bagels, watching movies on the couch, picking out furniture for our new house.

This week, freedom looks like long, uninterrupted showers, dropping him off at day care with occasional tears (mine, not his), therapy visits attended, parking deck circled a dozen times, more treats than usual to compensate for an upcoming shortage of them, making a half dozen frozen dinners, sitting beside him on the couch for Mickey Mouse Clubhouse as he leans his thirty pounds fully into my belly, making him laugh at dinner, watching fall premieres together after TK’s bedtime.

And next week? Somehow, freedom will look like being opened up so new life can emerge, not feeling my legs for a couple of days, not driving for a couple of weeks or exercising for longer, glazed eyes and sleep deprivation, adding a new name to the top part of my heart’s registry, wondering if anything will ever feel “normal” again, trying to balance two where there was one. This will be life, and freedom, because he is growing within me and that is no coincidence, no accident–it is what we were meant for. It will feel like anything but being free, but then again–sometimes love feels like anything but that; sometimes victory looks like anything but that; sometimes rescue shows up with surgical knives and wrecking balls.

Because the gift that arrived two and a half years ago? The one that has been setting me free through every cry, every doctor visit, every trip through the parking deck and hour of therapy and moment of recognition, his head to my belly? There is unwrapping of it some days, wrecking by it others. But to be the wife, the mother, the holder of words that I never would have had otherwise–this is to be alive. This is what has redefined free for me, made it more terrifying and unpredictable and full. And next week* a scar will be made bigger, because life times two will have emerged from it–along with tales of freedom waiting to be told.

*Joke’s on me! I wrote this post two days ago and am posting it today from a hospital room that I share with The Husband and the brand-new Little Brother, who is set to meet TK later today.