See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

It feels like the first Christmas without a deadline on the celebration.

Four years ago, The Kid was two weeks old on Christmas Eve. The next day was a blur of nursing, erratic sleep, and purple crying. I wondered–as a friend had wisely told me I would–what I had done. The next year, I rocked and sang him to sleep knowing that in six days, we’d wake up before dawn and lay him on a table while they cut into his neck. The year after that, I begged his neurosurgeon’s office for information, exchanged emails with the orthotic specialist and physical therapist, and prepared for the cutting of bone, days in the hospital, weeks in a halo. Last year, we wondered if words and answers would ever arrive while a three-month-old woke up multiple times a night and I cried regularly on the couch.

This year has been…different.

This year, he’s gone from sounds to words to short sentences in a matter of weeks. This year, the waitress handed me crayons and paper and instead of pushing them aside, he grabbed the crayon out of my hand and went to town, grinning at everyone around us excitedly, totally present. This year, we dropped him off at gym childcare and the son of my friend walked up to The Husband, pronouncing, “James was in my class last year. He’s my friend.” This year I talked to another neurosurgeon on the phone two days before Christmas and he told me that things are staying stable as TK grows–then asked how he’s doing.

I am the only limit on my own celebration this year–this year filled with so many firsts, with miracle upon miracle. With the coming of our boy into his own, into himself. To us.

But what a limitation I can be, with this life-long line I’ve walked along the throes of anxiety with a view into the neighboring land of depression, a place I didn’t feel I quite fit but always worried I would venture into, wake up one day and find myself too far gone. Maybe it was the not-fitting-in that was especially irksome, the feeling of being on the edge of one place, then another, without a clear answer or directive: take this pill, try this treatment. And I’ve walked that line now with The Kid, perusing the checklists and checking off boxes with numbers (as if numbers can tell a story) that always hovered on edges too, landing him near a diagnosis but not quite fitting in anywhere either.

Crayon to paper, he draws all over and outside the lines.

Now it feels like we’re crossing over, into a new place that makes me feel sad that I ever wasted time indulging hopelessness. A place that makes me realize how long we’ve been waiting for him to show up–and that now, instead of waiting on him, it’s time to walk with him.

And it’s not lost on me, thank God and his grace, that it’s all happening this time of year: the season of waiting and of showing up. The thing that comes next, what some call Boxing Day but for me has always felt like a steep descent into sadness: the un-decorating, the tearing down, the ensuing emptiness. I’ve always been great at anticipation; it’s the aftermath of arrival that leaves me bereft.

But this year.

I think about the nativity that TK loves so much, how he points to each of them: the mother, the father, the baby, the wise men. I especially think about her, this mother surrounded by glowing light in most of our present-day renderings, and how she might have described it differently: the quiet, clean waiting broken by sweat, blood, and tears–then all these damn people show up right after she’s emptied her body and all she has is some hay and cloths…and him. How the tableau we’ve come to recognize probably had a bit more of that not-so-fresh feeling that you can’t capture on canvas or in sculpture. But we’re told–twice, once right after he was born and once after he disappeared for a few days as a child–that she pondered these things, that she treasured them in her heart. Once he was back with her, she pondered and treasured–and I wonder if this is the secret to Advent and Christmas living on, into even January. I ponder whether crossing the line from anticipation into presence might just be the thing I’ve been missing for so long–the next thing that’s been waiting for me.

“I’ve been doing a new thing–don’t you see it?” grace asks, and as TK grabs my hand to pull me further along, saying–not signing, but saying “more”, I can nod through tears and whisper it back myself: yes. Finally–yes.