Today started out just fab. The skies were grey, rain threatened, and I said to The Kid, “Why do you have to complain about everything ALL THE TIME?”
Even as I said it, I felt regret. (And believe me, it was the nicest of the statements that were flitting around my head in the moment.) But? Honestly? Why does he have to complain about everything all the time?
He doesn’t do that. And when I apologised to him, I told him that. But he does do it quite often, and I should know because it takes a complainer to know a complainer. It also takes an anxiety-ridden person with obsessive-compulsive tendencies and control issues to recognise one, and as far as that goes it’s like each of us is looking in a mirror when we’re around each other. His recent success with independence at school is counterbalanced at home with OCD behaviours and stabs at controlling everything in his environment, and I resemble that. It all reminds me of my life from childhood until…two seconds ago, usually, so this mirror does indeed have two faces.
My own issues, which have allowed him to come by his honestly, should make me more empathetic. And they do, in theory…and when I’m in solitude. And sometimes when I’m with him, in calm moments, talking at bedtime or cuddling on the couch. But at other times, we combine to combust. And then there’s Little Brother, beside us and watching, and now I have shame and guilt to add to the mix.
Parenting is so fun.
There are times when I look around at our life and think that things are almost too good, and then I have to laugh because I will never run out of things to discuss with my therapist, and soon TK will find the same with his. It’s all lather, rinse, and repeat around here, and no matter how many times we go through our rhythms, I still think that someday my insides will match my well-ordered and wiped countertops. A place for everything and everything in its place. Done.
Then TK screams about how LB is doing a poo and he just knows the toilet paper will be arranged messily afterward, and I realise that these moments aren’t aberrations that will disappear, but they are part of the rhythm. And there is no song without a rhythm.
I find myself revisiting our beginnings here lately, those moments after we first landed when everything was new and life felt like an extended vacation. There was uncertainty, but also potential. But that time carried its own grief that gets lost in the sands of memory as life becomes routine and new becomes familiar. We tell people how long we’ve been here and find that it exceeds their own stay. We’re becoming veterans, knowing and being known. There is such beauty in this, and also moments for grief.
What should have been a kindy year full of experiences that echoed TK’s has been a narrowed-down, pandemic-affected, altered year for LB, with fewer of those first-time school experiences. Yesterday, I said goodbye to my hairdresser, who’s moving back home to Europe. She was one of the first people I met here and I see her more often than I see any of my extended family. We’ve talked about anxiety, depression, Netflix. LB and I still miss his beloved preschool teacher, whom we lost eighteen months ago.
There are stretches of sunny days punctuated by rain that makes me forget how blue the skies are. And then there are swims in water so clear it makes me realise I never knew how cloudy it could get in the winter. There is sniping and forgiving. There are unforgettable dinner parties with friends, and regrettable hangovers the next morning.
There are sharps and flats and majors and minors and all the keys, and I never really knew how much they all tell a story until I listened to this. How we need every kind of note to make a song, and convey its meaning. How only when we embrace it all does it become music.