Monday I hopped into the car with the boys after our usual weekday back-and-forth fighting and existential angst-ridden morning. They alternately blabbed and went quiet in the backseat, and the classical music station that The Husband loathes–the one I would like to glue into place on our dial because it is my sanity–began playing a familiar tune. As we turned from our street now onto the street where we used to live, the notes went from tumbling around my head to organising themselves into “God Bless America.” In between questions shot from the backseat about why we have a Hyundai Tucson and what would happen to the power lines if there were an earthquake, I tried to hear what the DJ (do they call it that on a classical station?) said about the musician who performed the song–how he was an Australian who moved to America by way of England and fell in love with the US.

I thought of how our journey as a family has been the reverse path: how we were at home in America, then considered moving to England, but instead landed in Sydney and proceeded to fall in love with it. I thought about this as the questions pelted my rapidly-shrinking head space and pangs of homesickness bounced around my insides, missing one place while loving another, feeling always-in-between homes. I thought about it as I felt the urgency to check realestate.com.au one more time (for the hundredth time) that morning, as I debated over the house we may have settled on, as I wondered when or if we’d ever stop moving. I thought about it as Little Brother cried from the front seat about wanting to go to Mommy School today, not preschool, and The Kid told him, “WILL. STOP IT. YOU HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL.”

I was a bit of a Monday morning.

That LB, the one who needs coaxing back into the old routine after a holiday, who needs a morning filled with cuddles on the couch and oh-so-much attention, his birthday party was this weekend and while I agonised over the thunderstorms that were predicted and how they’d affect our planned event in the park, I tried to focus on celebrating him. It’s not hard to do: he is celebrate-able, you might say, with his knowing grins and easy excitement, with his utterances implying his assurance of his own identity the day before: “I’m going to James’s class with him at church today so I can protect him.” The morning of his party he kept clapping his hands together in exultation: “I’m so excited for my birthday!” This one walks through the world with an air of confidence, an absence of self-consciousness, and this comes to his own language as well. While TK constantly assesses our individual linguistic patterns–TH and I speak/are American, while he and LB are/speak both British and Australian–LB, well, he just speaks. Often incorrectly, which is somehow better than correctly, because it brings us words like payooter (computer) and Dark Mader, and, most recently, hilarious.

Yes, LB has reclaimed and renamed hilarious for us. A few years ago, Louis CK tried to with a bit that TH and I had practically memorised about how the word is overused and incorrectly applied (it was funnier when he did it), but lately, in the wake of allegations admitted as truth, that bit (or its author, at least) has become less quotable. So LB stepped in and decided that hilarious meant something different altogether. Somehow he came to associate it with negativity, throwing around proclamations like, “I don’t want to go to the doctor. It’s HILARIOUS there!” or “You said we could go to the mall. That’s not fair–you’re HILARIOUS!” Fittingly, it was hilarious–these unknown-to-him misreadings, his attempted insults that landed instead as jokes as he grew more enraged while we laughed. Even after I explained it all to him, he kept doing it. So we kept laughing.

And last night, TK leaned in after I asked for a cuddle, and he assessed our language again: “Cuddles is Australian for kisses,” he said, and I thought about correcting him until I realised I like his definition better, so I planted one on him–his cuddle.

It made me think of all the words we use to define what we know, and to try to pin down what we don’t, and how sometimes they’re just…wrong. Or not enough. How you can live in a country that is both foreign yet familiar. How a home cannot, for us right now, be captured by a house, because we keep getting kicked out of them after a year’s time anyway, but also–and this is such a big part of what the last two years have been for us–home is where the four of us are: in rentals, in hotel rooms, at tables in the twilight piled with pizzas and bottles of wine. No, make that five of us, because grace is right there with us, whether you call it that or spirit or God or love or whatever word you use, the four of us walking within its eternal fifth presence, always somehow heading and being home.