Five years later, the city looked the same. And different.

The first time I went to London, twenty years ago, I was with a mission group sent to Liverpool by my church. To save all the white people. We stopped in London for a couple of days on our way back home. I remember visiting the Wesley home (because it was free, and the Tower of London wasn’t, and these were my choices), seeing Les Mis at the Palace, and capping off the trip with a dinner at a local place called the Hard Rock Cafe.

Fifteen years later, The Husband (then The Fiancé) took me to a wedding in the English countryside. Which was helpful in preparing for ours on the Gulf Coast, a location similar to Somerset in no way whatsoever. We also hit London to take in a show at the Globe (I fell asleep, sue me) and hit the tourist spots that I had missed before: the Tower, the Tate, St. Paul’s, Hyde Park.

But this trip…this trip was about TH working, and about my exploring the city sans tour guide, sans anyone but me. I navigated all the terrain on foot, explored the nooks and crannies and side streets, took shortcuts and ducked into alleyways, weaved in and out of crowds. I saw the city, the familiar sights, in a new way. I left the diaper bag and Wet Ones at home with the kids, four thousand miles and five hours away, and wandered through Hyde Park and past Buckingham Palace, around Westminster Abbey and down Whitehall, through Trafalgar and Leicester Squares and Piccadilly Circus and Soho. My feet met concrete the way they did in New York: mildly goal-oriented, at their own pace, freely. Even Les Mis looked different, and not just because it’s no longer playing at The Palace. I’ve learned all the songs, lived my twenties and the better part of my thirties, gotten married and had two kids. As a high schooler I felt like maybe people should let up on Javert–he was just following the rules. Now he is such a dick. And I used to be so much like him.

“I am shy in ordinary social contexts; I am not able to ‘chat’ with any ease; I have difficulty recognizing people…Given all this, I tend to retreat into a corner, to look invisible, to hope I am passed over,” wrote Oliver Sacks. I hear you, having been someone who, for most of my life, has fought to avoid being seen. But marriage and children open you up to examination on a daily level: your side streets and alleyways are suddenly fair game, open to foot traffic, explored with abandon. I rarely pee alone, is what I’m saying. Nor do I kick trash cans or raise my voice or lose my temper alone. It’s all very inconvenient for someone whose preferred orientation to The Radar is “below”. It’s all very uncomfortable for someone who has things she’d prefer to hide.

“You really put it all out there,” people have said about my writing, and I have to laugh when I hear that because it has been equal parts compliment and complaint, but what it definitely is, is fact. Fact born from decades of hiding, of not putting it all out there, and there’s this:

It’s a wonderful thing, to not have secrets. To not live under the weight of them. To be seen.

Sacks didn’t do so well below the radar. He has written multiple books, had movies and documentaries and even an opera based on his work. “I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts,” he also wrote. And the more I allow myself to be seen, it seems, the more I am able to see. The more I recognize as familiar, as recurring grace woven throughout the years. I see, also, the difference between who I often am and who I am meant to be. “Who you are at home is who you are,” I read recently, and thought, I hope to God not. Because there is a gulf, daily, a breach that seems impossible to cross between the worst of me and the “me” that grace makes of me. The Javert and the Valjean. I see that gulf and immediately try to think of ways to cross it, and if not cross, then to hide it.

But the cross has already been completed.

And this is why I can write, can tell, can put it out there: because who I am at home is not who I am. Who I am made to be is who I am, because grace makes the gulf between the two not a distance to be crossed but a journey to be lived, with the cost of travel already paid. And when I look back at the road already traveled, I see the connections.

He told me he can see now how hard it is every day, how the struggle with two young ones can wear you down, and as the recipient of half his genetic material, I know how we see things similarly. He said that you need so much patience, and he just doesn’t have it. And I laughed, because none of us do–not enough, anyway. “But…” he continued. “Just being there, it helped me. I can see how it helped my own patience.” And with that, I watch the lines connect from my parents to me to my own kids, the struggles that become gifts we pass on to each other, beyond baby-sitting and break-providing and dinner-preparing and on to wound-healing and soul-patching and heart-sewing. How our own histories are changed by our now. How when we put it all out there, we are given the gift of sight. Of recognizing the us in each other.

The moment we walked in the door, The Kid whipped his head around, ran to us, held on longer than usual. There is something different, and I see it. I’ll be writing it. But that night, he came into our room no less than a half-dozen times. I felt the familiar impulse to irritation…but something was different there too; like that impulse had weakened. “It’s like he wants to make sure we haven’t left–that he can still see us,” TH whispered through the dark, just as a voice within my own head/heart whispered, Let go. This is how tonight is supposed to be. And so, a half-dozen patters across the hall and into our room later, I felt the me that I am: annoyed, and the me that I’m becoming: eyes open to the boy standing beside my bed whose grin lights up the night so I can see, and share, it.