I can’t even tell you how much of my life is dominated by sound machines right now.

There’s the one in The Kid’s room, turned to the “rain” setting but switched to classical music by him as soon as we tuck him into bed at night. After he’s fallen asleep, I creep into his room and change it back. In the morning, his first action of the day is to climb out of bed and switch it back to Mozart, then climb back into bed. I watch from the monitor in our room, where I’m usually feeding Little Brother, and I smile–then the anxiety of getting a family of four ready for the day kicks in.

LB is in our room for now, despite The Husband’s quiet but frequent hints that it’s time to move him. We had TK in his own room from Day One, and I think that was largely due to the fact that I didn’t know how much there was to be afraid of then, but now the monsters loom large in my mind: spitting up, choking, cessation of breathing–as if I can control it all if he’s forty feet closer. With his presence comes his own sound machine, also set to “rain” at a volume so loud (pediatrician’s recommendation) that I’ve woken a few nights and been confused as to whether the house was flooding. Then I go pee, creeping by his rock ‘n play and hoping he won’t cry until I’m done.

This ambient noise is meant to lull their tiny selves to sleep. I remember a few years ago, when my ambient noise was the sounds issuing from my New York City block, the yells of people leaving the club on the corner, the resident street alcoholic who was chipper or angry depending on that day’s consumption, the taxis using 29th as a thru-street, the occasional sound of puking or fights. I loved it; it made me feel a part of something but also separated by four floors from its nastier aspects. When we prepared to leave the city, I made a list in my head of suburban weaknesses I wouldn’t succumb to: searching for a parking place close to the entrance instead of walking; driving when we could walk; becoming oblivious to how much more space we have and how much less expensive life is–and just human weaknesses: taking my relationship with TK for granted by such methods as nagging him, focusing on negatives, pointing out crumbs on the floor.

Needless to say, I have broken each of these vows. And how.

These aspects of our lives, they might otherwise be called blessings if they weren’t always so there. Marriage allows you to take for granted that your partner isn’t going to leave for lack of romance (or presence of demands). Health provides the expectation that the only thing standing between me and a half marathon is time and sleep. Ha. Two boys make you forget about miscarriage, about trying for a year, about the longing you had before they even existed–and make you long instead for sleep, nights out, moments away. The ever-present gifts that lull you into complacency, allowing you to forget the empty space that was there before them, to forget how truly miraculous it is, every moment we spend together. As if there are days when I am entitled to any of this, and pure ease along with it.

I think it’s important to be honest about the hard stuff–it’s why I do so much of that here. But there is also the moment at 4 am when I am sitting on the carpet beside LB as he fusses in his temporary crib and I am thinking anything-but-grateful thoughts and grace cuts in, not quietly and politely as it so often does, but like a sledgehammer to my sedated sense of entitlement: I am living in a home with a healing two-year-old across the hall, a husband asleep in our bed behind me, and the baby I waited through blood and loss for crying intermittently beside me as I sit in the room my husband designed and had renovated so that we could live here as a family. 

It’s so easy for it all to become white noise.

We tag team with TK still, though now one of us is usually holding a fussy newborn, and when I’m the one standing beside TK on his changing table, I look up at the collage of him in the halo. And there’s the picture that is at once so beautiful and awful that I sometimes can’t bear to look: him beside me on the hospital bed, still groggy from anesthesia, with the halo in place and the IV in his arm and I’m turned to him, and I know now the mixture of emotions that grace kept calm at the time because it’s on my face, in my eyes: the love and fear and pain and pity, the everything, because that’s what always comes along with the love. Everything. And though he’s so much better now, though we’re marching past that whole dark season, those emotions wash over me like a flood–but it’s a flood of mercy that refuses to let me take it all for granted. Even though I will, probably in a couple of hours when the cries wake me up and I feed, but then too there will be a little mini-flood, when I look down and see the tiny face and know that ingratitude, frustration, entitlement–they are not the truest things about me because grace won’t let them be. It’s grace, along with a two-year-old miracle, that turns the white noise into music.