When we drove into the city that July afternoon, three across the bench seat of a U-Haul, the west 30’s were our first view of my new home. I could feel The Mom’s apprehension next to me, hanging in the air like a cloud: Here? This? For my daughter? Our driver, the son of one of my dad’s friends, put it more plainly: “You sure you want to live here? It looks…gross.” 

It did look gross. We were rolling through not the glossy skyscrapers of midtown or the quaint townhomes of the West Village, but a wasteland of empty warehouses and grimy tenements and…well, Port Authority. It was not the city I had visited in the past, when I had hopped into a cab from LaGuardia and headed straight to a hotel, avoiding this underbelly, this gritty honesty. My first day as a New York City resident began with gross.

I began to have doubts. This was not the way I’d thought it would be.

But we stayed. We unpacked my apartment, took the son of the friend to Times Square before sending him to the airport, headed down to Little Italy and ate pasta. We spent the night in my new apartment on the fourteenth floor and woke up the next day to a new view. I was home, it would just take a while for me to know it.

A couple of years later, my friend and I headed from the East 70’s, where we had been shopping and walking, into Hunter College for church. We couldn’t go straight in to claim our seats–we had to meet a guy first. I scanned the crowd, though I had never met him and didn’t know what he looked like. He was holding up the opposite wall, and as soon as I saw him I knew. Not that he would be my best friend in a matter of weeks, my boyfriend in a year, or my husband in two. Not that we would have two boys and endless challenges and a hammock in the backyard. I just knew, when I saw him, that he was the guy we were meeting. He looked nice. A little too much hair product, maybe. He didn’t wear a sign saying he was the love of my life. Still–I was home. It would just take a while for me–and him–to know it.

Last weekend, the four of us sat at a table outside. By the time we ordered our food, The Sis and I were at our loudest and most laughing. Our men talked beside us. I looked across at the Bro-in-Law and remembered the first time I met him: at a bar in Nashville, where I was visiting The Sis for the express purpose of meeting her boyfriend. It was serious. A guy walked up the stairs: blond, young-looking. Not him, right? He was supposed to be a few years older, and I hadn’t pictured blond. He walked toward her, and she looked nervous enough for me to know this was the real thing. I felt a twinge of jealousy: as the older sister, I was supposed to go first. I didn’t know that he would be the father of my niece, that his parents would practically adopt me when I moved to the city, that I would spend Thanksgivings and Christmases with them, that this was one of the first chapters in a story that would lead to the four of us sharing life around a table on a Saturday night in May. We were all pointing home that night in Nashville, the pieces gently falling together even as I begged them to hurry, scrambled to force them. I was headed home, I just didn’t know it.

The Kid got his placement on a Friday, during a two-hour meeting that The Husband and I sat through anxiously, silently willing them to get to the point already as papers were read and prior evaluations reviewed. He would have a spot in a 3K program at our local elementary school, they said, and the outcome was better than we had hoped but still…bittersweet. The mom in his class–the one I had at first thought was distant and brash–she sat next to me on the playground a few weeks ago while we talked about it, how her older son needed extra help and was going to a different school the next year too. People had asked her if she was sad about it. “Sure, a little at first,” she told me. “When things don’t turn out the way you expect.” And then? We spoke almost in unison, our voices echoing each other by milliseconds: But this is our story. Why wish for something that’s not us?

And when I sat down this week and finally read the school psychologist’s report, I felt my insides roil and my temper flare. The suggestion of low intelligence, and I remembered how she had arrived over an hour late to that meeting, rushed and flustered; how there had been a fire drill halfway through; how they had then had to pull him away from us twice and lead him into a small room; how many small rooms he’s been led into where he’s been poked and prodded and opened up. How the expectations are what’s been low, not the intelligence, and how many people will be wrong about him before they’re proven so? How I watch what he can do, how quickly he learns, how intuitive he is, and with one piece missing, he is written off by so many.

I cried. I prayed. I gritted my teeth. I probably swore a bit. A lot. I breathed.

I remembered.

I remembered the city, the guy, the waiting, the ideas I had of what faith and love were before I actually got to know them–often through heartbreak and disillusionment, necessary steps on the road home. I thought about how I’m teaching TK some, but also, I’m learning him. I’m learning the gestures, the grins, the laughs, the cries. I’m learning the way he looks at the world. I’m learning about the more that makes up who he is.

And I know that he won’t be a slave to expectations, but a surpasser of them. I know that he will affect people, and challenge them. I know that he will not be what’s expected. That he may have an asterisk by his name, but it will not represent what people think it does. They will be wrong before they’re right. And for every step that feels bittersweet, that takes us further from the way we’d thought it would be…we’ll be headed home.