Our house stinks.

I know I’ve likely belabo(u)red the point, but this situation is getting beyond the bounds of normal limits. We’ve entered mildew/mo(u)ld territory now. This is some apocalyptic shit.

In my former life as an aspiring Fox News consultant, I blindly believed–and doubted–many things. One of the doubts was climate change, but whew chile…there are no doubts left now. Many scientists have surmised that climate change will hit Australia harder than the rest of the world, and if our carpet is any indication, the proof is RESOUNDING.

The shot: four months of drought and fires.

The chaser: a weekend of the worst flooding in thirty years.

There is airspace next to the downstairs aircon vent that I hold my breath when I pass through, like I’m walking by a graveyard in the fifth grade, and there’s a spot on the stairs to the front door that is just sort of…sopping, and a couple of mornings ago there were two frogs by that door, and yesterday Little Brother found a tiny lizard indoors, and y’all I cannot anymore. Tennis lessons and birthday parties have been cancelled. A boat was washed ashore, unmoored at the local beach the other day. This is the same harbour beach where people were surfing due to the storm-induced swells. The water everywhere is brown from whatever shit is stirred by these floods.

EVERYTHING IS SO GROSS.

Which means that when it comes to the real estate website, you better believe I’m right on top of that, Rose–countless times a day, imagining marble countertops and immaculate tiles and hardwoods and every other HGTV wet dream because hope is what saves us. I mean, kind of. Partly, at least.

I find myself wondering, and asking others cutely, if we can’t just have weather that’s, I don’t know, somewhere between fires and floods? Like, is that possible? And then we all laugh and go back to our mildewed houses and I forget that most of life? Is exactly that–between the extremes, in the mundane day to day.

(I just checked the real estate website again. At this point it is a verifiable tic.)

We drag the kids from house inspection to house inspection (open houses) on Saturdays, in search of a dream that will turn out to be a compromise that won’t answer our deepest longings, then coming home to our current house which is totally sufficient for our needs and even great in a lot of ways but still feels like sliding back into an old set of clothes after trying on brand-new ones. And I realise that yes, there are fires, and yes, there are floods, but there are also parts of life that I turn into extremes.

Parent information night was at the boys’ school a few days ago and at the year three session, the standardised testing that begins this year was brought up and I felt the tension in the room rise. Questions were tossed around that really amounted to “how can I propel my kid as far ahead as possible so I’ll feel okay as a parent?” and I felt the pull that used to drive me–the one that tells me to give in to being defined, and having my children defined, by how well we all perform. The undertow was there to yank me down.

Then I thought of my boys, currently at home with The Husband, and how–generally speaking–happy they are. How full of hope. How they don’t even smell mildew. How what they really need is space to feel, and recognition that they are exactly who and where they’re meant to be, and that mistakes are like muddy puddles–they can get you dirty while also being fun as hell.

So I removed that particular concern from the Fire/Flood column, much like The Kid proclaims when he hears something he doesn’t like: “DELETE!”

And I’m trying to do the same with the other moments that threaten to undo me, like when LB waves bravely at me from his class’s line formation in the morning–I want to crumple, and I let myself feel the feelings, but I remember that they are held by hands bigger than mine so I cry a little, then breathe. And when I do, I feel a bit of the weight I’ve been voluntarily shouldering begin to slip off, consumed by fires and floods that seem to just take away, but actually reveal what will never leave.