The other morning I drove away from my house and family toward work, an act always fraught with dueling impulses: the urge to go back and never leave again battling the temptation to head south for the beach and just take a few days for moi.

As I turned the corner on our street, my ambivalence already in full gear thirty seconds into the ride, I spotted a teenage girl ahead on the next corner: hand gripping the straps on her backpack, waist twisting her torso side to side in a rhythm born of boredom or anxiety–I could tell which if I knew her. And in that moment, I felt that I did know her, simply because I had been her. The girl at the bus stop trying to figure out what to do with my hands, how to either fit in with the kids around me or at the least fly under their radar so I wouldn’t have to talk and inevitably say something awkward. The feeling of being alone wherever I was. Of never quite fitting in. There in the pre-dawn haziness of a new day, I was transported twenty years back in time, and the familiarity of my awkward teenage-dom, unreduced in potency by the years, stole my breath. Some things never go away.

I have always struggled to find my place.

Growing up painfully shy left my nose buried in a book and my confidence at a constant low. The Mom told me I needed to smile more–“people won’t assume you’re shy, they’ll assume you’re not nice.” I remember thinking I was okay with that if it meant I didn’t have to make regular eye contact or conversation.

Now I’m a wife and mother and have settled into what feels like my spot in the world. But that doesn’t keep some moments from feeling off, or me from feeling misplaced within them. You know, like how I was supposed to be the mom in Target with the perfectly silent, poised and well-behaved children? Instead I’ve got Little Brother babbling at me like he’s trying to be heard over the band at a concert, and The Kid screeching because I didn’t take the route that leads past the donut counter.

My children read exactly none of the books on discipline that Amazon sent while I was pregnant.

As the years have gone on, I’ve found my place in waiting rooms, next to MRI machines, on hospital beds, miscarrying in the bathroom at work, sitting at therapists’ offices and across the desk from neurosurgeons who shrug way too often given their amount of training. In bed at night, I’ve complained to management that I signed up for none of these places. I’ve been assured none of it is a mistake.

That doesn’t make it easier. But it does make me reevaluate my fighting stance. It gets exhausting holding that pose–my legs tend to cramp.

“I was a hypersensitive kid—one of those kids who just thought that everyone was judging and hating them,” Mindy Kaling said recently in an interview. “Most of the people I know who experienced that as children end up being writers. They find creative outlets where they can use that–it’s sort of like the gift that they’re given later in life.”

When I read that quote, I wanted to both forgive her for the direction in which she took The Mindy Project its second season, and put down my copy of InStyle magazine to take a spiritual breather. Because all of a sudden, so much made sense.

There are gifts that come wrapped as pregnancies without a hitch, three-night hospital stays and a ten-minute ride home with the baby. Then there are gifts that can only be opened in the NICU after surgery at two days old and weeks of uncertainty and waiting. There are gifts of friends who live five minutes away with matching demographics and clothing sizes. Then there are gifts that come in the form of a weekday 3 pm phone call because we both happen to be free, when he tells me about his latest boyfriend and I talk about Little Einsteins–and how did we go from Manhattan and happy hours to this?–and then he tells me, “You know I’m always thinking about y’all, right? That I’m always here for you?” And I remember that there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. There are the shoe-shopping trips that take five minutes and end in stickers and ice cream, and there are the ones that end in his screaming and my tears, which have mercifully managed to hold off until the parking lot.

There are the gifts we ask for and the ones we get. And somehow, they are all good. They are all willed. As a friend emailed recently: “What’s the alternative? Shitty stuff just happens with no purpose, no redemption?”

So where does that leave us? For me, it means a total redefinition of all of it: good. Bad. Gifts. Fitting in. Because the way I’m beginning to see it, I always have fit in–exactly where I was supposed to. I always do fit in–exactly where I’m meant to be. I’ve just spent way too much time trying to find a different spot. A better view. Then the current one sneaks up on me and I’m blown away. Like this:

Last Friday I took him shoe shopping. I told him about it before we left, in the car, on the way in. I even left the stroller in the trunk–something I swore I’d never do again after one trip that left me in the fetal position with a bottle of bourbon (Kidding!…?). We walked into the mall and crossed the Stride Rite threshold, a step that has always kicked off the tears. I braced myself.

No tears.

The salesperson held out the foot measurer. He balked, stepped back. “Remember? How I told you?” I whispered. He gingerly stepped forward. The trip ended with a triumphant dance at the outdoor fountain, our grins matching, conspiratorial: we had done it.

Sunday morning, we head to our small church, where two of the staff members have kids with challenges similar to TK’s. And that night, a girl in our small group at our small church talks about her calling to work with kids, how music therapy has brought them back to life in so many ways, and The Husband and I look at each other–seriously, there’s a therapy we haven’t heard of?!–and twenty minutes later I’m sitting on the floor in front of her, pouring out our story, right where I’m meant to be.

“But willingness comes from the pain,” writes Anne Lamott, and I can see now how sometimes that’s the only way he could have gotten me to finally say yes–to it all. To all the gifts. By showing me that they all are. Just take one step forward. “Remember? How I told you? How I showed you?” grace whispers, and I sink further into the couch where the two boys with matching faces are leaning into me, listening as I read a story they’ve heard a hundred times.