I’ve made some people cry this week. And it has been the best.

Documenting The Kid’s meteoric (to us) rise in skills has been almost as much fun as watching it: these daily progressions through sound to speech, the light-bulb moments in communication–those recognitions of connections between names and people, titles and objects, saying and getting. It’s like witnessing a miracle unfold. How else to describe it, these milestones divided–first painfully, then gloriously, the sequence dictated by grace–into tiny steps borne out over days and weeks and months? I am watching him come to life. Let me know if you can come up with a better word for it than that: miracle.

I have not done my share of watching over the years. Instead, I’ve been more of a hearer, and to voices with no association to truth. Fear and lies and had my ear too long, speaking with an air of authority that had me fooled. I’ve been plagued by self-doubt and hatred, by judgment when love awaited.

I’m learning a new language too.

His speech therapist answered when I asked her–why now?–that his brain has focused on one thing at a time, and now that his receptive language has reached a peak, his expressive is beginning to catch up. And that’s a pathway I can understand, the slow dawning of understanding, words burrowing their way through the mind and heart after years of hearing them, then finally becoming real. Coming to life. Followed by the need to tell people, to say it or type it or document it and post it: this is what it’s supposed to look like. I thought it was one way, but it’s not–it’s better.

I’m finding all sorts of new things to listen to.

When we drove six hours down to The Mom and Dad’s new place, and unloaded our baggage three stories above the calming bay, I felt like I could breathe again, water and sand a landmark for my soul. My friend of twenty years had sat with me on the balcony, wine glasses beside us and kids playing nearby, and we talked about things we’d never have imagined in college, things we never planned for but are living nonetheless, these twists (of fate? of grace) that have landed us within narratives we would never have chosen. “Isn’t is hard?” I asked, and answered for myself, “Sometimes it’s just so hard.” She quoted me back to myself–accountability can be so obnoxious, what with the words right there, the always-documented path of the storyteller–“Yeah. But these are our stories. Without them, we wouldn’t be us.”

She is the mother, the person, I might have imagined she could be if I had that kind of imagination. I don’t. Grace does. We are ourselves because of it. And she is beautiful.

Later, The Dad does the same thing–draws an example from my own life. He’s talking about how far TK has come. I tell him how hard it can be. There are times when it just seems easiest to talk about that, you know? And he reminds me of a time when I lived near the water, on an island called Manhattan, and how I had called home then and said things were hard. But that it didn’t mean I wasn’t supposed to be there.

I hadn’t even known he was listening. But he remembered that when I didn’t, and he retold me my story. And if Ram Dass is right, that we’re all just walking each other home, then maybe the way we’re doing it is by telling and retelling our stories to each other until the other voices are shut out and only the truth remains. This long walk leading always home, and growing more crowded along the way: we are not alone.

At the gym, I run into the woman who told me about her son who wasn’t speaking at four. I play her the video on my phone, TK and his words. “I told you,” she says, her smile reflecting mine. I run into my other friend, who’s watching one of her closest battle cancer, and she watches the video with tears in her eyes, shaking with excitement. “I can’t wait to see him!” she says. I continue my Tour of Tears throughout the week, provoking them from therapists and friends, family and doctors. “He just seems…happy,” the pediatrician says. “Different.”

She leaves, and we wait for the nurse to bring the shots that come along with turning four, and I explain it to him because he gets everything now, and this is a perk of that: telling him stories. When I get to the part about the pinch, he turns to me, wide-eyed fear, and tears pool in his eyes. And this is blessing, this sadness that shows me he knows. I keep talking, don’t stop when the nurse comes in and we place him on the table and he looks deep into my eyes. I’m still talking as we hold him down to do what he needs, as the needle goes in to protect him, and my voice in his ear? He’s listening. He calms.

He can hear me. And it changes him. And now, I can hear him. And it’s changing me.

All the right voices.

We head home to turn on Christmas lights, address cards, wrap gifts, our list so much longer this year. There are just so many people to tell.