You can’t keep safe what wants to break.

“This must be killing you,” she said.

We were standing in the kitchen with our husbands, glasses of champagne in our hands. The boys played steps away with their sitter, and the men…well, the men had placed their beers on the countertop so that they could take a look inside the hood above the stove. To see if a dead animal was there. Also, we were all in costume.

It went like this: days before, I had noticed a burning smell coming from the kitchen even though I wasn’t cooking. A few days after that (on my birthday, no less), I had stumbled downstairs in dire need of coffee and was greeted by the smell of death wafting from…where? The trash can? We emptied it. The flowers wilting on the countertop? We chucked them. The toaster? We cleaned it. Candles were burned, surfaces were wiped, and still it remained.

Until that evening, the costumed champagne evening, when I was making dinner for the boys and saw it. It was a dot on the counter, then it wiggled. I yelled up the stairs to The Husband.

IT WAS A FUCKING MAGGOT, Y’ALL.

And as I shrunk from its writhing body, I scanned the area around it and noticed more. A half-dozen of them lurking in the crack between the backsplash and the counter, mocking my attempts at cleanliness and order. Which is why she was right, when she said it must be killing me: “I know you love things to be clean.” Endless bottles of spray, countless nights of wiping, a possible Swiffer addiction, all leading to this: what would later be discovered (by TH, as I got the hell out of there while he looked) as a dead rat all up in that hood.

Jesus help us.

It’s embarrassing, really, to know that that rodent sat decaying up in our wall for a good week before we (he) disposed of him; that despite my daily and nightly efforts, something was still rotten in the state of New South Wales. That there is no amount of scrubbing that can get rid of the hidden skeletons.

There’s a metaphor here, I just know it.

Earlier that day, I’d gotten a text: The Kid’s therapist was ill and couldn’t make it into school. Neither of them could, actually, and this year not being last year (i.e. this year’s teacher not being last year’s teacher, and Year One’s grammar not being Kindy’s play), a quick chat with TK and his educators wasn’t going to cut it. Little Brother and I had plans with one of his many “best friends” and his mum, one of mine, involving a ride into the city and an art gallery, and the three of them waited patiently on the playground while I tried to sort it all out. Once TK was, against all odds, settled, I made motions to leave. That’s when I heard the sobs. And our plan changed.

The four of us went to the beach instead, to the playground there and its coffee kiosk, and for an hour endured the sunshine and water views (and my anxiety, nonetheless) of Plan B. I wanted to salvage what I could, so I took TK back to school while LB and our friends went to their house. I watched gymnastics class. I helped with some grammar. I situated him into music class. And then I left and headed for my friend’s place, where LB and his mate were engaged in Nerf wars. I sat on the grass in the sun and told the truth: how hard it is sometimes, when you see that things aren’t what you were maybe telling yourself they were.

She displayed her typical more masterful grasp of objective reality, tempering my purely emotional-based one with some truth of her own, and I was once again pulled off the ledge by love, which is a nice little recurring theme in my life. And when I picked TK up a short while later, he was better than fine, despite my frayed nerves and sore heart. We do this: our family, and our friends-as-family, we survive the spectrum and dead rats and maggots, because this is what we do, this is our story. Even when I try to hide or deny the parts that make it ours.

Sometimes the challenges that TK faces feel like a direct punch in my heart. My fears for my children’s feelings, for their being loved and enjoyed and never ever made fun of, for my deep-seated and insecure need to never fly above the radar despite that being where I’ve found the most grace–they are targeted by the spectrum, laid waste and left to die and be eaten by maggots.

Is the metaphor working?

What I’m saying is this: autism and changed plans and anxiety, they are killing me, and my fears alongside them. And they, because of how grace infuses them, are also bringing me back to life.

It’s messy, and it often smells, and there is so much struggling and searching to find where the rotten parts are, but then there is the morning after, when it smells and feels like home again because I’m not trying to cover up or deny what was meant to die and be carted off, and what was meant to be there in the first place.

We saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Saturday night at the Opera House, where it was accompanied by an orchestra playing its score, and I had forgotten so much of it: how this is the one where Voldemort comes back to life, how somehow this is also (consequently?) the one where it starts getting good, how this is the one where Hermione says tearfully, at the end, that “everything’s changed now, hasn’t it?” And Harry responds, matter-of-factly, “Yes.”

Afterward, we came home to two sleeping boys, and I climbed in bed between them, and thought of all the ways they’ve changed me. All the boundary lines, the Before and the After of their existences, the deaths and the resurrections. I listened later to the truth: that “difference is a teacher.” How my sporadic and flailing and fearful efforts to make TK “like everyone else” would rob the world of so much, of him–one of my favourite teachers.