We were meant to be back in America by now, with Little Brother finishing preschool and The Kid wrapping up second grade. Instead, TK has just begun year three and LB, in a stunning (to my heart) turn of events, now wears a red and navy uniform alongside his brother as he marches into a kindy classroom every morning.
OH, MY HEART.
I knew, once we settled in here among friends and a community that feels like family, that I wanted desperately to see LB in that uniform alongside the mates he’s had for a few years now, little siblings of TK’s friends. I knew that it would be easier this time around, our tenure in Australia three years rather than three weeks, my awareness of what food to bring (and in which containers) cemented, the walk to the school being a familiar one. I knew that LB, having accompanied me every day to drop off and/or pick up TK, would be more comfortable with this new stage in his life.
But that doesn’t mean I was prepared.
I still, often, have flashbacks to my last nursing session with LB. It was a memorable moment: I sat with him on the couch a couple of hours before I was due to take TK for his second MRI, and I had plans to spend the rest of the weekend toilet-training TK. So there was a convergence of goals and emotions that morning, a perfect storm of my own creation, to some degree, swirling around me. The minutes felt precious, fraught, important. It was a “last time,” and those are always hard, even when they should be happening.
Maybe I hadn’t fully examined the “last time” nature of this recent life shift: LB standing there in his uniform, hat perched nattily on his head, expression on his face wavering between excitement and nervousness but eventually falling into “determined to be brave”–the one that pierces my heart the most. And then, he was inside the classroom, along with all the other kids, the parents remaining outside scattered, and I realised what I so often forget: life is almost always full of grief.
It’s the laugh/cry emoji in real time, these moments that are called both bitter and sweet, that hurt and bring freedom, that feel good and bad and everything in between. I walked around town that morning free of hands reaching for mine, free of questions without answers pelting me, free of urgent bathroom requests, but also devoid of the buddy I’ve had for the last three years.
It was, like so much, a little of everything.
As was one afternoon last week, when the boys and I headed down to our favourite after-school setting, the beach at a local sailing club, and they slurped ice cream then hit the sand and water while the grownups had a drink. After a few minutes of happily building villages in the sand, TK sought involvement with the group, who were jumping from a nearby pier. LB was already racing around with them, abstaining from the jumps, and I heard TK ask one of the kids if he could play with them.
It nearly broke my heart. But that’s because projection is a hell of a drug, and my own isolation as a child was coming back to haunt me. But that wasn’t happening here.
After he asked a few times and his friend finally heard him, TK realised he had a choice to make: abstain from the jump like LB had chosen, or…not. I could see him weighing the options there on the pier. He looked up at me. I walked over.
“I’ll do it with you,” I told him, not sure I even wanted to, but when’s the last time that mattered to a mother? His friends began to cheer him on. My heart was being reassembled there on the dock. I honestly didn’t know, though, what he was going to do: he stepped forward, then pulled back, about a dozen times.
Then…something shifted. I felt his resolve, whether through his hand or our connected hearts and souls, I don’t know, but I looked at him and I knew: he was going to do it. He stepped toward the edge, his hand still in mine, and then–he let go.
The kids cheered. LB sloshed toward him through the water and bear-hugged him (then bravely refused to do the jump himself). I was reminded that my childhood is not TK’s, and vice versa. And that everything that is right also hurts a little, because of the letting go.
And yesterday? At his school’s swim carnival? He swam twenty-five meters. To more cheers.
So this morning, after such displays of bravery from my kids (and an absence of accompaniment by them), I headed down to the beach to do the thing I’ve been thinking and talking about but haven’t, yet. I put on my cap and goggles, and I sloshed toward it: the open water. I fully, finally, submerged myself in the Pacific.
At first I felt I’d drown, because the pool doesn’t have waves or fish or currents, and it does have a line that keeps me going straight. But after a few minutes, my strokes became more sure and I looked around at this world: unpredictable and vast, and adjacent to the old one, but still somehow brand new.