“Today I had a thought. What if I…what if I had never met you?“

There are moments when my brain does a time-travel trick, and I find myself back on the streets of New York: emerging from the close heat of a subway station into the human traffic of Soho, trying to pinpoint my location by finding Lafayette; running past the back side of the Met on my way to circle the reservoir; claiming my nosebleed seat as the orchestra’s strains mark the beginning of the ballet. These are pre-The Husband, pre-The Kid, pre-Little Brother thoughts–pre-bottles lining the sink, pre-backaches at bedtime, pre-pre-dawn wake-up calls. They’re foreign and yet so familiar: I can smell the nuts warming in the vendor’s cart on Fifth Avenue. They’re a thousand miles and a lifetime and one memory away.

These tricks of my brain, I don’t know if they’re momentary lapses or escapes. Either way, they’re not my reality now, though they were then. The other day, though, I imagined an alternate reality to my Now-days: a reality where TK was born with no tilted vertebrae, where he was speaking on time, where we had never seen the inside of a waiting room other than his pediatrician’s. I let the thought creep in further, the what if? of it float around my head: a world in which I didn’t know which levels of the hospital parking lot always have free spaces, what department resides on each floor of the medical building,  where to find a bathroom in every building on Meridian Mark Road.

What if The Kid had never been in pain beyond a skinned knee? What if he never knew the feeling of an IV in his arm? What if he had never been poked beyond a tickle, prodded beyond wrestling with TH?

Intoxicating, the idea of a smooth ride, an easy road. And also: not us.

Grace intervened in my imaginings, and I know it to be grace because my default setting is not optimism. I don’t have a backup generator within me that pumps Pollyanna-isms into my veins. But the beauty of what is began to eclipse the allure of what if, and I looked to see it.

Leave out all the waiting rooms, the doctor visits, the screenings, and I wouldn’t have gotten to hold his hand as long, wouldn’t have had the extra naps he took on my chest and in my lap. I wouldn’t have had as much time to pick up on the things that make him him, the ways he behaves differently around those who don’t know him well, the smiles he reserves for TH and me, the sound of his purest delight and deepest despair, the symphony that composes his language. The rides back and forth, the minutes that add into hours, and his voice in the backseat singing us home. The way he spooned me in his hospital bed in the middle of the night, giggling and poking me with seven pounds of hardware on his head and tubes coming out of his arm. I wouldn’t know his strength, and I wouldn’t know mine.

I wouldn’t know ours: all that TH and I can make it through, without the tense discussions and insurance calls and division of labor; the glances that speak words. Holding hands used to be an act of flirtation; now they are a bond of iron. We have crossed the thresholds of hospitals and operating rooms and doctor’s offices together, heard that the surgery will happen and that he made it through okay and that the pregnancy was not viable and the hands have held a little stronger, a little more tightly each time.

I’ll never fully know, this side of eternity, how it all plays into who we become, who we’re meant to be. I only know that grace promises to make it beautiful–promises that it’s being made beautiful, and there are moments when I get a peek at the process and have to say thank you, because…I believe, but you know? Help my unbelief?

TK, headphones astride his noggin, is pushing a cart full of weights down the hall of a medical building while I follow with LB in the stroller and every now and then he turns to grin and pause for the applause from me and his two therapists. And the girl in New York trying to find Lafayette would have been so afraid. She would’ve taken in the therapy visits and the diagnoses and even the nightly backaches and gone running further than the reservoir. She would have–she did–roll her eyes imperceptibly when parents mentioned sensory issues, when they explained tantrums as a result of endless doctor visits. She would have shaken her head in denial at the possibility that the research papers and the books would come to life as flesh and bone with her heart tied into every cell.

I know she was me, but that she wasn’t all of me. I know that life isn’t either/or but that it’s full of beautiful nuance and terrible complications and that all of it joins together to lead us to who we become. I know that the next time I walk the streets of New York, it will be as a visitor who knows the feel of their hands in hers, the sound of their laughter, the smell of their skin, the shape of their smiles. I know that I wouldn’t be me without all of it, and as much as I want to curse the needles and the scalpels and the nights that got us here, I can’t–not completely–because he turns from the cart, locks eyes with me, and the smile I know by heart lights up his face–and here we are again, being us.