DEGAGNE

I've always been a late bloomer. I drove myself to the mall to buy my first training bra. I didn't start law school until age 26. The only thing I did before most of my friends was to marry and divorce.

When I was a little girl, I assumed I'd start having children around the same time my mom did, well-timed to coincide with the legal drinking age. But my twenties came and went, then I found myself separated from my husband at age 32. Although I had high anxiety about whether or not I would ever have children, I was able to distract myself with my law career and a string of relationships, some good, some not so good, while time marched on and my ovaries began their steady decline.

Then I met Scott. And he came with two of the best little bundles in the world, Emma and Quinny. And so it was that in my late 30s, I was introduced to the wonders and perils of true love, love for a man and his children, the kind that suddenly leaves you vulnerable to the vagaries of the universe in a way you never thought possible. One minute I was blithely jay-walking in high heels through Tribeca traffic, the next I was clutching two beloved little hands in an Upper East Side crosswalk, saying a little prayer that we'd make it to the other side.

The watershed moment when it really hit me that the footloose, champagne-fueled single girl I had been was gone for good came when I was about five months pregnant and Quinny had the stomach flu. Scott and I took turns carrying him into the bathroom, watching him cry and wretch into the toilet while we sat on the ledge of the bath tub and surreptitiously wiped our own tears. Exhausted, Quinny finally begged not to go into the bathroom again. So I held him over my shoulder and I just let him throw up all over me, again and again.

The sun came up and an exuberant Emma woke. She was nonplussed by her brother's stomach troubles - she'd recently had her own vomit-a-thon after getting over-excited about a trip to Disneyland - and insisted that I help her with a Halloween word search.

"Emma," I chided, with Quinny slung limp over my shoulder and both of us stinking and covered in vomit, "I'm a little busy. Can't you see that your brother is sick?"

"But I can't find 'DRACULA' anywhere," she pleaded.

I looked down and studied the puzzle. "Some of the words are written backwards," I told her. "Which really isn't fair. That's too hard."

So while Quinny rested his big, vomity head on my soiled neck and Scott changed our bed linens for the fifth time since midnight, Emma and I finished the puzzle. And I realized that I had completely capitulated to this family.

Nothing about my romance with Scott has followed the typical boy-meets-girl trajectory. It's more like one of Emma's word search puzzles than a narrative. Here's "LOVE," here's "CHILDREN," here's "FAITH." And just recently, over Memorial Day weekend, Scott and I, after "CHILDBIRTH," became "ENGAGED." Almost simultaneously, to Scott's delight, we also added a "CAR." And I suppose, once we get Henry sleep-trained and Quinny settled in nursery school and we find an apartment big enough to accommodate this growing menagerie, we will have a "WEDDING."

But for now, I am going to enjoy being a fiance. Because even though we've cared for children together, had a baby together, even bought an SUV together, Scott was still romantic enough to buy me a ring that, to this country girl, looks big enough to fry an egg on. There are moments in the midst of the chaos of our household when the light catches the diamond just right so that a little fire burns on my ring finger. And I remember that what came first was a girl who loved a boy and a boy who loved her back.