I’m sure most everyone who has a baby goes through this cataloguing, this realization that certain things have come full circle while others have begun anew. Perhaps it feels similarly for an astronaut looking down on Earth from space or for a tiny lady bug summiting a blade of grass or for anyone who rescues a living thing—the view has changed so profoundly that you have, too.

Five weeks after we lost Lorenzo, I posted what I had learned from that profoundly shifted view. I called it What I Know Now. Around the same time, I reached out to two grief mamas who had made similar decisions for baby boys, one of whom had also had HLHS. Both were pregnant with baby girls at the time. Nothing helped quite like their solidarity because they had seen the same view. And the new lives they were carrying were HOPE.

Recently, a grief mama reached out to me. I’ve never met her, as I still haven’t met the grief mamas who helped me, but you bond quickly when you are writing about your lost babies. It was a full-circle moment: I had seen enough to be able to help someone else. When she first wrote, I was pregnant with H. When I saw this mom swimming/drowning in the fresh flood of loss, I realized I no longer was, though that does not mean the waves don’t still crash. But I’ve mastered a certain kind of stroke, the one that allows me to keep going when I used to feel the lull of sinking. As I’ve discovered along the way, it isn’t one profound shift, but several. I keep changing because I was Lorenzo’s mom, as I will now that I’m H.’s.

I was recently asked just how I had changed now that I have H. What did I know now about being a mom? Well, I became a mom two years ago, not two months ago. I know that. I know how fiercely protective I am, in a primal way. I know I would lay down my life for hers. I also know I would have changed places with Lorenzo. I would have given him my heart. He taught me that. And thanks to H., I know how incredible active motherhood feels, moment by moment, as I learn all that she and I are capable of.

Strangely, as time passes, I think more about what I don’t know:

• What to write on the line of H.’s baby book that asks what number grandchild she is. She is the first in a way, and not in another way.

• When I will tell H. about her brother though I do know I will tell her.

• How many of Lorenzo’s things to give away, as I’ve been doing for friends and family who have brought baby boys into the world since his passing. It helps to know that those thriving babies breathe life into what was meant to be his. Some have even made it to an orphanage in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a friend recently adopted two boys. That’s pretty cool to think about in terms of Lorenzo’s reach! I’ve also dressed H. in some of his things. Finally, I’ve packed a box for another boy we may have one day. We may not, and then I really don’t know what I will do with the rest of his things. Or, it will be all too clear.

• What to do when another grief mama I know loses in her third trimester—again. I know some of what to say (your baby is precious and perfect and loved) and what not to say (this happened for a reason). I know all I want to do is get on a plane and hold her hand and let her cry.

• How it will feel to leave Chile after all that has happened here. Yes, there is that. It’s time to say goodbye to our home in the Southern Hemisphere after nearly three years for me and nearly four for Ryan. We are moving back to the U.S. with his company, not to California, but to a new state we haven’t lived in before. So, we will be starting over, but not in the ways we did here as newlyweds, with a new language and a new procedure for just about everything. Perhaps I don’t yet know what I will miss most, but I’m starting to sense… backyard tennis ball tosses with Ruby, walking the streets where I was pregnant with all of my children, the trips Ryan and I took so far away from home. I will miss my doctor; H. and I have been so well cared for. And so many dear friends.

I now have patience with the unknown; that may be the main thing life in Chile has taught me. Days here have been my very hardest and now, my very best. A place like that will stay close to you. H. will always be Chilean, so maybe she will come back and walk these same streets and see where she and Ruby came from and ask me to tell her about our days here. Maybe she will tell me all that she knows.