He’s at it again, placing the boxes next to each other in a pattern only he can see. After this, we’ll head upstairs and he’ll do the same with the farm animals, and here’s the thing: there was a checklist I read one time about how this type of behavior is something other than “the norm”; how he should be stacking the boxes and, I don’t know, making the cow and horse moo and neigh at each other? And that checklist upset me, naturally, as most things do that reduce a person to a sum of numbers. Because I felt then that there was more going on here, more than a list could address or diagnose. And now? Now I know there is. Now I’m seeing the patterns too.

We’re in the middle of a couple of weeks full of appointments, screenings, tests. There was the thirty-minute drive to the preschool diagnostics center last week, The Kid singing in the backseat the whole way while my insides roiled at the traffic and at what we were headed toward: another room, another bunch of toys, another person watching him and questioning me. Further testing needed, they said. Ha, I thought, bitterly (oh yay–we get to do this AGAIN) and triumphantly (good luck fitting this guy into a box). Then I sat across from the developmental pediatrician’s nurse, sans TK, and answered her questions a few days later. I think she heard the things I wasn’t saying, because she didn’t refer to a manual but quoted Michelangelo. And to be fair, we’re paying her and not the others, but still: here was someone who understood that we’re hunting for the beauty here.

That we’re unraveling a mystery.

These appointments are exhausting, and not because of their length or distance from home, but because of the emotional component involved. We’re on a mission to define my child. Since I was a kid, so many diagnoses have changed and medicine has broken into little subspecialties that didn’t previously exist, and I wonder sometimes if I would have landed on a spectrum or into a diagnosis myself–I mean, I had some weird tics and antisocial tendencies (some of which I’ve maintained and chosen to refer to as severe introversion) and I always felt out of place. Now, as we try to find TK’s place, I find the journey is fraught on my end. The things I thought would be difficult about parenting (sleeplessness, tantrums, date nights) are–and then there are the things I never expected: the fact that he’s three and not speaking, the tilted vertebra in his neck and the surgery to fix it, the arranging of blocks.

I left the pediatrician’s office and climbed into my car, immediately noting the solitude I’ve been craving. I used it to burst into tears. I’m so tired, I thought, and it’s not so much lack of sleep but the weight of this journey on my heart, the not having all the answers, the long and slow unrolling of this scroll with TK’s name and story on it. And I remembered a moment in Birmingham’s botanical gardens at least a decade ago. I was alone then too, but felt it more, which was the problem: I wondered if I’d always be alone. That was when the voice (tic?) spoke into my heart as clearly as if it had been inside my ear: Your heart is bigger than you know and stronger than you think. I may have laughed a little bitterly then, thinking, That’s not saying much. A few years later, I would swear my heart was broken (it was) and that it would never recover (it did). The waiting of a year between confession and fulfillment between me and The Husband was enough time for my heart to harden (it didn’t). Something kept it alive and willing and ready for the right time, for the unfolding of the story as it was meant to be.

And now, in the car, I consider that TK’s story is also mine, and mine his, because this period of waiting in the not knowing and for the mystery to be unraveled–I’ve been here before. Sometimes the weight, and the wait, on the heart breaks it in order to tend it, to recreate it. Bigger and stronger. It is where we’re broken–that’s the place where the stories are born.

I pull into the garage and TK’s face pops into the window. He meets me at the back door and wraps his arms around me, and I remember another phrase spoken about me, about him, about all of us: fearfully and wonderfully made. These are the labels that matter, that don’t change, that speak beauty into the mystery and tell our stories, and I bend down to wrap my arms around him and watch the unfolding of patterns only we can see.