I wish I could step from this scaffold…

The other morning I was rushing out the door to get a swim in at the local pool before my Holiday Schedule with the Boys began and we were immersed in therapy, hastily prepared lunches with small people barking orders at me, swim lessons, and too much screen time. I slid into my flip flops (thongs here, but that term could be confusing for the Americans among you) and stepped off our front porch. It was a rainy, grey day–like so many the past week–and the smooth steps beneath me were just slick enough to send my feet flying out from underneath me.

I haven’t fallen too much in my life. There was the time in junior high when I was rushing down another set of stairs at school and tumbled down a couple; it was enough of a spill to not be able to cover it up completely and a few people laughed. There was the time in ballet class at the same junior high when my pointe shoes had just the right amount of caked-up resin on them and I crumbled while doing a pirouette, kicking off months of fear heading into our spring performance that the event would repeat itself. And there was the time a few years ago when I was carrying Little Brother downstairs in the early-morning dark and I slid on the hardwood, sending us both to the floor in tears.

This most recent fall, like all of them really, took forever and an instant. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but that scene in Million Dollar Baby did, and I helplessly thought to myself that this could be bad. Very bad. At the very least it could be a “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” situation culminating in an injury that aged me well past my, ahem, twenty-six years. Also, I wondered who might be watching, which was probably the scariest possibility.

That moment of suspension in between the beginning and end of a fall carries more than time allows; it holds the weights of expectation and fear, of pleading and prayer. What if I hit my head and got amnesia like the woman in that Liane Moriarty book–would I still have to make lunches? What if I broke a leg and couldn’t run anymore and depression set in, along with voluminous amounts of chocolate on my slowing-metabolism-twenty-six-year-old hips? What if I broke my hip and had to become more acquainted with Australia’s healthcare system than I’d planned? If there were pain pills involved, would I be able to drink wine with them?

Last week we went to the playground (#holidayschedulewiththeboys) and I let the kids loose. At first they stuck together, each grabbing a pair of handles hanging from the play structure and swinging to do their “exercises” together. Then LB caught sight of a boy his age. They hesitantly approached each other before running off together, fast friends. This is LB: outgoing and friend-acquiring, the lone extrovert in our quartet. Immediately, The Kid protested. Exhaustion and emotion got the best of him, and he yelled across the playground, “WEEEEE-ILLLL! WEEEE-ILLL! BE MY FRIEND! COME BACK!”

It was heart-wrenching, naturally. There I was, torn between the two of them and their separate and unique personalities, but totally empathising with TK: I’ve often been the one abandoned for other options, left too shy and fearful to do anything about it. I encouraged him to play with them anyway, knowing how hard it would be. He continued to melt down. Two other mothers approached and kindly asked if he was okay, if there was anything they could do. One was the mother of LB’s new friend and tried to get him to offer TK some food or a play. TK would have none of it, preferring to become a puddle of tears, exulting in his emotions, despairing over his lack of control (of his little brother).

I can so relate. This world and its people hardly ever do I what I want.

He remained on the ground beside me while my own emotions swirled: irritation, frustration, sadness, that special kind of despair that only a parent who’s wondering what to do can feel as she fears she is ruining her child’s life.

After a few minutes, he stopped crying. He looked up at LB and the new guy, and something switched. He got up, resolve now written across his face instead of tears, and joined them.

There are so many moments in their, and my, life, when I hang suspended between the before and after on that Ferris wheel. So much so that it feels like life is made up of only those moments, the in-between, the “during the fall” while the unknown permeates the air around me and I can only wait. I realise more now (as I enter my late twenties) than ever that the control I fooled myself into thinking I had when I was younger was always an illusion. It took kids, and the spectrum, and an across-the-world move, and a million other things (with some falls thrown in) to make me finally laugh (and cry) at the truth being revealed. I am always mid-air: waiting for a new house to move into, waiting for another milestone to be achieved, waiting to know we’ll all be okay.

Meanwhile, a grace beyond and within these mid-air moments, these forever falls, guides me both to and through them, and promises that whatever shape I land in, there is only one true home and I am always headed there.

Which can be just words when I’m dealing with a sore ass, but also more when I think of how I landed on the part of my anatomy that is best-padded, and that the glass water bottle that shattered within my bag was beside me, not underneath me, and that even if there had been blood and guts and gore, there would also have been grace. Just more pain pills along with it.