I finally cried in church this week. That hasn’t happened in a while; specifically, since we were back in Atlanta in our home church on Christmas day. I’ve missed the tears that come with heartfelt experience, that attend a weekly re-membering, the stark awareness of a grace that transcends my daily worries. The tears were welcome; they reminded me of home. They made me feel like we are getting to be at home here.

True to my nature, I’ve taken to adopting several routines here in Sydney: the repetition helps me adapt and relax and gives structure to my days. To the boys’ days. Most of the routines are centered around cupcakes and wine, but there are a few others. Some are carry-overs from back home in Atlanta: my nightly epsom-salt-filled bath, the morning and evening liturgy that mercifully remains the same across oceans and continents, God himself unchanging in the face of everything else feeling so different.

But is it that different?

The end of the day is, in so many ways, and that’s one of my favorite new rituals: after putting The Kid to bed, while The Husband remains with his allotted child, Little Brother, I head out to the balcony off our bedroom (I KNOW, but someone’s gotta do it) and take a look at the setting sun, since this is the season–summer–for it to set around 8 pm every night, the days long and often hot, the evenings splashed by the western glow of fading light. That light is more scattered and glorious when clouds are paired with it, filtering the beams and painting them purple and pink and orange, leaving me wonderstruck at the artistry of it all. Then I turn to the harbor(u)r on my right, the boats bobbing in the blue-gray water. I feel my blood pressure lower, and often TH appears beside me, taking it in too even though he’s had longer to get used to it over the visits he paid before we all moved, and he tells me about those weeks when he watched alone–how there was a different sunset every day.

So yeah, that’s not quite the same as the occasional day-enders I’d catch from the window back home, when I’d pull the boys out the front door and onto the porch to witness the setting sun through the trees of our neighborhood. We have a different view now.

But so much is similar. There was the moment in a local (and now favorite) pasta takeaway shop, after I’d heaved the stroller through the doorway and placed my order and waited in a rare moment of quiet with the boys then heard a familiar crying sound and saw that it wasn’t my #preciouschildren but those of the woman who had just entered with her stroller, out of which had clambered a boy who was now throwing himself onto the floor in a fit of passion. She sighed deeply, the same sigh I emit several hundred times a day, and glanced at me with exhaustion in her eyes. “That sounds just like my two,” I told her, and she smiled ruefully, pausing to think. “I mean…” she began, and I waited. “I mean, it’s hardly worth it sometimes, is it?” I think she was referring to leaving the house with small people, though she could have meant more and gotten away with it in the moment, sweat running down her face as it was mine, goodwill evaporating with the day itself. She said it, and I felt less alone and told her so: “I know exactly what you mean.” The language of kinship, of CS Lewis’ “What, you too?”

And there’s church. The place that, outside of our actual house in Atlanta, felt most like home there, surrounded as we were by so many who know our story and embrace us because of and independent of and in spite of it, who prayed us all the way here and haven’t left just because we did, whose messages light up my phone alongside other friends’ and family members’ and carry with them an awareness of those moments that define us, that solidify our existence. You can’t replicate that; it will not bear re-creation. But maybe it can be echoed, transformed, so that it is both similar and different, its own thing here yet not without familiarity.

This week before the Sunday service the boys bounded into the old building with its arched ceilings and stained glass windows, and they ran to the front where the musicians were practicing. They bobbed up and down in their rhythmless white-boy dancing, then chased each other through the rows and around the pews, and the pastor–new to them and yet known from long ago to me–laughed as he approached. He mentioned gin and tonics, getting together, and it was like the pieces of life that I had felt were disappearing were suddenly just being rearranged, falling into their new places. The “for now” part of “home for now” falling away…for now? Or for good, for no matter where we are, this new place will always be a part of us too. A part of our story the same way New York is, never to be unfamiliar again. What a gift, to be scattered around in so many directions like the setting sun.

And when the music played later, the kids in children’s church with TH because it was his week, I heard an old song in a new arrangement, and it was the same but different, and I felt new yet familiar tears fill my eyes in a kind of baptism into this new yet forever the same life. Later, before the sunset, our house made its sounds and instead of frightening TK, they felt familiar: “That’s just the fan turning on,” he told me. As he drifted off to sleep beside me, more peaceful this night than the last and still more peace to cover ahead of us, I thought about how it’s the different sunsets, the different colors, the different places and people and experiences that tell the whole story and make us part of something bigger than ourselves. That mercifully take me out of myself and the tiny world I’d inhabit if given the chance–that choice denied me by a love that won’t let life be so small. The next day, the boys and I turned in our new car onto our new street, and as I grabbed for the new garage door opener that feels strangely similar to our old one, TK spoke to me from the backseat: “Mommy! We’re home.”

It was almost as if…dare I say…he welcomed the wonder of it all. –Maria Semple, Today Will Be Different

When I first lived in New York, in the summer of 2005, I quickly learned the subway’s 6 line and how to catch the express train to Union Square–a mecca of familiar retail like Barnes & Noble, and new ones like Forever 21 (which, regretfully, I was/am not). I would emerge from the underground and check out some stores, then head south on Fifth and hit up some more staples (J Crew, I’m looking at you…and your sale section). After awhile I memorized a route that took me past a favorite church and down a street of polished townhouses into the West Village, where I would end the first half of my journey at Magnolia Bakery, cupcake in hand.

I always felt that, after the effort spent getting to it and the miles I walked home afterward, I earned that cupcake.

I spent the overwhelming majority of the first three decades of my life thinking I’d earned a lot, actually. Isn’t that the unsaid and unspoken agreement by which many of us live–the law of karma? The world, after all, lives by–and recognizes–hours put in before assessing reward. It’s such a hard habit to break, this cycle of determining my own worth by my merits. By my productivity. By whether my kids are potty-trained or I’ve yelled at them today. Now let’s see: neither of them is, and one sports a black eye that I garnered for him when our stram (stroller + pram, I’m coining it) hit an Everest-sized bump that I failed to notice, probably because I was quantifying the lack of gratitude shown for all the hard work I’ve put in on this earth. (Some of you will be getting letters.) I HAVE MOVED ACROSS THE WORLD FOR MY FAMILY. I WIPE TWO ASSES THAT ARE NOT MINE EVERY DAY. I MAKE FOOD THAT TINY PEOPLE DON’T EAT THEN I PICK IT OFF THE FLOOR LIKE CINDERELLA BEFORE THE BALL HAPPENED. I could go on. I have gone on (ask The Husband). Surely, it’s time for God to throw me a solid and make things easy?

Life used to be easier and I never appreciated it.

I got blisters in New York. I sweated from countless places. But I ate cupcakes on the street and slept in until noon. I wandered around. I got lost. I got found. I stared at water views. I experienced grace. I peed alone. Looking back, it seems like it was…easier. But it was the same, just different. Because now, I do the same things. I just do them with a pair of tiny dudes, their combined weight working with gravity against me, their whines piercing through the quiet of unfamiliar grocery stores and interrupting the Bible story at church, their wrestling leaving one foot in my face and another in my crotch. I wipe cupcake off their faces and arms and legs and stram, and I sweat in playgrounds. I drive twenty minutes to a therapy center multiple times a week and wait for two hours while TK gets services. I would never have driven this early (read: I would never have driven in Australia) if TK hadn’t needed me to. I would never have done so many things if I hadn’t been needed to…if I hadn’t been needed.

It is weighty and often onerous, this being needed. It wakes me up in the middle of the night with thoughts of childcare and school starting, of sharks and drownings and kidnappings and breaks with sanity. It pulls me down into a depth from which I think I may never recover, and then it does the strangest thing:

It saves me.

Or, to be clear, grace saves me through it. Grace had the wisdom and foreknowledge to see what I didn’t, that I was on a collision course with myself, and grace intervened. Grace made everything harder, and better, and worse, and wonderful, all at the same time. Grace made everything more.

And what that looks like now is somehow the same as before, but different. There are the thousand tiny kindnesses of grace showing up. From the silly–the bedding I found that so resembles what I had and loved those years in New York, only now it’s bigger; it stretches further and over more people–to the deeply meaningful: the books my friend sent that I’m devouring on our back deck as the boys play beside me. The homes we’ve been welcomed into, where we’ve been watered (wined) and fed and our children have been embraced with stunning consideration. The liturgy that is the same across languages and hemispheres and continents. The rooftop bar TH and I went to the other night with a view of the water and a bridge, much like so many of the rooftop bars we frequented in New York.

Except now…this time, we came home to two boys who swam naked in the pool with grins on their faces, their faces that look like both of ours. (I only worried about drowning…occasionally.) Now, when I get to the gym, I park a stram and heave out those two boys and, in a move my old self wouldn’t have seen coming, I take them on an escalator ride before I work out, the three of us clasping hands like we’re going on some grand journey. And we are.

And at church this week, I didn’t get to stay with the grownups this time. I sat with my children, who alternately charmed and disrupted, and when the story came along, I wondered if it wasn’t for me as much/more than it was for them. Because when they were asked what kind of person we have to be to receive that divine love, a boy spoke up that I knew in New York, but he was a baby then. Now he’s an older kid, the same but different, another reminder of grace bringing the pieces of this puzzle together, and he answered in a way that not every preacher’s kid would, but in the best way, because he said: “You don’t have to be anything. He just loves you.” My boys scrambled across my lap and swatted at each other, and I grabbed their hands and heard it, this story that is always, always the same but meets me in every different place I am as though I’ve heard it for the first time.

My point of destination’s different from where I was headed.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman about to become a wife and mother has no idea what the hell she’s getting herself into.

(Or maybe it’s just a truth that I’ve recently begun to acknowledge.)

Yesterday I was pushing the boys in their stroller–ahem, pram–in the summer (YES, SUMMER) heat and humidity down the baking sidewalk as cars and buses roared by. We passed a bus stop where a teenage boy and girl were openly making out, going at it in front of my children’s innocent eyes, but more importantly my not-so-innocent ones, and I wanted to stop right there and yell at them–the girl, specifically. Not because I was offended. I mean, I’ve made out at my share of bus stops before, YA HEARD? But because I wanted to issue a warning to this girl that she would remember, one that would stand out among the thoughts of makeup and prom and college entrance exams and would crawl from the recesses of her mind every time she wanted to turn a huge decision into a small one and a small one into a huge one, a warning that would echo within her brain for years to come until, at the wise age of thirty or above, after years of bad blind dates and information gleaned and continents traveled, she would finally settle down with the right person and without any misconceptions of what that should look like. I wanted to pull her aside in the sticky heat and tell her that she better have some damn good birth control and a grasp of reality because otherwise she could end up like me a decade-and-a-half early. “Like me” meaning a middle-aged woman saddled with a husband and two kids, sweat running down the backs of her legs and from her armpits (because she can’t find an anti-perspirant ANYWHERE that actually lives up to its job title) and from every other conceivable spot on her body, headed toward a home where she would listen to those two children play and fight outside while she made them a dinner they would barely touch and would clean it up after them like some sort of shitty restaurant owner and would then bathe their dirty asses before her own collapsed into bed at the hour of about eight o’clock.

A woman like me. A woman who finally has everything she prayed and dreamed for and is not above feeling ambivalent about it all.

Let me be brave or awful enough to say it, and the rest of you can either a) pretend it’s never true; 2) act like you’re somehow above it; or III) come sit by me and pour a glass (bottle) of wine: this life isn’t all it’s made out to be. The women I know are often living lives of quiet desperation (yeah, looking at you, THOREAU–it’s not just the dudes), struggling either with what they want and don’t have or have and are struggling to hold together. In other words, living out the human condition. They are tired of IVF appointments or adoption waitlists, they are sick of their husbands working too late or their bosses being asses, they love their children madly and want to drop-kick them out the window. They are not crazy, though they feel like they are and their hormones and exhaustion aren’t helping matters. They have #firstworldproblems but they’re still problems, thanks. They are a little confused as to why they don’t know who they are all the time and under whose jurisdiction they are expected to have become different people because they now wear a ring or had babies removed from their bodies. They are high and low and up and down and all over the place in any given moment. Or maybe these are just the women with whom I care to do life. Either way, it is life. And we’re living every second of it, long days and short years alike.

All of which is to say that this second week of our new life in Sydney has been all of the above. You know–life.

The boys and I are together all day, every day. The Kid doesn’t start school until February (which I both anticipate and dread, go figure), and Little Brother’s occasional childcare situation is being figured out. Lately we have hammered out our own little routines to structure our days: walk to the gym followed by a trip to the bakery followed by a trip to the playground. Come home for Mommy’s desperately-needed shower. Eat lunch. Play on the deck. Go out again. Come home. Give the boys the screens they’ve been screaming for all day. Pour Mommy a desperately-needed glass of wine and pair it with the obscene coloring book one of her favorites back in ATL gave her. Dinner and the rest.

It’s been mostly good, peppered by TK’s frequent upsets and freakouts and general emotional processing of, you know, BEING MOVED ACROSS THE WORLD. It’s been good, and beautiful, and awful and sad. It’s been exactly what we’re meant to be doing even when it sucks ever so royally. We have had moments of sublime grace: playdates with a friend and her son, conversations while our boys play that identify our lives as wonderfully similar. The shoe-store employee who fit the boys with sandals and sneakers then realized we live in the house she occupied with her family JUST BEFORE WE MOVED THERE. Drives to therapy that end with TK and me arriving alive without crap-stained pants (mine). The guy at the car wash who witnessed TK’s meltdown and handed him a super-soaker to help. The dad at TK’s therapy center who just struck up a conversation with me because he’s also American. Slowly recognizing streets without maps. A cupcake shop. The crest on Awaba Road that gives us a view of Balmoral and the majestic Pacific beyond it and which leaves me breathless over how grace will just not leave me alone until I see the beauty it takes me by the hand and leads me to.

The complicated love I feel for all of it: for The Husband, whose gifts led us here and whose kindness looks out for us even as he can’t fully understand how it feels to be plopped into a foreign existence with the kids day in and out, handling their minute and large adjustments, finding them sitters I can trust and trying to manage the anxiety of it all and all their damn fights all day long. (Also, trying to cook in Celsius.) Love for those children, whose well-being is my absolute oxygen but whose happiness is often annoyingly independent of that in any given moment until the whole story plays out. And grace itself; rather, the giver of it, whose grand idea all this was. And it is grand–grand in its scope, complexity, ambiguity, and emotion. It is everything. It is life.

The other day the boys sat in their pram and I beside them outside that cupcake shop. As we inhaled out baked goods, I remembered Carrie in Paris, who wandered the streets, not sure of what to do with herself. I remembered myself in New York, sweat sticking to the backs of my legs in the July heat as I wandered the streets, not sure of what to do with myself. Neither of those women had children she was pushing uphill while breathing gutturally. Both were looking for home.

I’m the one who’s found it. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but I’m counting on that being because somehow, it’s more. Complicatedly, blessedly, painfully more than what I would have come up with.

The other night the four of us headed upstairs and I had a fleeting feeling of familiarity: of how this can, will, be home for us. And yesterday, I dared to get behind the right-sided wheel alone with the boys and we drove around our neighborhood. LB slept in the backseat and TK yelled directions, just like old times. Just like new times. Then “Freedom” blared from the radio and I’ll be the one who’s brave or awful enough to say it: I turned up the volume, belted out the lyrics, crested another hill, and let TK choose the next turn as the wind (A/C) blew through our hair and the sun beat down mercilessly, mercifully, on us all.

I’m sitting in the dark in a hotel room in LA, 5:40 local time, my #preciouschildren having been awake for an hour, thinking of how God has a way of doing things that keeps pissing me off.

Christmas is my favorite time of year. The anticipation, the lights, the magic floating through the air set to the tunes of familiar songs. The price of Christmas, though, is the days and weeks after: the taking down of ornaments, the tangling removal of lights, the vacuuming of needles, the tossing out of leftover food. I’ve never quite been able to match the sacredness of the season with gratitude for it in its aftermath. I’ve dabbled more, instead, in a bit of depression and self-pity. And counting down the days until next year’s marathon of A Christmas Story.

This year was a bit different.

This year’s Advent carried even more anticipation than usual: not only were we awaiting a #preciouschild’s birth, but we were preparing for our move to Sydney. “The definition of bittersweet,” one of my closest described it, and as we said and heard “I love you”s, gave and were enfolded in hugs (#kayhugs are the best), and shed and wiped tears (and butts, always), the meaning of the season rested differently. It burrowed its way deeper into my heart because I needed it more desperately. I needed the hope of the season, but more than that: I needed the hope that comes after it.

I needed Christmas to last. To last after the decorations were haphazardly thrown in the boxes the way I keep swearing I’ll never do again, to hang on well after the lights were dimmed and the pine diffusers faded away and the presents ended up in the donation bin. I needed the ridiculous story that I actually believe–of the baby born to a virgin and a star bringing shepherds and wise men and the whole damn thing–I needed it to be more real than ever, and I needed it to stay. I needed it to be with us as we were called away from the people we love and the place we call home and settle us into our new home, with new people.

It was the least it could do. After all, that story and the love it purports to show, the God it claims to have birthed? That love and that God are the ones doing this to us.

Hence the whole aforementioned “God pissing me off” tradition.

I think back on my story sometimes and how everything that led to a new chapter was brought about by discomfort. By a rattling of my familiar settings, a removal of my safety nets, a disruption of my plans. Some form of divine rudeness purporting to be love that led to the next thing. The next thing being chapters that were hard and beautiful, painful and wonderful: New York, The Husband, The Kid and Little Brother. And now, Sydney. It all began, and continued under, clouds of uncertainty mixed with nearly unbearable glory. Never one thing, but always everything. The price of Christmas: its glory and…the barren aftermath?

No. Not fully anyway, for if there is a faith that allows me to feel the full joy of Christmas, and a same faith that allows me to grieve its sacred anticipation, then that faith carries me now and transforms that grief into something different, something more; it transforms the disruptions into interventions and the rudeness into incomparable love.

Because there are the moments that are glimpses into its reality. Which brings me to this hotel room, and this seemingly mixed bag that is actually all blessing.

The weeks before our departure were marked with…everything. There were bouts of pink eye (LB’s and mine). There were TH’s trips and my solo days and nights with the boys. There were the moments of near insanity in those days and nights, and the moments of two boys burrowing into me on the couch. There were the episodes of stomach flu, the middle-of the night wake-up calls by TK or LB or my own gut, the hours spent in bed the day before we left, my packing plans dashed and my only strength lying outside myself. There were the goodbyes from people we knew cared, and from people whose words surprised us with their sincerity, whose tears caught me off guard and brought more of my own to the surface. There was Christmas Eve with family and laughter, the usual jokes with a poignant edge to them. There was Christmas Day with more laughter and more tears, the weight of leaving compressing the air around us. There were the minutes of holding Baby Niece, of watching her sleep and making her grin and seeing it all through my own watery eyes. There was that moment of The Niece’s face in the car window, tear-streaked as she waved goodbye, her note burning a hole in my hand: “I love you and I’ll miss you the holl time you’re gone.” There was the prayer led by one of my oldest and dearest friends as we stood in a circle in the driveway, hands clasped and hearts aching.

There was the strength that looked like weakness, the greater story told in tiny moments, the quiet truth of love showing up. It was so much like Christmas. And it stays.

It stays in this hotel room, where last night our boys tumbled out of their clothes in preparation for their car-wash shower and LB leaned against the wall like he was about to get frisked by a cop, and instead a long and perfect turd fell onto the carpet. It stays in TK’s grin to me from his seat as we prepared to take off, his giddy proclamation: “Mommy, I’m on a plane!” And he talked the whole flight, this boy who was without a word last year. There is the fact that without this family, without this man and these boys, the goodbyes would have been so much fewer and less freighted with meaning and that though they are so much of the story that is disrupting my previously-laid plans–everything from reading a good book to staying put, whatever that looks like–they are so much of what is making me who I am. I would not be me without them.

I would not be me without Christmas, without the ridiculous story of the baby boy showing up and disrupting everything.

This is a faith in which death happens first. Birth comes after. And life lasts long after Christmas Day, because it never ends.

I’m not falling behind or running late. I’m not standing still, I am lying in wait.

There is one moment I remember most clearly about both of my sons’ births. Standing out among the scattered and hazy memories of pain and activity and and the cold of the OR, I recall waiting: waiting to hear their voices.

With The Kid, the wait seemed interminable. Eternal. Fitting, right? Maybe he, maybe grace, was giving me a heads-up in that silence: There will be waiting here, with this one. When his cry finally did reach my ears, it wasn’t the loud and frantic cry of Little Brother. But it was something. I heard him, and that is when I felt I became a mother. That is the moment, with each of them, when the tears finally flowed: when I heard them.

Our path with TK has felt anything but linear: so many starts and stops, questions and wondering. The milestone questionnaire at the pediatrician’s office, and my feeling that I was failing some sort of test. Moments of victory and seeming defeat, of struggling to stay above water, of wondering whether some skill would ever develop. Facebook reminds me that a year ago, we celebrated the uttering of a two-syllable word; now he tells me every morning: “It’s Christmas! Time to open presents!” Facebook shows me a picture from five years ago, mother and child sitting by the window in a moment that I know, at the time, was bathed in stress and sleeplessness; now all I can see is the way the light fell on us, how beautiful it was.

Sometimes our hearts take longer to catch up to what grace tells us is gift. Sometimes a step forward looks more like a step backward before the story plays out.

Sometimes, some moments, I venture into the dark territory of wondering whether grace is involved at all; whether this is really a story told by love. Karma, after all, makes so much more sense. There was the patient I saw in New York, the little girl with a speech impediment I didn’t know about, and when I jokingly asked her mother to translate I was met with hurt and horror. And there were the other kids in other offices who had diagnoses of their own, and when I saw those words written on their charts I wanted to run in the other direction because I knew this would require more of me, more time and more effort and more emotions to push down and bottle up–chief among them, fear. And now, in a place where some of those fears have landed in our laps–were handed to me as that swaddled bundle who took his time to cry in the hospital–I could interpret it as karma. I could believe that I got what I deserved. I could continue to call them “fears realized.” Or…

We could all learn a new language.

I am no longer waiting to get what I deserve. I am waiting to see what love brings in all its effed-up glory. Because…CHRISTMAS.

On Sunday, The Husband and I stood at the front of our church and were surrounded, touched, and prayed over by people who know us. Words were spoken that reached the bottom of my soul and came back up again. I have hugged, held hands, cried, and said I love you so many times in the past few days that my life would look like a f-ing Hallmark movie if I didn’t say “f-ing” so much. I have never, ever felt so loved. And we are walking away from all this? It doesn’t feel like a step forward. It feels like a step backward–away from everyone who knows us, who knows our children. It feels wrong. Or, as one friend calls it, “God’s big dumb idea.”

And then I look around at what this season really means. At what Advent is, in its bones and at its depth, truly about. It is about waiting…and then being surprised. For the answer to resemble nothing we pictured. For the source of hope to arrive at the darkest moments, masquerading as the weakest thing, in the unlikeliest place. Approach the manger with me and let’s get all up in it.

Grace always works in uncertainty, for we are incapable of imagining what it can do. The language of karma is reciprocal and predictable. The language of grace explodes expectation. It turns “worst fear” into “beloved miracle.” It transforms backward into forward. It relocates home from a place into people and makes it all eternal.

Little Brother’s words come at the expected time, and I watch as he intentionally speaks them, chains them together: “Bye bye Daddy. Bye bye Mommy.” I watch the milestones happen according to the pediatrician’s questionnaire and am stunned to find they are no more or less beautiful, whichever order they come in, however they show up.

And there is this: this opportunity to say goodbyes that, really, are transformed by grace into “see you soon.” There is the chance to say how we feel, how to have the “last times” that are so painful yet carry with them such gifts. I hold each of these, treasuring them up in my heart. We don’t always get that chance. We don’t always get the chance to watch milestones unfold in their own fashion, exactly how they’re meant to in more than one way, and not everyone gets to watch their child ride a horse from walking into trotting, fear becoming glee. So many places we never would have gone were it not for all the things we never would have chosen.

Because we’re moving, because his schedule is different, TH and I walk alongside each other on the indoor track, wordless but in step. And because it’s his last session and she’s never been, The Sis meets me at the barn where TK rides his horse. She hands me a cup of coffee (without bourbon–dammit! She’s slipping, y’all) and we watch him ride around the ring, then trot, then–because it’s our last time–his therapist invites me for the first time to join them on their trail ride. Because she’s here, The Sis comes with me. And on a cold and gray winter day in Atlanta, while it is summer in Sydney, the two of us walk behind my son as he speaks constantly from atop his horse. It seems that we cover the same paths over and over, that we walk in circles, yet somehow have been, are going, everywhere that matters.

I still believe in summer days. The seasons always change and life will find a way.

This will be a short winter for our family.

When our plane touches down in Sydney on New Year’s Eve, we will exit the airport into summer, and a new home. All of which makes this season–winter, Advent, Christmas–especially poignant.

It’s also especially stressful, especially sickness-ridden, especially busy, especially everything.

On Sunday I went to see The Nutcracker with The Sis and The Niece. We weren’t out of the driveway before TS and I were bitching in the front seat about, you know, life, finishing each other’s sentences and speaking in shorthand like we do, and TN piped up from her booster in the back with a giggle. “You two really are sisters,” she said, and I sensed her delight: that she will one day share such rides and conversations with The Niece, Too, her own role in their family having recently changed from Only Child to Big Sister.

As TS and I sat in the darkness sipping drinks from the bar, TN moved between our laps for the length of the show. I peered around her at the dancers onstage, the music flowing from the orchestra pit and the recesses of my mind, which has memorized each note after years of hearing; years of seeing; years of being in the audience and one year of rehearsals and performances myself. I told TN that, how I was in the show when I was about twelve, and she exclaimed, “How COOL!”, and I bit my tongue which would have acidly replied that it actually wasn’t super cool for a preteen to be a gingersnap alongside people half her age because she had gotten a late start while her contemporaries were en pointe in such meatier and prettier roles as Mirliton and Snowflake.

But I had been in those studios, watching others rehearse those roles and then moving into pointe shoes myself eventually, some of the scars still present on my feet today. I watched on Sunday with a knowledge base full of struggle and pain and humiliation and occasional glory, and it meant all the more for having been through it. I looked at their feet, and I spotted the ones who, like me, didn’t have the best feet–bad feet, I believe they’re called, and you can’t get too far in the ballet world with those–but I spotted some anyway and felt a kinship–for those who have to point harder, and work harder, who may never belong but show up anyway.

It was heavenly. I sat for two hours, wine flowing, seat cushioned, TN’s weight intermittently on my lap, and through tears I tried to capture the moment that is, especially this year, all too fleeting: this togetherness, this comfort, this knowing and being known by everyone around me.

I’m crying a lot this month, in case you wondered.

I’m grieving what I trust to be a gift but what, in its grace, still allows space for grief: this feeling of having finally made a home, of having deep friendships with people who know my scariest, darkest thoughts and share theirs; of people who have heard my story and not run away; of people who share life with me in all its ugly beauty. And it seems so unfair, I keep griping to Management, that this is the time when we would be moved ten thousand miles away. It seems rude. Unfitting. Painful.

It’s a huge disruption, is what I’m saying.

Then, during a brief walk on a cold and wet morning as the weight of all there is to do rests on my shoulders and my eye gushes infection and four loads of laundry sit waiting for their turns, the thought breaks through: what is Advent itself, if not a disruption?

This season of waiting, of hoping, of the collective world, believing and unbelieving alike in this whole crazy story of God showing up as baby, holding its breath because it just feels, knows, something is going to happen. If there is a month filled with more built-in anticipation, I’ve never known it. And even as we wait, when the thing does happen–when the dawn does come–it is not at all as expected. It does not fit into our predetermined categories, doesn’t tick off the boxes on our wish lists. It shows up as something brand new, unsettling us from our comfortable spots and notions and asking way too much, only to end up giving it and more.

This is Advent: a breaking in of grace. This is what showing up looks like.

I put drops in my eyes and wait for healing. I do the vomit-soaked laundry, wipe the butts, go to the last dinners and wrap the presents and say the goodbyes. I get an email from a mom whose son got his own diagnosis, and I think that there’s no way I could add one more thing to the pile but I email her back anyway: because I’ve walked in those shoes, I’ve danced to that music, and so I know, and that is what I can give. I look ahead to the next few weeks and think there is no way this is really happening–haven’t I had that thought so many times before?–and I scurry and fret and run and struggle–but most of all, I wait. I am waiting even when I don’t know it. I am waiting, always, for the holy disruption however it shows up, and waiting for it to be revealed as just what I always needed.

Can we talk for a second about New York City?

Because I miss it.

I think about my life in the city often, much like a person might make a mental return to a past relationship in the midst of heartache or boredom, the grass being perpetually greener and all. As I type this, I’ve read one friend’s comments about missing the couple she and her husband were before kids; I’ve Voxered endlessly with two of my closest over how tragically comical the idea of “having it all” is and how it looks strangely, often, more like diarrhea than sounding like a feminist anthem; and I’m in the middle of a project with another friend, one of the themes of which is the loss of identity that occurs within marriage and motherhood.

I know. No wonder I’m on Lexapro.

But I do this often: I imagine myself back on the streets of the city, iPod in pocket and music in ears and legs just pumping, pumping, wherever the hell they want to go. I remember leaving a friend’s apartment regularly and walking the seven blocks home to a soundtrack of pop music and freedom, the seasons alternately heating my way or freezing it, but none of that mattering because I was in NEW YORK, DAMMIT! I had made it here–now I could make it anywhere!

That “anywhere” should have an asterisk beside it. And the asterisk should represent “everything I ever dreamed of before I got it.” Subtitle: My Happy Ending.

I don’t know what being a man feels like, so feel free to tell me (though that’s a lot of feelings in one sentence, so maybe you’d prefer not?). But let’s get real for a second: being a woman feels like having your body and heart torn in two on a regular basis. It feels like having a split personality: the person I was before my heart and life melded with The Husband’s in holy matrimony, the person I was before I had two children cut out of my abdomen, and the person I am now: somewhere in between and hovering all around those others, trying to figure out what still fits and what doesn’t (and I’m not talking about jeans). Trying to figure out if there’s anything left of that girl who bopped around Manhattan without a care in the world.

Then I remember: that never happened. I was never the girl without a care in the world. My shady memory has seemed to forget the days I got caught in the rain, one day in particular when I showed up to work in ripped, soaked jeans because I thought the schedule was empty but it was so not and I spent the next eight hours checking teeth while my crotch squished. I’ve forgotten the turds I went out with who left me feeling heartbroken and hopeless. I’ve forgotten the turd I was, losing people’s numbers after they paid for dinner. I’ve forgotten feeling like a ghost, inhabiting a life I had never asked for that somehow fit and didn’t, that felt full yet incomplete, that felt like the start of one thing and the end of something else.

Oh my God, y’all. I’m the same person.

Last Thursday, after the turkey had been eaten and the parade was over and we were headed to bed, I asked The Kid what his favorite part of the day had been. He thought for a moment then replied, “Thanksgiving.” The whole damn thing had been his favorite. DUH. A few minutes ago I was putting away laundry in his room (#havingitall) and I looked up at the collage of him in his halo, three years ago now. And right now I listen to him through the open basement door asking his therapist questions–a new skill he has acquired, on top of that small matter of mastering the English language in less than a year.

Christmas is my favorite season, yet this year Advent weighs heavily, it being our last full one here. In our home. In our current home. It makes me think about all the homes I’ve had, the ones I’ve said goodbye to, the house I came home to from the hospital and said goodbye to at thirteen; the house I left for college and came back to a visitor; the apartments during grad school and the fourth-floor walkup on 29th and 3rd whose threshold I exited wearing a diamond ring as I headed toward this life, here. And now we’re headed to another home, across the world, away from all we know, and sometimes I can’t breathe.

We went out last weekend with two of our favorites, and after we ate and while we drank, the two instruments at the front of the bar gained musicians in front of them and thus began the Dueling Pianos we had been promised. You’d think with a descriptor like that–“Dueling”–and with the state our world is in, always ready to pick a fight, and with the difference in keys and tuning and pianists, that it would have sounded more like a battle. Like noise. But somehow the mixture of the more than one thing, of the notes and the people and the laughter and even the tears at the back of my throat, it all combined to create something different from what was expected. Somehow the “more” of it all–the head in a halo, the Northeastern home and the Southern one and (I’m counting on it) the Australian one, the no words and now a gifted-notebook-from-a-friend-full of them, the Then and the Now and the tears and the bruises and the failures and the victories and all the goodbyes that lead to hellos–it melds and mixes and rises to create a symphony, a soundtrack that is always and never changing, that ends only to begin.

Sitting in my doctor’s office, I tried not to stare out the windows, where the east- and westbound lanes of I-285 rushed by. The whirring cars just made me nervous, but then again…everything makes me nervous. That was kind of why I was here. Well, that and the yearly mandate that comes with being female.

I had sat in this chair so many times before: during pregnancies, while trying to get pregnant, after a scary mammogram, and during a miscarriage. Most recently, I sat here and told him that I needed something extra, a little help. I left with a prescription for Xanax in hand. Today, eight months after that visit, the bottle still holds a few pills–little white tablets whose primary purpose of late has been unwinding my anxiety at night and helping me sleep.

On this day, though, from this chair, I asked him what the hell was going on with my hormones and if it was normal for them to be fluctuating way the eff all over the place. I may have phrased it differently. But I’ve been all over the map lately–literally, and emotionally–and I wondered if it were more than circumstantial. If it might also be chemical. The short answer? Yes. He referenced a drug that several friends have also mentioned–one that has helped them feel more like themselves. I thought that sounded good, since I’ve hard a hard time remembering who I am lately in these throes of moving and marriage and motherhood, and the resistance I’ve been halfheartedly building within my mind–composed of “just wait and see”s and “maybe it will get better on its own”s–they crumbled under the added pressure of medical reasoning. I took the script, got it filled, and swallowed the first one an hour later.

My counselor had taught me a technique awhile back to deal with anxiety, a strategy pioneered by a doctor in Australia (!) that tosses around terms like mindfulness that make me feel the urge to grab a yoga mat and some green tea but really just involve perspective; specifically, stepping outside myself and observing what happens to me when I get all wound up. I said I’d try it, doubting it would work, and as has happened once or twice before, I was wrong. Looking at myself from a new vantage point allowed me to see how much of me is still the little girl who’s afraid of failing. Afraid of looking like an idiot. Afraid of being hurt. Now, though, those fears have the added pressure of a family riding on them. No wonder I often have trouble breathing–I’ve been trying to hold all that up myself.

The day The Husband left for his most recent trip to Sydney, I was pulling out of the garage with the boys in the backseat waving goodbye. I had my eye on TH, trying not to hit him because I was in a charitable mood, and didn’t notice that my left side was inching closer to the garage door until my mirror slammed into it. I should mention that this is far from the first time this exact event has occurred: I’m looking at one thing while another gets butchered. Better car than husband? Anyway, TH secured the mirror with duct tape and we parted ways for a week, The Kid in the backseat narrating what had happened: “Mommy hit her mirror on the garage,” the refrain echoing over and over from the backseat. I tried to remember how I used to have to narrate everything for him. You know, #gratitude. He’s been giving me countless opportunities since then to call upon that memory as my mirror still sits encased in duct tape, evidence of my constant inability to see all things at once.

And it’s funny, because I’ve always told TK that I love how his brain works even as I’ve struggled to understand it, and I read recently about how some people on the spectrum (and, let’s be honest, probably a lot of others as well) have trouble with a thing in the brain called mirror neurons that interpret facial cues and incorporate them into appropriate reciprocal behavior. This results in a type of social blindness, or at least social visual impairment, because the person is focused elsewhere. This, along with sensory overload, can contribute to a lack of eye contact. I’ve read such information with reactions that fluctuate way the eff all over the place depending on my “self” at the moment, but the thing I keep coming back to is how quick the world is to call such differing perspective a disability. I’m looking at the wrong thing all the time, after all. Meanwhile, I’m not sure TK is, like, ever.

My car is, like me, a bit beat up and held together. My phone is, like me, a bit cracked, and the camera only works in selfie mode, forcing me to change the way I take every picture. Forcing me to take less of them and, instead, just look ahead. My children, though, are looking at each other and laughing. They are tubing down fake snow-covered hills and jumping around bounce houses and taking chances and believing in a way they don’t even realize that they are taken care of. And on Saturdays, TK and I go to the indoor pool that serves as swimming lesson location on one side, senior citizen exercise center on the other, and the man swimming laps gets a big grin from TK. Later, while TK paddles with his instructor, the man walks by me. “You have a wonderful boy,” he says. A minute later, the woman who teaches water aerobics passes between me on one side, TK in the pool on the other, and smiles at me. “Beautiful,” she says. I think about all the ways grace is working, all the things it is using to make me who I’m meant to be, this fluctuating mixture of prayer and people and pills. I think about all the moments I’ve caught TK staring at something I couldn’t see with a delighted grin on his face. About all the things I read telling me what he can’t see, and all the more that he’s showing me he can.

“It is madness to wear velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.” –Annie Dillard

When I was growing up in the church, I gravitated toward any event billed with a heading like “How to Know God’s Will for Your Life.” I would sit in the crowd at the youth group Bible study or retreat, pen in hand, hand poised above paper, and invariably I would leave disappointed and not a little angry. I felt snookered, EVERY TIME. Because instead of spurting out a list of tips or throwing up on the overhead projector (YES, I’M OLD) a bullet-pointed bevy of rules to follow, the speaker would toss out some mumbo jumbo about praying and reading the Bible.

I already do that, asshole, I thought (because, while being a Good Girl, I was also a jerk). I do that religiously, I would add (because, while insecure, I also fancied myself quite witty). Still, I would leave said event empty-handed but for my own bitterness and sense of being lost.

I’d like to talk now about how we decided to move to Sydney.

Because I used to want life to add up to a list, and for that list to follow my own (shitty and small, it turns out) plan, I didn’t have room for any mystery or uncertainty. Following a list of rules was my shortcut, I felt, to the life I envisioned. To the one I secretly felt I’d earned. It wasn’t until years later (yesterday, I think) and exiles in the lands of New York and Motherhood that the truth, like Jesus said it would, began to finally set me free–but, like Gloria Steinem added, first it would piss me off.

All of which is to say that I’ve had a willingness to abide mystery and uncertainty gracefully and brutally loved into me, and my body is finally backing down on its autoimmune response against it. But honestly, every time I think I’ve gotten the message, that I’m there, thanks, a new level opens to the whole thing. And what I initially interpret as just plain damn meanness on God’s part–an unsettling of my sense of home and comfort and place–always, ALWAYS turns into gift.

But not without the pissing off first.

Sydney first came on our radar last October. I was circling the track at the gym when The Husband called–during the workday, no less, so that I knew something was up. He explained that the company he works for had bought a business in Australia, and that a role may be vacated there. A role he could be asked to take.

“NOPE,” I believe I said. “WRONG NUMBER.”

Earlier that week I had gotten just as earth-shattering of a call from The Sis, who told me that I would be receiving a new niece or nephew in about eight months. We had been at our church for six months, enough time to feel blessedly in place and build relationships that included texting bitmojis and exchanging good-natured profanity with our pastor. The Kid was not speaking, but had just started a great school program and oodles of therapy, including weekly shit-soaked sessions at a horse barn, and I was not in a position to roll all that up in a bag and toss it in the trash. We were home. I informed TH and God that I would not be leaving.

The conversation seemed to end, due less to my petulance than to the role remaining filled, and TH and I would reference it occasionally as that crazy thing we (he) had considered doing.

Then it came back.

In late June, I had a brand new niece, a speaking son, and even deeper friendships and numerous bitmoji texts. That’s when TH sent me an email saying he had been offered the role (he knew better than to call this time, I guess). I remember exactly what I wrote: “If God wants us to pick up our lives and move halfway across the world in six months, he’s going to have to make it pretty damn clear.”

This is how I know there’s a God: there’s no way a nondescript, unspecific thing like “The Universe” could operate with as timely and sharp of a sense of humor.

For the next week, I shot glares across the dinner table at TH; he seemed to have already left for Sydney, his excitement palpable and incredibly annoying to me. Because of my own anger, my own sense of being abandoned for a foreign country, I couldn’t see the honor this was for him. I couldn’t see the opportunities it could afford us; I couldn’t see. And I couldn’t breathe. After a few solid days of raging around the house, even more short-tempered and bitchy than usual, I realized I couldn’t live like this. And my family shouldn’t have to. (I’m selfless like that.) I prayed for an open heart (for me) or a changed mind (for TH). And I waited.

I wrote about what happened next in my last post: how grace reached right into one of the most tender places in my heart, where my children reside, and showed me how it was preparing a place for us. For The Kid. And I recalled an email response I had gotten from a trusted friend and counselor back in October, when I had enlisted wisdom, about making such a huge decision, how it had said that maybe the decisions themselves are clear; after all, grace doesn’t hide–it’s we who don’t look. That maybe it’s the implications of the decisions that are hard. That we want to believe that if we are hearing our answer, it means the path will be easy–but the real roads never are. They’re much too…full for that.

“God is not a kindly old uncle,” goes a Jewish proverb, “He’s an earthquake.” Annie Dillard, above, would agree. And so would I, gazing from this vantage point at the way grace has upended my plans, destroyed my lists, broken all my rules, and tossed me around like a rag doll…it seems. But this holy destruction is part and parcel of what has turned my faith from a self-improvement exercise to a living, breathing thing. This relentless love, this grace-fueled devotion not to my comfort but to more, always more, painfully more…it laughs gently at the oft-quoted idea that faith is a crutch and reveals it instead to be life support. Oxygen. This is not the finding of a plan, but a relationship with a being. I am not memorizing items on a spreadsheet, but learning the scars of a hand, the workings of a heart. I’ve gone from doing research in a library–because even prayer and Bible-reading will only get you so far without the eyesight bestowed by grace–to riding the unpredictable waves of a love that won’t stop until I’m really home.

There is a grace that opens my heart, but doesn’t stop there: it opens my eyes to how it shows up everywhere, how it asks too much and so little at the same time, how it is written in every moment: the stomach viruses, the hospital visits, the painful and wonderful call to a beautiful new home. And I find myself wondering–in those moments when I let go of the lists and really piss off my adolescent self, who still lives inside me and is just aching for more rules to follow–wondering, what’s so bad about riding waves anyway, terrifying and exhilarating as they are, when you know they’re not going to sink, but save you?