When you don’t often crave the company of others, it’s easy to end up feeling alone.

I get worn out by other people. No offense to them–well, not all of them, anyway–but I find social situations often harrowing, and small talk to be downright hell. And now that I’m staying at home for the time being, I find that the only companionship I suffer for most of any given day can be limited to two small boys and the contents of their undergarments. Which is usually just how I like it–but also can be…terrible. I mean, really: how much talk of trucks and ba-bas can one person stand? Sometimes I turn on the news just to hear an adult voice, then realize how rare those are during campaign season. So I plod along the sparsely populated path of the introverted mother of young children, ambivalent over loneliness being a virtue or scourge.

People creep in, though. My favorites? They do it seamlessly.

I keep running into my friend at the gym–the one who has a boy like mine plus fourteen years. Sometimes we just wave across the room at each other; others, I approach her or she approaches me. “How’s it going?” she’ll ask, in the way of someone who knows exactly what it is, and our conversations are edenic gardens scattered throughout my week, patches of understanding among moments of mundanity or difficulty (read: life): the nodding when I describe a victory or setback, the advice offered without judgment from a place of experience, of sameness. She gives me hope: a place to complain, or commiserate, or rejoice. An “I’ve been there” who holds up both a mirror and an eight ball, and the best news is that the outlook is good. “You’re over the hump,” she said recently, and from anyone else it would have sounded trite and false-positive, but from her it was a balm, and truth–because there will be many humps, but the tide is so changing.

We baptized Little Brother on Sunday, and I was nervous, naturally: we planned to take The Kid up there with us and, therefore, inject total unpredictability into the outcome. Before the service, an older boy with Down Syndrome whom we’ve never met walked up to TK and grinned down at him. Wordlessly, he bent his knees and embraced my boy in a bear hug. It was over as soon as it began, and as he walked away, I turned to The Husband. “Why…” I began, and he shook his head, but there was no question mark at the end. The way he reaches people, the hearts that react to him? It’s grace, opened over and over, this gift of knowing that he will affect the people around him, even change them. He’s changed me.

Later, our family of four walked to the front of the room and repeated the liturgy. TK stood beside me, holding his arm out for me to scratch it since we are nothing if not his personal masseuses. He looked down at the row of families and looked back at me, giggling. He ran his toy car over the table behind us set for communion, which I’m not sure but I think may be a desecration? Or maybe the opposite? Our two pastors, who know our story from both telling and experience and also go by the title friends, brought the water down and sprinkled it over LB’s head. He gave his best Elvis snarl, TK laughed, and I cried: our family of four together, all of us now washed by water both plain and sacred, among a community of friends.

Yesterday she texted that we should catch up since it’s been since before Christmas, for the love of God, and when we began talking it was right where we had left off. She’s read the updates but I got to fill them in, and they were somehow more real in the sharing. That afternoon, TK bounded up the stairs followed by his therapist, who gave a recap of his latest achievements. “I have to move on to reading because he’s learned everything else so quickly,” she said. “I mean, he’s basically typical,” she continued, using the jargon of our particular community, at which I felt both relief and another funny thought: Let’s hope not.

When she gave it to me, a simple magnet, she’d signed the gift with the title we’ve figured out because there isn’t an official name for what we are. The Sis’s in-laws? Too wordy. Friend? Too incomplete. “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly,” I read, and when I looked to her, she turned to TK. “Like him,” she said, and she couldn’t have known that later that day I’d read the boys the book with the same ending–“by and by, he became a butterfly.” Grace showing up in all these places as people.