In a few weeks I’ll go back to being called “doctor”–part-time, at least. For the past year and a half, “mom” has been my primary title.

It’s going to be an adjustment.

There may be days coming when I barely ever say, “Don’t eat your shirt” or watch multiple episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. My back will hurt from leaning over other people’s children while someone else watches mine. I’m…ambivalent about it. But I’ll return to the work force, to the world outside our home, a different person than when I left it. The Kid and Little Brother have left their marks all over me.

I think sometimes about who and how I used to be, before two tiny people were yanked from my abdomen. How going to the grocery store was a pain, but not an Olympic event. How I almost dozed off a few times driving on the interstate because I didn’t have a screaming occupant in the backseat to jolt me awake. How eight hours’ uninterrupted sleep seemed barely enough. How dinner conversation covered politics and current events instead of being consumed by, “YOU HAVE TO EAT YOUR CHICKEN BEFORE YOU GET A CRACKER.”

So there’s all that.

And there are other things.

There is the fact that a job interview–something that would, in my former life, have drenched me in anxiety and kept me awake and resulted in major digestive issues–is now a bullet point to fit in between feedings and pickups. Administrative tasks have displaced my worry; exhaustion has drained it off. (#blessed. Really.)

There are the logistics of getting from Here to There, and then there are the logistics of getting from Here to There with a pump attached to your chest as you drive down I-85 with one eye on the clock and the other on the road. Oprah calls it multi-tasking.

There was the moment when LB first looked at me with that recognition: Oh, you. You’re HER. And the smile he radiated from that realization, that smile is rewarded to Mom alone. (And she has EARNED IT.) That smile took at least six weeks (plus nine months) to arrive, the one that starts at his mouth and goes straight up to his eyes and just recently began to be paired with a soul-healing laugh.

There’s the way TK likes to shake his head back and forth when he walks toward me because it makes me laugh, and how there’s no way he could know that it looks just like the move I had to master when performing as a gingersnap in The Nutcracker a few decades ago, but that the similarity–one of so many–lifts me from end-of-day exhaustion and tantrum-bred frustration and reminds me that sometimes he just wants to play. And that sometimes I just should.

There’s the moment when he stands up from his bath and catches my eye, grinning, and jumps into my lap, overwhelmed with laughter, and it has a way of making the fact that I had to chase him down and use One, Two, Three five hundred times and talk myself out of screaming–it has a way of making all that disappear into our reflection in the mirror and letting the day’s last moments outshine the tougher ones.

There are the runs I go on now, and I’m more tired than I was then, so they’re often shorter. But when I stop early and slow to a walk, I look down and see a sidewalk scarred by leaf marks–they must have fallen in as the concrete was setting, before it could fully harden–and I wouldn’t have noticed them if I’d stayed full-speed. I think about how easily they could be taken for imperfections, but how at this moment, they look like areas of added depth, as though an artist rendered them. They are landmarks that point the way home.

I think about how I see everything differently now.

And I stop cursing the slow pace that last night’s shortened sleep brought me because there were marks left on me before I was allowed to fully harden. There was the idealized version of myself that I’d planned to be, and there is the real me–the one I am because I am their mother, and his wife, and the beloved. There are the thousand ways my schedule has changed and countless ways my priorities have. And the marks, they don’t look like imperfections, but an artist’s rendering that leads me home.