“The things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful.” –Ben Platt, concluding his Tony acceptance speech

“Can you become…a new version of you?” the voice sang from my screen every week throughout the end of college and the first half of dental school, and I wanted to scream back, “I HOPE SO BECAUSE I’VE BEEN WORKING ON IT MY WHOLE LIFE!” This desire to be something other than the meek, flailing twenty-something (and before that, teenager, and before that, kid) that I seemed to be, it fueled everything I did. My biting sarcasm (and other defense mechanisms), my studying, my clinging to the barest hint of relationship, my move to New York City. LIKE FELICITY! I found comfort in a narrative that appeared to glorify my own. Plus, she got the guy in the end. I mean, they cheated on each other, like, A LOT, but they ended up together.

Meanwhile, it seemed that everywhere I went, there I was. Still. Without the guy.

Now I have three guys. A trinity of males who fill my heart and my washing machine and my waking (and sleeping) hours with concern for their well-being, efforts toward their happiness, irritation at their insubordination. I am the same person I ever was, fighting my own constant inner unholy trinity of frustration, anger, and self-righteousness. I’m also more different from that kid and teenager and twenty-something than I’ve ever been, for being a wife and mother has unlocked parts of me that I never had access to before. Parts I didn’t know existed. Some of them? Damn ugly, recesses of selfishness and a need to control everything/one in my path, writ large in the daily monotony of life within a family. Some of them shocking in their gentleness or ferocity, reflecting the mystery of being a mother, soaked in ambivalent waters that run so deep.

The Kid is getting all Felicity on me, becoming a new version of himself. Or is he just becoming…more himself? I watch as he resembles some type of local celebrity: there are people crossing our path daily who see him coming, and welcome him. He stops and smiles at the mother on Spit Road whose son studies him while she grins big when he walks up, asks him what kind of car he has today. He turns to the next table at restaurants and gives his coy “Hiiiii,” flashing a smile, and when they’re lucky they get a look at that day’s vehicular choice too. He delights babies, who squeal with glee (usually) when he approaches and tickles their feet or pats their faces. His confidence is growing along with his charm. He is becoming unlocked, getting accessed. And it’s beautiful.

But not everyone likes these updated versions of ourselves. This past weekend the boys and I entered the lift at the shopping center, the glass one that we ride without destination multiple times a week, and TK set about pushing the buttons as he does, like an expert, the lights flashing beneath his fingers that are so attuned to when the door needs to open and close. It’s like a language he’s learned. But not one everyone speaks it.

An older woman got on the lift and narrowed her eyes at the injustice of a child being permitted such freedom. At the audacity of a mother who gave the permission. She watched his every move, to the point that she missed her stop and became outraged. What follows is a transcript of the ensuing conversation:

Nasty Old Bitch (NOB): He just made me miss my stop!
Me (doubtful, but willing to put it to rest quickly): Well I’m sorry about that. But I don’t think it’s the end of the world. (Okay, maybe that wasn’t very placating after all.)
NOB (Stares at him, trying to block his hands from the buttons, growing increasingly agitated as the elevator goes the opposite direction from her destination; finally glares at me): Where are you even GOING?
Me: We’re not going anywhere. We’re riding for fun.
NOB (interrupting me, nodding so hard I’m worried her plastic surgery scars will rip): That’s what I thought. RIDING FOR FUN. You have no business doing that. And he has no business pushing buttons.
Me: Like I said, I don’t think it’s the end of the world. And if you can’t handle a kid who wants to ride the lift for a few minutes just because it makes him happy, that sounds like your problem.
NOB: HE MADE ME MISS MY STOP!
Me: Well, you must be very important if you don’t have thirty extra seconds to spare for an honest mistake!
NOB: Well he must be the most important one of all!
Me: HE IS TO ME.
NOB: NOT TO ME!
Me: AND THAT’S YOUR LOSS.
Pause; silence.
Little Brother: Mommy?
Me: Yes, buddy?
LB (Grins): Hi.
Me (laughing): Hi.
(Elevator door opens, woman exits angrily. I WIN.)

There have been other versions of this story before, I assure you. Snide remarks made under someone’s breath. My reticence, my fear of conflict leading me to stay silent. Hell, I’ve been my own version of the NOB, sneering at parents who clearly don’t discipline their children enough, rolling my eyes at crying babies on planes. I’ve been all over the wrong side of everything. But this time? This time, the anger and frustration that typically plague me, born of either self-righteousness or fear? They were gone. What I was, was oddly calm. I was defending my child against irrational ugliness, and damn it felt good. And bad, because it’s never fun to deal with bullshit (mine or others’). But mostly I felt like a warrior princess who’d be DAMNED if anyone was going to step up on her baby.

What I’m figuring out is this: we are all mixed versions of ourselves at any given time, the Me from decades ago interacting with the Me of now (hello, inner child therapy exercises). I am not becoming a new person. I am not becoming stronger, unless the kind of power you mean is the kind that often looks like weakness, the exhaustion of parenting, of life, of facing my own insufficiency driving me into the grace that answers with all its enough-ness.

A friend put it better in a message recently: “To put my allegiance to a sense of Me at any point is to say that I am immutable and unchanging. I am the created; I am a work in progress; and I am so incomplete and messy and fucked that I can’t even redeem myself. But the animating fact is the love of God, the immeasurable grace, the unchangeable holiness of who He is.”

Hell yeah. Whether I walk away from an encounter feeling like Wonder Woman or NOB, whether TK is sporting one of his wide-as-the-earth smiles of late or melting down at the rain-soaked Vivid Sydney display at the zoo, whether LB is delightfully defusing an elevator dustup or providing material for the next edition of The Strong-Willed Child…I can stop chasing alternate universes where I don’t have anxiety, where TK isn’t on the spectrum, where LB doesn’t act out to get attention. We are always in the right place, even when it sucks. My strangeness and yours and his and hers, hobbling us into the rescue of grace by what we will never and always be.

We just talk and take in the view.

This morning, outside The Kid’s classroom, a couple of other mums and I were left behind once the two single-file lines had chaotically climbed the steps and retreated from outdoor play to begin indoor learning. “I just hate when our mornings begin like this,” one of them said, recounting the day thus far, which included a slowpoke child who wouldn’t listen to instructions and some responsive voice-raising and regret. We commiserated together over these guilt-laden moments, and pronounced gratitude for children’s short memories.

I’m having these conversations daily, it seems.

All the mothers I know are doing a bang-up job with what they’re given, which is to say imperfect kids and imperfect selves in an imperfect world, but we are, without exception, beating ourselves up at points along the way. If not the entire way, managing doubt and regret along with grocery lists and dinner prep, carrying guilt while folding the laundry, our children on our minds whether they’re with us or not. It’s a weight that’s as impossible to fully share (thanks, biology) as it is to elucidate for others, namely, the men in our lives who often try to understand but–and we love you, but it’s true–never fully will. Not without lying on the bed or operating table themselves, being cut open or squeezing out, and enduring the mind-blowing and never-ending explosion of hormones and body changes that accompany the miraculous act of giving birth. It’s an incredible gift and an isolating endeavour, and we’re trying to find unifying moments with others even as we often feel we’re doing the bulk of it alone.

So how’s everyone else’s day going?

I realised yesterday morning how much of my life operates under the thumb of fear, and how it turns me into a creature that can’t sit still but is always one moment, or hour, or day ahead, and how hard this makes parenting, and life, for me. How an afternoon stretching before us with just me and the kids (hell, an hour) looms like a spectre and that this is something I do to myself because underneath it all is the fear, the anxiety, of having to fill that time and make it matter; how NOT to populate it with my mistakes. I am afraid of myself, of hurting them by raising my voice or misinterpreting some outburst or just not being enough, and I’m so tired of the way this fear follows me around without my even seeing it. How I’ve somehow come to accept it as just the way things work. Motherhood, these moments, they should be a gift, right? So a friend asked the other day, and I counted yet another layer of guilt we’re putting on ourselves: the guilt of not enjoying every. damn. minute.

It should be a gift, and it should be magical, and also? Some of it really sucks. And I am of the firm belief that we need the space to recognise those moments, the sucky ones, just as much as the sepia-toned ones, not only because this is honest, but because it makes the magic more magical. I’ve found myself saying it lately, (hopefully) inside my head in those moments when I look at what is happening and think to myself that if this were any other job, everyone would quit: “God, this sucks right now. I mean, REALLY SUCKS.” Most of these moments involve poo, FYI. But not all.

TK won’t shut the fuck up. Isn’t it cute? Weren’t you right, whoever you were who told me for those four silent years that one day I’d long for a moment of quiet? And yes, there is value in recalling those days, those moments when I would have given my left nut for the word “Mommy,” and now he says it constantly. And I hear it now, and it both soothes my heart as it makes me want to hide in the closet with a bottle of wine, because it is a reminder of need. And I’m not so good with others’ need. WELCOME TO PARENTING, ASSHOLE! you may say, as you whisper, “I told her so” under your breath about the talking thing, and if so, sorry, I’m all out of wine but you can have a tall glass of shut the hell up because I’m WORKING ON THINGS here. Motherhood, like health care coverage, ain’t that simple and you don’t get past the hard part. So on the way to and from school, my formerly wordless boy asks a million questions as I wonder which one will turn me from Patient, Responsive Mommy, Fount of Knowledge and Wisdom and into Cruella Bitchface Mommy, on the local news at 7 tonight. Some of these questions are so brilliant and yet without answers, as while I can tell him what makes up a Happy Meal, I’m not sure I can explain an Angry Meal or a Sad one (some help, McDonald’s?). I grit my teeth as he sounds off again while lying in bed, and I’m imagining my hot bath and my own bed, both so close yet so far away, and then I realise these are the moments that are scaffolding his young childhood and AREN’T I AN ASS.

With some friends last week, I asked for encouragement. For prayers that I would just enjoy my children. Just enjoy them.

Later that day, TK and Little Brother were gabbing away in the backseat. An actual conversation, not exactly regarding nuclear physics, but interaction nonetheless, and I gave myself a moment to stop ruing the podcast I couldn’t listen to because this was a moment I had, once upon a time, dreamed for. We got to the parking lot and TK whined because we were going to the beach first instead of the playground, and I wanted to scrap the whole thing and retreat to the closet. A few minutes later we were finally on his playground and I ran between the boys, helping LB up the slide and swinging TK, and I saw a path in the distance. “Want to go on an adventure walk?” I asked them, and they giddily assented as though it was the best idea they’d ever heard. “What will be there?” asked LB, and within a second had answered himself: “We get to find out!” As the sun set, we climbed the hill that overlooked the water. “WowEEE!” TK exclaimed. “This is the view!”

This is the view. This expanse ahead of us, with the climb always there too, the falling down and skinned knees and expletives and regrets, and the view. They ask about the sunset every day, remark on its beauty, and they notice it because I showed it to them, and I am doing so many things wrong but there is this: somehow there is teaching that has occurred outside the grandiose plans I once had that now litter the wayside along with the too-small, too-easy dreams of the past, and within their death is the seed that is growing into this. The reality of what is. The view before us. They are recognising the narrative within which our lives operate, the story of a grace that walks uphill with us, that stops alongside us when we’re hurt and acknowledges the pain, that provides sunrises and sunsets and rainbows to remind us it never leaves. That teaches us, is teaching them, to see.

What’s next? We get to find out…together.

I’m passionately smashing every expectation.

We’re sitting in another classroom, with another teacher and another therapist, on another morning. It all feels very familiar.

And yet not. Because we’re in another country, on another continent, in another hemisphere, in another season. And then another thing happens.

It’s only good news.

These meetings, which have been occurring in conference rooms and classrooms and waiting rooms and exam rooms around the world now, have led to this place, this school overlooking a harbour filled with boats. The sunshine creeping in through the window and the sound of children playing outside while my own alternate their own playing with trips over to see us, their parents, sitting on tiny chairs at an undersized table, two people who love them more than they can imagine, talking to two people who love them too.

This is the same, but it’s totally different.

She pulls out James’s papers, a thin sheaf with his picture on the front–his mug shot, I joke to him, and I feel the freedom to joke, to laugh, because we’re not here to recognise red flags or discuss warning signs. We’re here to check in. We’re here to, I’m beginning to feel, celebrate.

There’s news of all the expectations he’s smashed this year, of all the goals he’s already met that need to be adjusted already. And as I hear each one, I feel it fall on my heart because I know the challenge each one is: the muscle weakness that must be overcome, the noise that must be filtered out, the sensory input that must be recognised. None of this has come easily to him, and this boy of mine playing with his brother ten feet (3 metres) away, I see him clearly for the first and millionth time. He is home.

We take turns talking about what we’ve witnessed from him: the unprompted and lingering hug he gave a classmate at the shops this weekend (overcoming social anxiety); the handwriting that’s taking off (smashing wrist weakness); the joy at the school’s fireworks night (filtering through all the stimuli). We’re all grinning, all saying how proud we are of him. And his teacher, she explains her side: “He was an unknown. All the other kids coming in, we had a chance to meet them, but he was an unknown.”

He’s not unknown now.

Everywhere we go, we hear his name. Our names. I run into friends at the park where I sit on a bench with Little Brother, and he and his buddy take off for the slide while I talk mum-to-mum. I lead The Kid across the street toward the schoolyard and older kids and their parents greet him by name.

And yeah, there are the tough revisits: the meltdown in ALDI that echoes my months-ago one in IKEA; four-letter words both; but his with the added difficulties that render him unable to cope and me, unable to deal, and by the time the three of us are sitting on his bedroom floor, LB patting his back and climbing on me, we’ve all been crying, but we are together. And we are understanding each other a bit more every day. A few minutes later I’m making dinner (peanut butter sandwiches, thank you very much; this day has been a bitch) and realise that I can manage his behaviour–manage him–or know him. Dammit. The first one would have been so much easier.

His teacher mentioned the transition program they’ll have in place to move him up next year, and one of my deepest fears is then addressed: he WILL be moving, and not only that but they assure us he’ll have some core friends in place around him. HE HAS CORE FRIENDS. And I think back to a year ago, when I was decimated by his staying put in the same class, fearful for his future. To nine months ago, when I dissolved into tears leaving a local private school here in Sydney because they were so unwelcoming. All the while, we were headed here. Were being ushered, loved all the way here. Through tears and frustration, failure and heartbreak, landing at home together.

I take LB to get his hair cut at the barbershop on a Friday morning, and he fights it, crying the whole time from my lap. Later that day, we return. Revisit. It’s the same place, but it’s different: TK sitting in the chair by himself, laughing at the process. He used to scream. I hear “Midnight Train to Georgia” from the radio, and I just laugh. Home and home. God, we’re so home, all the time.

And on Saturday night, after an afternoon of successful swimming and inflated-slide climbing that takes my breath away in the best way, we head to the fireworks show. On the way I imagine bombings, of course, because that’s my brain doing its ridiculous work, but instead we sit on a blanket. I place headphones on his ears while The Husband has to cart LB away, who can’t take the noise. A friend (I HAVE CORE FRIENDS) comes to sit beside me and I pour her a glass of champagne and we laugh as TK beams with joy, literally bouncing with it, beside us. This place isn’t perfect (their milk containers could be sturdier, for instance–the one I dropped this morning exploded a gallon of dairy goodness all over the kitchen. But then I told another mum about it and she described it as one of those, “Oh, for FUCK’S SAKE!” moments and all was well). I know there will be rough spots, difficulties. There already have been. It’s called life.

But right now, as grace keeps bringing us back to the same spots to admire the different views, it’s also called home.

Say it with me: I’m a shitty mom.

No? Not into that? Doesn’t make you feel better? Because lately I’ve come to wonder what our group obsession is with telling each other what a good job we’re doing; what wonderful mothers we are. And then I show myself and others a little grace and realise, duh, it’s because this matters more than just about anything else we do. We don’t want to suck at it.

But guys. WE DO.

And we don’t. But the parts where we do suck–where we fall apart, and don’t have the answers, and are left heaving and hurting with heaving and hurting kids beside us? These parts are real and deserve attention. They deserve being called what they are. And what they are, are not our best moments. And I have a lot of them. And maybe shitty is too strong a word, and sucks doesn’t exactly foster conversation, but neither does hiding those dark moments and covering them up with pretty ones.

I’m tired, is what I’m saying. So if you’re tired, and feel weak, and need a place to sit without having to get your shirt dry-cleaned first and have a professional photographer gloss away the messy bits, then there is room over here.

Welcome. Let’s breathe.

The other night The Kid set off our house’s security alarm. Yep, surprise! WE HAVE A SECURITY ALARM! It was news to us too–not that we had one, exactly, because the control panel is right there on the wall, but being the renters we are and having been given no information about said alarm, we figured it was disarmed. That there was no danger of it being set off.

TK woke us from that reverie.

So it was that on a Friday evening at around 7 pm, in the dark autumn night when bath time should have been gearing up, a shrill electronic scream broke through the air on our quiet street. TK freaked out. Loud noises coupled with parental anxiety? TIME TO HIT THE ROOF. Nothing would assuage his fear; no amount of reassurance would calm him. So I did that thing they tell you to do if you want to be a good mom: you play the flight attendant when the plane is crashing and your kids are the passengers. You stay (fake being) calm. IT DIDN’T WORK. Not for TK, at least. Meanwhile, Little Brother bounced around like we had just kicked off a rave and it was the BEST, MOST EXCITING NIGHT EVER. The Husband fiddled with the control panel, then descended to the basement to fiddle with the fuse box, and I heard proclamations floating up the stairway that brought to mind the dad in A Christmas Story when he was working on the heater, so I made an executive decision. Maybe even a shitty one: I poured a short roadie of red (one inch, or 2.54 centimetres if you’re nasty) into a stemless glass, threw on some shoes, forgot my wallet, and told the kids we were going for a drive. LB bounced behind me and into his carseat, glee plastered across his face at this break in monotony, while that same break in monotony plastered terror over TK’s features. He reluctantly climbed into his booster, though, and we backed out of the driveway in time to meet one of our neighbours who was walking by to “check on us” (figure out what the hell was going on and why we couldn’t stop it). He graciously offered us a place to stay if we needed it, which I think was sincere and not code for “I’m going to have you kicked out of the country if this doesn’t cease in the next five minutes.”

And off we drove into the night.

As “Cherry Bomb” poured from the car’s speakers and LB sang Mickey Mouse songs in the backseat and TK asked the same thousand questions over and over and we drove circles around our neighbourhood, I thought about how wonderfully shitty I am at this whole “caring for others” thing. Even the film Bad Moms didn’t touch on the idea of chauffeuring your kids around with takeaway Shiraz in hand, but I thought that movie kind of sucked anyway because their lives were more funny than depressing and who believes that? Besides, LB was now giggling in the backseat and TK was visibly calming (or I was), and at the end of the day if you bring home two intact and somewhat happy children, I’d say that’s a success (#lowstandards).

The alarm eventually subsided once TH pulled the plug on nearly all our electricity. We had to throw out everything in the freezer and fridge (RIP, 2 bottles of champagne), but we survived. Success.

The boys are taking swim lessons and they are truly smashing it. They willingly jump in to their teacher and are both going underwater (LB’s submersions have been mostly accidental, but whatever) and they’re learning survival skills which is all encouraging, but my favourite development so far is how they cheer each other on. TK gets into the water first, and LB yells from the side, “Hooray! Yay, James!” and applauds as if he’s watching the Olympic finals. Then it’s LB’s turn, and James throws out a few “Yay Will, go”s before begging to ride the glass elevator. They are for each other, and it echoes LB’s utterances from his carseat on the night of the alarm: “It’s okay, James. It’s not scary.”

I tell him what a good brother he is, because that’s what you do. That’s what people want to hear, right? But the thing is, sometimes it is scary. Sometimes the thing that doesn’t bother you, or undo you, or leave you heaving and hurting on the floor beside your heaving and hurting children? Sometimes that’s the very thing that DOES do all that to someone else. We are all broken in different ways by different things. Some of us, ahem, get through a spinal surgery and hospital stay with their kid then almost lose their mind when he finally starts talking and won’t stop asking what every. word. means. Some moms have to leave their son’s room during bedtime because he won’t read his damn book like he knows he’s supposed to, and when those moms finally cool off and reenter the room and the son asks, “Mommy, why did you leave?” those moms say they nicest thing they can think of which is also true, and it sounds like, “I needed a break.”

Sometimes we need a break. And here’s what that can look like to me: we all want to hear we’re great at this, but what I think we really want, even more, is to know that in those moments when we’re not so great at it? When we, in fact, kind of suck at it? That we’re still loved, that there are people who won’t abandon or refuse to forgive us.

The boys talk to each other in the car now, and it is hilarious. They argue over the most ridiculous and non-existent crap, like whether the airport is closed and why people go to jail. Throw in a few made-up words and I feel like an Uber driver carting around a couple of drunks. It is wonderful. And, sometimes, when they reach a fever pitch and start whining and my eardrums bleed, it is shitty. But every Saturday, they cheer each other on. They emerge from the pool, and the car, and the alarms, and the days, intact and mostly happy. They are learning to take care of each other, as I am learning to take care of them. We are doing something you can’t be taught yet still have to learn: how to love, and how much life there is in admitting we have miles (or kilometres, if you’re nasty) still to go.

Females are strong as hell. –Walter Bankston

This morning a text dropped on my face in the middle of the pre-school chaos, asking me if I could read with The Kid’s class today because the mum I alternate weeks with had an appointment she forgot about. CUE THE UPHEAVAL.

But not before I quickly texted back “Sure” with a thumbs-up emoji because I AM IN A NEW PLACE AND MY NEED TO BE LIKED HERE (ANYWHERE) KNOWS NO BOUNDS. Especially when my kids are involved. So I assented to the alteration of our morning landscape–not exactly akin to the beaches of Normandy, but adding anxiety nonetheless–and proceeded to let the new tension tighten my shoulders, cramp my back, raise my voice, and leave me realising once again how laid-back Aussies are and how NOT laid-back I am. How f-ing mental I am, to put it their way. In a quiet moment in front of the mirror, I breathed. I thought about my kids, quietly watching their screens in my room. And I did this: I resolved not to do better but to let go.

We moms carry too much.

We carry tension, and anxiety, and guilt, hung like millstones around our necks while water threatens drowning all around us but land persists, and we do too. We carry scars (my children seem to be magnetised to the one on my abdomen out of which they were born, landing on it with such regularity that I wonder if it’s their mother ship calling them home). We carry bags, ridiculous folds of leather and fabric containing the secrets of universes both Lego and literal, with some sand and dried peanut butter mixed in for WTF-fun. (At least I hope it’s peanut butter.) We carry hearts, and it’s a good thing when I chose that poem for my wedding I didn’t know how painfully true it would apply to my parenting or I would have run the other direction (don’t feel bad for The Husband; he would have too). We carry hands within ours, and soiled underwear, and smears of poo we don’t realise are there until it’s too late and social alienation is, once again, inevitable.

Did I mention we carry guilt? I still don’t know the names of Little Brother’s daycare teachers. I keep meaning to look that up.

And on Mother’s Day, we carry around handmade gifts and hopeful expectations that we’ll be recognised, that we’ll be seen, that maybe we’re not doing the whole damn thing wrong.

And maybe a bit of hope for some time away. During which we’re not touched. By anyone.

Which is why (along with a concerted effort to pre-empt a breakdown similar to last year’s) I told TH in no uncertain terms that this year, what I’d really like for Mother’s Day is a hotel room by myself in the city. And I got it, y’all. Thankfully, I have a partner who thinks handling live turds in the hand is as gross and #notmagical as I do, so he gets it. Also, he has a vested interest in my not going insane and blowing this popsicle stand. So on Saturday night I found myself in a warm and glowing room at the Sheraton where a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne awaited me. (Note to Jesus: if heaven is supposed to be better than this, then you have your work cut out for you.)

(And note to you, readers: I am not bragging. Please understand the point here: I NEEDED A BREAK OR I WAS GOING TO GO CRAZY. We just completed a whirlwind trip across the world and back, right after a whirlwind move across the world, and I was reclaiming some space. Some sanity. It was a luxury and trust me, this is not lost on me. Which is why I’m considering starting a charity that provides mums with hotel rooms when their anxiety meds run out. I’ll keep you posted.)

I almost cried when I entered the bathroom and saw all that space that was for me, just MEEEEE!!! Compare it to our bathroom at home, whose own space is constantly exploited by two small bodies that hover around it constantly as I try to squeeze out a wee to the sound of screams. Heaven.

I wrote for two hours with champagne by my side, and then I met a friend downstairs for dinner. And this introvert who values her time alone found a gift in the next three hours, during which I spilled red wine all over myself (#nailingit) and deepened a growing relationship with some like-minded talk and laughter. Then I went back upstairs, drank another glass of champagne, and watched Ghostbusters (#nailedit). (Did I mention I shared a bottle of champagne with another mum the night before and she’s amazing? CHAMPAGNE FOR THE WIN!)

The next morning I managed the logistics of shoving all my stuff into my bags and carrying a bouquet of blooms to boot. The bags hung heavily off my shoulders and the flowers weighed in my arms like a baby as I walked through downtown Sydney. I was sweating when I arrived across from the church, in the park where I was meeting my family. And it wasn’t lost on me, the wonderful yet groaning weight of all the stuff, all the love, that I had to carry.

We carry so much. We carry dreams for our children, and disappointment over dreams dashed. We carry diagnoses, and fear over our own health and theirs. We carry empty spaces inside us waiting to be filled with the hope of new life, and we carry the little deaths that come each month when that doesn’t happen. We carry the phantom kicks that remind us of what pregnancy felt like and the ensuing wonder over whether we’re really done with that chapter (don’t worry, TH, we are). We carry confusion and ambivalence and regret and hope, and we carry it all every. single. day. We carry it to sleep, often waking up with it and the little ones who give birth to it lying right beside us. We carry, and we persist, because this is what we do. It’s how we go on living. It sucks, and it’s amazing, and the only thing lying between those extremes is…oh, just the mundanity of every day of life.

Oh, and we carry tunes. Recently LB asked me to sing a song about dinosaurs, and of course the only one I could think of was the classic below. I sang it for him, and then TK joined us in the car later that day, so I sang it for them, and now it’s the only GD thing they ever want to hear. This morning, in the middle of the upheaval and my pleas to get into the car, I urged TK to open the door. A second later, I heard him singing.

“Open the door, get on the floor, everybody do the dinosaur.”

I looked at him. “Are you singing the dinosaur song?” And he grinned back at me, and the morning and all its sins were redeemed and atoned for, and a dinosaur song became holy. And tonight, I’ll carry that to bed with me along with all the other baggage, as TK and LB do that thing where they whisper without knowing it in their drifting off to sleep: Mommy.

“…but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid…” —The Bible, and George Washington, and George Washington

I am driving my mom’s big-ass Toyota Highlander through a parking lot of traffic west on 285 toward Vinings and my women’s small group from our Atlanta church, and this is ridiculous and remarkable. I don’t live here anymore! Right? I mean, I live in Sydney. But here I am, driving down the right side of the road, searching for a decent XM station on The Mom’s radio, knowing exactly where I’ m going. And when I get there, I open the unlocked door and settle into the empty seat right between two friends, one who always laughs at my jokes and the other whose baby bump is MUCH bigger than the last time I saw it, and I’m hearing teaching and sharing life among familiar voices in a known spot. I live nine thousand miles away, yet I am still home. There, and here.

I am sitting on our couch, assigned the task of going through The Kid’s medical file which is really a medical drawer which is overflowing, and I’m actually throwing things out. There are things we don’t need here. Things he has outgrown. He doesn’t live here anymore, within these pre-surgery scans and PT exercises, and before I toss them (trust me, I didn’t toss that much), I take them to The Husband. “Remember this?” I ask him, as people always said we would–that we’d barely remember so much of this, and marvel at the recollections–and that’s what we do. Marvel over where we were, and where we are. I kept discharge papers, those golden tickets we were handed that were our tickets to freedom after hours and days in the hospital. And I toss them. They are no longer my tickets to freedom.

I am burrowed into a couch in a beautiful home that feels like a second one to me, a place where a party was hosted in my honour to bid me goodbye, and it smells and feels like home, so why isn’t it? It is. I am sharing life not over email this time but in person, and we are nodding and grinning and crying and talking and who knew when I nervously asked her to be my mentor a year ago that she would also be one of my dearest friends?

I am checking into a hotel a couple of hours before the other three arrive, and when they do it’s like no time has passed. No–it’s like ALL the time has passed, because in it have been texts and Skype sessions and stories and laughter and tears, and we are that much closer for the nine thousand miles, and over dinner and drinks we do life together, in person again, and I’m home here. Someone asks the next day if it was fun, and I reply in the affirmative even as I know that word doesn’t begin to describe what is experienced among friends like us. “Life-giving” comes closer and still doesn’t touch it. “This was good for my soul,” one says, and I think that just about nails it.

I am sitting on my family room floor after a Chick-Fil-A lunch and this baby is four months older and bigger now, and my boys are periodically enthralled with her, and I catch her grin and grab her rolls and see, again in person, what a blessing she is. And her mom and I, who have been somehow made stronger through the time and distance (this seems to be a theme among my closest), we share life over fries and children and the kind of vulnerability that is born of trust that is born of the CS Lewis, “You too, I thought it was only me” identification, which is of course born of grace. And a few days later I am sitting on this same floor as three of us women, and three of our men, and six of our kids are wreaking havoc around us. My youngest niece is four months older and she smells like heaven. Her sister, The Niece OG, crushes me with her hug. Our honorary nephews mill about as do my boys and I stop for a second to take it in: the three of us, stumbling our way through college friendship to these six lives and our triplet of marriages, and it’s so hard and wonderful and everything else in between. And I am home.

I am walking toward the front on Sunday, and a knowing glance is paired with the bread and wine, and I am given these gifts at the table and in life: these incalculable mysteries and mundane moments and all of it, scattered across maps and time zones and climates and continents, and it all plays like music I know yet am hearing for the first time. Our vines and fig trees are in two places for now, and we are doubly rich for it, even on the plane in the middle of a sleepless night in the air, even in the getting-to-know-you awkwardness of new friendships, even in the packing-up stress of house reassignment, and especially in this: these reacquaintings that are deep soul reunions that are preserved by grace. All of it blessing, all of it gift, because this is the only language grace speaks, no matter the local dialect.

I am doing my life, among my people–the American subset of them–but all of it points back to this: the one who is I AM, which means, really, Was Already and Will Be and Always Is. No matter where I am.

*Upon further reflection, the author would like to add the following:
I am wishing that I had more time to prepare a talk that I’m giving in two days in front of more than a couple of people.
I am loving my children while gnashing my teeth over their neediness and anxiety, which reflects my own, and over my guilt about leaving them for three days for the first time in awhile.
I am aching for alone time in the midst of wonderful reunions and talks over drinks and other blessings that are exhausting for a tried-and-true, dyed-in-the-wool introvert.
I am constantly realising how insufficient I am for all of this, which is reflected by my constant internal threats to just UP AND LEAVE.
I am wishing I would stop comparing our clock to Sydney’s, which has my older son missing more and more school.
I am trusting…off and on…that the greater I AM is bigger than all of this and swallows it up in love.

A bit of madness is key to give us new colours to see. –La La Land

“THIS IS SO WEIRD.”

It’s what The Husband and I kept repeating to each other from the moment our car hit I-85 and headed north, away from the airport and toward our house–our Atlanta house, as The Kid calls it. As we took Exit 5A and stopped by Chick-Fil-A to pick up dinner. As we pulled into our neighbourhood and headed down its familiar streets. And especially as we entered our house and flung our suitcases to the ground. Our familiar yet foreign house–one of two that meets such description, I suppose–the house whose ceiling seemed lower and walls seemed closer than before, the house where things are like we left them but also not, the house we grew into over six years and now feel to be growing out, or away, from.

Also, the cleaners hadn’t come like they said they would, which blew.

Our return trip began, I guess, before we even moved, a date on the horizon filled with hope. As it drew closer I pushed it away, fearing the travel ordeal, the jet lag, the emotional underpinnings. Saturday I did a half-dozen loads of laundry and packed three suitcases and grew more anxious and tense by the second. We took the boys to the zoo where there were meltdowns and euphoric moments, whining and flying above the terrain in a sky car, tears and views of the Harbour Bridge. That night, we went as a family to the restaurant where TH and I ate lunch the day we looked at schools. That afternoon I’d sat with him at the table, facing the water with a glass full of rosé and a heart emptied of hope. On Saturday, we sat with the boys, and TK approached another table where a boy his age sat with his parents. He was invited to play with Legos, which he did for a bit, as Little Brother narrated our tableau, and the waves rolled and crashed outside the window. The day before, I had run along that same beach, already missing it. On Saturday, the boys wanted to take their turn running on the beach, so I sipped my wine and watched them as TH took them outside and I waited for the bill. A few minutes later I was with them, chasing them across the sand to chants of “MORE!” TH and I looked at each other: Where else in the world would we have this? The ocean our backyard, Saturday nights filled with waves? I took snapshots in my mind like I was at Jim and Pam’s wedding. Three and a half months is how long it took to fall in love with this place.

The next day we boarded our flight and our kids proved their resistance to drowsiness-inducing drugs, sleeping for only two hours each on the fourteen-hour journey. We landed in LA exhausted and confused and crashed at the hotel. After a marathon sleeping sesh (them) and a Twilight marathon (me), our carless asses headed to the lobby to search for entertainment, which we found in the form of elevators and escalators. We had two Easters, neither typical: one on the plane and one in a hotel. We ate dinner at the bar and slept in two beds, one kid with each of us, and I marvelled at the changes over the past season: how much closer we are, how much growing the boys have done, how this adventure is changing us all, knitting us together.

Yesterday TH and I took TK for his fifth annual MRI, a tradition I’d rather pass on but Management (in the form of God and TH’s neurosurgeon) have assured me that won’t happen in the near future. I watched my brave boy follow the nurse back to the radiology department, gazed as he mounted the scale without the tears of years past, grinned as he tearlessly underwent the administering of the IV. Then I carried him to the MRI room and he lost his shit. But hey…progress! (This was NOT the camera he had envisioned. Fair enough.) A couple of hours later we got the good news, which was that there were no changes, and we headed back to our Atlanta house to be complete as four again.

This morning the ceilings weren’t as low and the walls weren’t as close. We went back to our gym–our Atlanta gym–and were greeted by faces that know us. The boys found their old places and people. I ran along my old route. We came back to the house and played and talked and they were being so sweet to each other, to me, and I thought about how much they’ve grown, how maybe this was how the trip would be: their comments, my laughter, our peaceful cuddles.

Lucky for you, I didn’t start writing then.

Soon enough they were picking and fighting. We went to Target, then Publix, where I approached the register and discovered I didn’t have my wallet. I hauled the boys outside and back in twice before realising I had left it in the Target cart. In the parking lot. One sweaty, yelly ride later, I found it right where it had been left. I flipped on my windshield wipers instead of my turn signal. I went to Trader Joe’s and very possibly caused a huge dent in someone’s car by not tucking our cart in properly–all I saw was one renegade cart bounding across the parking lot and into a Lexus. I gave them my information and prayed they wouldn’t use it. Then I headed back to the house with the boys, considering that I can feel crazy on any continent; that competence is a trait I feel in scant possession of and this is not likely to change soon, regardless of hemisphere; and, finally and most importantly, that grace is taking all of the events that would have formerly been to my shame and decreasing the amount of time between said event and self-forgiveness, and between that forgiveness and laughter. Grace is literally un-shaming me, and it only took me thirty-nine years to fall in love with it.

It’s amazing how much growing I’ve done.

On the way back from our adventure, TK asked me where his toy jeep was. I grimaced–there was no way in HELL I was going to show my face in that Publix again, un-shaming be damned–and told him I didn’t know. “Did you leave it at home?” I asked.

He considered the possibility. “No,” he finally replied, encapsulating the last three months in his response. “I left it at the Atlanta house.”

I know the world can turn in different ways
Most of the time, we’re simply hanging on
And under the signs of how we all behave
We might find the place that we belong

We’re gearing up for a trip back to the States, and it doesn’t feel right.

What a strange thing for me to think, let alone say, when this date on the calendar might as well have been a life raft in a stormy sea as we were preparing to move. The bright sure spot in an ocean of coming uncertainty. And so soon! And so soon. I anticipate the negative, as I always am adept at doing, and its possibility hangs over my head, drenches me in anxiety, keeps me awake.

Not to be negative.

There are, of course, all the benefits of this trip–time with family and friends chief among them–but they’re wrapped in the difficulties that come along with it: nearly forty hours on planes with small children (TWO OF WHOM ARE OURS), jet lag and sleep deprivation, The Kid’s yearly MRI under sedation the morning after the evening we land. These are certainties. Then there are the shadows that lurk around them: setbacks in adjustment, confusion over home, a prolonged feeling of displacement, of not feeling fully at home in either place. The shadows get me the most, because this is where so much of my personality lies and is at home itself: not in the sunny patches of easy social interaction and making-the-best-of-it self-help theology, but in the dark spots where grace always shows up but where I get the time wrong and arrive early, waiting for it.

And there’s the added complication: we’re making a home here.

Oh my God, what a few months it’s been. What a couple of weeks it’s been: Little Brother spouting out waterfalls of words, narrating life for us, padding into our room every morning in his footie pyjamas and giggling, jumping up and down as though he can’t believe this wonderful life into which he’s been dropped. Talking of changing nappies and cuppa tea and performances of ABC songs for everyone who will listen, making himself known to parents and schoolchildren and daycare staff and coffee shop owners and endearing himself to them all. And TK? Well, let me breathe a second.

Last week, one of the other mums asked me about the scar on his neck. He’s just gotten a haircut and the barber went a little shorter than I prefer, which of course turned out to be a gift, because now that scar is showing, and it is a gateway to our story–another point of entry for people to love him. The little redhead who is like The Niece, Australia Edition, she came up and mentioned it and showed me her own scar from a fall several years back. And it hit me: scars reveal sameness.

Last Friday we traveled en masse with the rest of TK’s class to a house across the street from the school, and as per usual, I arrived to the dark spot of my mind early: TK ventured inside to explore as per his usual, and my anxiety followed me inside after him, likely overflowing onto him, damn that shit, and I led him back outside over his protests as I worried for the millionth time about how he would “go” as they say here–how he would interact, if he would. And within seconds, the dark was flooded with light and his classmate had come outside with heaps of cars from his room: “Here, James. I brought you cars.” And I nearly cried with relief. As if that wasn’t enough–as if grace hadn’t made itself known with that fireworks display–the mum of the house appeared by my side with a bottle of champagne and passed me a glass, and we proceeded to stay thirty minutes longer than the allotted party time. LB playing inside with cars and kids and occasionally breaking into a dance as per his usual; TK moving from his cars to–are you there, Stephanie? It’s me, GOD–the trampoline with half his class, as is per not his usual. And I stood, glass in hand and various women beside me, engaging in conversation and hearing about how well James reads and how much the kids love him. And in this social setting, I glowed. So not per usual.

Then on Sunday, we went to a cookout at the house of an acquaintance and found ourselves surrounded by three other stories on the spectrum, like-mindedness and battle wounds on full display, and just like that we knew and were known. We ended the day on the beach with them all, wine in hands and children playing in various states of challenge and gift around us, as a cruise ship floated by, the sun set to golden glory, the waves lapped at our feet, and the gifts were almost too much.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” one mum said of her son’s diagnosis, and proceeded to tell me about the people it had brought into their life, the priorities it had reshaped, the adjustments it had allotted. There are moments when I could say something similar and moments when such a thought makes me run in the opposite direction and I know it’s okay if I live most days somewhere in between, the shadow and the light dancing around each other to create the most beautiful sunsets.

But there are days…there are days when the light undeniably blasts through and I have to throw my hands up in surrender to the greatness of it all that I never could have imagined.

TK running around church and the town centre, approaching strangers with a grin that invites them toward him, leading LB into his path so that they are the most miraculous pair, forcing our lives beyond their small margins and into the orbit of others. His confidence is growing and palpable: he is reading, and adding, and greeting, and growing, and oh how he is talking, and all of it glows in endless invitation, dropping us into a life full of wonder. He is comfortable here. And it shows.

And so we will head to one home, and then back to another, two autumns in less than a year with a summer and spring sprinkled in, and what is that if not a gift? Among the difficulties and the scars, so many gifts. Yesterday I drove TK home from the therapy centre, and he told me about a booboo to his finger–a battle wound. I mentioned healing, and threw in Jesus for good measure because we’re working on getting him up to Santa status at least, and he queried from the backseat: “What’s Jesus doing right now?”

“The dishes, probably,” I almost said, but decided to wait until he gets sarcasm a bit more, and finally settled on, “He’s taking care of you and loving you.” TK thought for a minute, then pointed at me. “That’s him!” he declared, grinning. “Mummy, you’re turning into Jesus!” And in a moment of pure joyful shock that never would have happened were it not for the way his beautiful brain works, I let the gift open right there in my lap: a grace that allows my son to see past the flaws and the anxiety and the mess and right into what grace and Easter and redemption and love are doing: changing my heart and me into more. Showing up with champagne and cars and unspeakable beauty.

Now, God help us on that flight.

“Is that James?” I heard the stage-whisper behind me. “The one who…” the voice trailed off, or I stopped listening, or both, because I didn’t want to feel the impact of what would come next, even out of a child’s mouth. The one who…has autism? The one who…talks funny? The one who…is different?

I’ve heard it all before. I don’t need to hear it again, and I certainly don’t want to feel the barrage of emotions that come afterward: the fear over his future, the guilt over his past, the anxiety over his present. But I’ve promised myself I’d make space for all the feelings, all the grief and pain and joy, because…well, therapists recommend it. So there’s that. But I also know from experience that anything else is just a lie. And I did that long enough. Like, for almost thirty years. Living in a space of denial isn’t living it all, it’s just putting a pretty filter on things and not knowing who you are. So I waited until we got home, and we bathed the boys and put them to bed, and then I climbed into bed and felt it. Then The Husband climbed into bed and I told him about it. And a funny thing happened.

It wasn’t like the times before.

This time, I didn’t grasp at hope like a blind woman looking for light. This time, I thought it and said it: how it hurt, how it sucks, but also: what has changed. How far he’s come. How–and not that long ago, this may have been wishful thinking, but on this night it was real–how there’s a growing part of me that is so inexpressibly thankful he’s not like other kids. Because it means the differences are adding up to something you can’t filter out, and it’s beautiful.

And I know, in saying all this, that it’s a description and reflection of the corner we’ve turned. Lately he’s been asking so many questions, and the memories that pop up on my phone aren’t just reminders to me, but offerings to him: here you are before your x-ray two years ago, last year. Here you are in the hospital after they fixed your neck. Look at that hat you had to wear! He asks about the surgery, which broken bone it fixed. He sees his own tilted head, and watching him as he takes it in, I almost can’t catch my breath: it’s like watching the sun rise. He asks about the body parts he sees in his book: the skull and the brain, the bones and muscle, the kidneys and bladder and intestines, and as he provides a brief recap of the way I’ve told him the digestive system works, I think back to a year ago, when he was just stringing three words together; how a year before that, when there wasn’t a sound. He asks about feelings, what they mean, and tells me about his day at school: who got in trouble (or “told off,” here) and was sent to reflection time. He mentions his classmates by name. He is seeing them, and knowing them.

And they are knowing him.

On Monday, the school handyman walked over to me with a box in his hands. Inside it was a model Chevrolet, still screwed into its stand, white and blue paint gleaming. “I’ve got more at home. I’ll bring them,” he said. The other kids gathered around, exclaiming. The next day, the girl named after a flower brought a sack of cars herself. “They were at my granny’s,” she said. “I knew James would like them.” On the way home that morning, H’s mom told me that they want to have him over for a playdate, and that they need to have popcorn and chocolate chip cookies because “those are James’s favourite.” That afternoon, his teacher told me that the other kids fight over who gets to walk with him to the playground. I emailed the mother of the boy in his class who’s looked out for him from day one, and when I saw her husband the next day he told me that she’d cried before she emailed me back to arrange a playdate.

Meanwhile, Little Brother sits in the waiting room with me at the therapy centre and approaches strangers who exclaim over his cuteness and teach him Chinese. His language is like an avalanche, building every day. He tells me when he’s sad or mad or happy, casually tosses out over lunch that “I love you, Mommy.” He tells me the feelings that I struggle to define to The Kid. We are parenting two different people. I am two different moms. It wasn’t what I planned. It’s hard as shit sometimes. It’s also pretty fantastic.

When the little redhead, one of two of them (three if you count me), comes out to me on the bench for reading, she tells me that the kid I sent to find her thought she wasn’t there. Like she was invisible or something. Oh girl, I think. I know THAT one. And I consider the threads that run through all of us, that make us more alike than different. How an email can make one mother cry while sending it, and another while reading it, for the same reason: this complicated, raw, pulsing love that tears us apart while it holds us together because it all comes from the same ultimate love: the one that has designs on all of us, weaving our stories together in ways we never expected or would have chosen. Never would I have wanted this to be the way TK would become so beloved. Never will I be the same because it is.

This love that is present perfect tense even as nothing is perfect but it, that transforms executions into coronations and death into life, that forces us past the first layer of ourselves and others, so that no matter how many times we relive it, each time is like the first. But different. But the same.

This love that is sitting with me as one of the other moms sees TK’s new car and tells him: “What a lucky boy you are!” And the me who would have bitterly laughed not long ago, internally reviewing all the scans and doctor visits and surgeries and therapies, she scampers off to a different space as I inhabit this one: this one where he is quite a lucky boy. This one where James? Oh, he’s the one who…has a brother who always asks after him, who won’t calm down until he knows he’s okay, who embraces him and gazes at him with wonder. He’s the one who…loves cars. And everyone knows it.