She is slight, with curly blond hair and a wide smile. She is soft-spoken and modest and has the air of a girl sheltered from the ugliness of the world.

I show her into the family room. I am embarrassed by the stains on the carpet and damp with perspiration from a frantic, last-minute attempt to tidy up before she arrives.

“Wow,” she says, turning her head slowly this way and that. “You have such a nice house! It is so big!”

I’m taken aback; I mumble my thanks and bid her sit down on the couch, wincing as she pulls a toy out from underneath her. She holds it in her hands, bones as delicate as a bird, and smiles at me.

“You are so organized!” she exclaims. “I would never know that two kids live here.”

I look around the room, puzzled by what she sees. What does she see that I don’t?

***

The streets around our home are lined with overgrown trees. Their trunks are gnarled and bent, and they look irritable, like the elderly men who shuffle out their front doors clad in slippers to fetch the mail.

When we looked for a house during a hectic three-day trip to the Midwest, I winced at the low-slung ranch homes with gravel driveways. The streets, without sidewalks, looked so ugly in comparison to the wide boulevards through which I pushed my daughter in her stroller.

Four autumns later, I walk the same streets that once made me flinch, homesick before I ever left home. My second child, a son, turns his face to catch the breeze on his tongue. My phone is tucked in my pocket, a strange reminder of a new life that requires me to be available at a moment’s notice for a far-away voice in New York City.

We walk, The Babyman and I, when he is restless. The bump-bump-bump of the wheels on the rutted road soothe us both. A man in a faded ballcap waves at us, smiling at the small boy with the blue, blue eyes.

“G’mornin!” he shouts. “Nice day for a walk!”

We smile back, my boy and I, as we take a left down Easy Street. The houses are humble and well-worn, some loved and some neglected. On the corner of Easy Street and Rainbow View, a jaunty white jeep pulls into a driveway.

The screen door creaks open and I catch a glimpse of an elderly woman, her body heavy with age, in a bright pink sweatsuit. She waits patiently as a young woman pulls a covered tray of food from the car.

Tears prick at the back of my eyes as I reach down to adjust the stroller’s canopy. “Babyman,” I murmur. “Mama loves her babyman.”

***

It’s been years since my vision was so clear. I see now, with 20/20 hindsight, how I let the past five years slip through my fingers. I mourned—deeply, legitimately—the death of my father. But the years that followed that first, terrible one are lost to me forever.

Months and days when beauty existed in the world. Months and days when my blessings mounted into great, shining hills and I turned my eyes from the riches. Months and days when my children were tender babies.

I struggled with the decsion—nay, the admission—that depression had mangled my personality to the point where I no longer recognized the woman in the mirror. Her eyes were so angry, so dead. She woke up angry and went to bed with sadness in her heart.

Morning, though it comes early, is welcome. Morning is when my children greet me with flushed cheeks and sleepy eyes. Morning is when I hold them close to my heart and breathe them in. I am in love, fully and completely and with abandon.

***

I wonder about the woman in the pink sweatsuit, the one on the corner of Easy Street. I think about the home of my youth, with its gleaming oak floors and bookcases filled with hard-back novels. I think of the journey from there to here and I hope against hope that when I am that woman, that woman in the pink sweatsuit, that I can look back over my years without regret.

In the distance I hear a siren and watch as an ambulance passes one street over. I cross myself, furtively, and whisper a prayer:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee …

I think of my father, speeding through dark streets to meet his final dawn.

We get home, The Babyman and I, and walk to the front porch with sunshine in our eyes. I hold his hand and help him navigate the cement steps to the door, his gleaming, upturned face so open and fearless.

His eyes lock with mine, the love so strong that I almost have to look away.

I don’t.

Instead, I usher him in the front door and drop to my knees. I hold him close to my body and feel my heart open, fully, painfully … finally.