When she made the suggestion, I had to hide my laughter. It was just so perfect–and by that I mean, wrong–which means it’s probably just right, if the past few years are any indication. My gym friend had just recommended an activity for The Kid that her son had loved and benefited from, and it was/is so not in my wheelhouse/comfort zone. Not my scene.

She wondered if he might want to try karate.

Then she suggested taking him to an anime store.

At that, I almost lost it. My Asian friends know that I’m a bit flummoxed by their cultural touchstones: working out in pants and a robe with a belt whose color is based on technical expertise rather than outfit compatibility? Hello Kitty out the ying yang? Uncooked seafood? Cartoonish anime characters with creepy giggles who look like this?

No. Just…I can’t. Which of course means I’m probably supposed to, if Monday afternoons at the horse barn have taught me anything. Which is why, on a recent summer afternoon, I took TK to a proper karate facility and we watched a class. Even though, prior to this outing, the most Asian activity I’d ever participated in was eating a cooked sushi roll at P.F. Chang’s.

These are the newnesses of life I’m being opened up to, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes resentfully assenting, sometimes (hardly ever) blindly optimistic. But always apart from my own plan, the one currently sitting in the bottom of a landfill underneath, probably, a diaper stuffed with diarrhea in a metaphorical illustration of what love and grace (interchangeable, really) have done to my life. Which is to say, wrecked it. And made it brand new.

In case you haven’t heard or been through it yourself–new life? In the form of the birthing process? Can suck way before it gets beautiful.

But in so many ways, we’re moving to the beautiful part. The part where you listen for what seems the first time and realize that what sounded like noise before has become music–and not only that, but your favorite song. The one that you struggle to call your favorite, because it’s hard to listen to what with all the ugly crying it causes, but then there’s also that part that makes you laugh, and the one after that that makes you exhale in relief. That song, for us right now, is “It’s Quiet Uptown,” and though TK has moved on to an infatuation with the Schuyler Sisters and their #work, he still likes to listen to “the push song”–as in, push away the unimaginable. A phrase he utters all the time, despite it not being six months since he said his first word. And when the song reaches this part–

The moments when you’re in so deep
It feels easier to just swim down

–that’s when TK turns to me, grinning, and says, “Swim up.”

He’s been swimming upstream his whole life, and while I’ve been fighting it, he’s been mastering it. So much so that it’s what he wants to do.

I think sometimes that maybe I do too. That this path–full of pushing harder than I’d ever thought I would have to just to get him to use a fork or try the bike or say a word, or fight more than I’d ever imagined to be his advocate and make him understood and tell his story–that it’s almost like we were meant for it. That it’s making us who we’re supposed to be, knitting us together eternally, and creating a masterpiece.

My friend brought her boys over last week and as our four kids played in the backyard, multiple surgeries between two of them and long roads yet ahead, I thought about how it’s knitting me together with others too; how now it’s not just our college and New York years that we have in common but something deeper and somehow more real. That it was fun skipping from party to party or eating raw cookie dough for four years, and it was sure as hell fun hopping from bar to bar in the greatest city in the world for five more, and there are days when I’d sell both of my ovaries (done with ’em anyway) to go back there, but then I look at these four boys running circles around us and I figure between them and a bottle of wine, we just might be onto something more.

Our pastor had talked about the rhythm of spiritual life, how it’s an endless cycle of messing up and repentance and restoration and there’s not, this side of eternity, a moment at which we reach a finish line–all done with screwing up!–but that it’s over and over, day after day, and anyone expecting differently has the wrong idea. And in these early days of summer, I think about that rhythm–how it can feel monotonous, frustrating. Or how it can be the basis for a new song. Our schedule changed, both boys with me, and TK and I struggle to deal with a routine upended. I take him to the barn in the morning now, and he fought it–this is not our usual time! Then we arrived, and he got on the horse, and the gait became a rhythm he recognized. I heard his therapist talking to one of her students: “When he started, he couldn’t do any of that.” I sat on the bench where I always sit, but the light fell differently this time of day. The same, but different.

We went to the doctor for a checkup later and what used to be soaked in tears–listening to chest and peering inside ears and mouth–now, he laughed through it. I cried at the same but different boy. And when I took him to get a haircut, this time without his tears too, she asked me if it was okay that she had cut it short in the back. “Did you want that scar showing?” she said. I smiled and thought of the therapist who, that morning, had admitted that when she started with him a year ago she’d thought he would never talk. “Yeah, I want it showing,” I answered her. “It’s perfect.”