In a lot of ways, the day this column published was the same as the day the last one did. Tears were shed. Indelible memories were made. But, this time, the life I had carefully cultivated didn’t fall apart. In fact, I’m proud to say, my life isn’t cultivated in the least. It’s messy. It’s busy. It’s happy. It’s exhausting. And, most of all, it’s real.

I went upstairs, saying I had to check on the babies. But instead of turning right toward the nursery, I turned left toward my childhood bedroom. I pulled that tiny pink-and-purple notebook out from underneath my mattress and sat down on the bed, looking out the window. I flipped through until I found the entry from that fateful day. Pen in hand, I put a big check mark next to Become editor in chief of a magazine.

Then I read Find a man that loves me and doesn’t care that I can’t have children. I crossed it out and rewrote, Find a man that loves me for exactly who I am. Because that had been what I was asking for, really, hadn’t it? Now, with time and a grown-up dose of rationality, I realized it wasn’t having those gorgeous, perfect babies that healed me. It was realizing that no matter how my life played out, I was who I was born to be. I was enough.

I thought of Parker, downstairs, and I smiled. I picked up the pen again. Find a man who loves me for exactly who I am. Check.

Life, I have realized, ebbs and flows like the tide outside my old bedroom window. Some days the wind is too strong, and sometimes you are carried along on a gentle breeze. The hurricanes come; the landscapes change. Any expert seaman will tell you that, in the roughest seas, it’s best not to fight the tide. It’s better to let it lead you where it wants to, to let it lead you where, maybe, you were supposed to be all along.

All those years I was planning and plotting my course, controlling my every move, I wasn’t controlling anything at all. Now I’ve given in to the pull of the moon, to the song of the sea, to the magical divinity that exists under the Southern sky. It will fill up your heart and never let you go, I realized as I walked down the hall to the nursery, to gaze over my sleeping babies. It will never stop its quest to bring you back where you belong.

And somehow, if you’re really lucky, you’ll do what I did: you’ll find your way back home.

Acknowledgments

IT IS FITTING IN SOME ways that Under the Southern Sky is a story of feeling untethered, of life getting in the way and having plans vastly different from our own. It was written in rental houses, condos, and apartments during the fifteen months our family was displaced after Hurricane Florence ripped through our beloved town and home, and edited during a pandemic that has felt straight out of a dystopian novel. But in Under the Southern Sky—as in life—miracles are born from adversity. Relationships are created in the void of lost love and dashed hopes. New life springs from the ashes.