Plans In Pencil

There are moments that the words don’t reach
There’s a grace too powerful to name
We push away what we can never understand
We push away the unimaginable

I have declared my hatred of camping in prose, verse, and rhyme for years now, but recently, despite knowing this, some friends invited our family along on their rustic getaways. We were actually welcomed on two different trips because all my friends want to see me suffer but since they were on consecutive weekends, we went with the friends who asked first (and, totally coincidentally, those whose plans included a glamping option). So it was that last weekend, the four of us (sorry, Kevin the Dog) drove an hour outside Sydney and set up shop for the weekend in the outdoors.

In short, we survived. Smelly and tired and in need of showers and another weekend to recover, but alive nonetheless. And it actually turned out to be a pretty magical time.

How could it not be, when along with the shared toilets, lack of attending to personal hygiene, gigantic lizards, and occasional meltdowns, there were campfires, champagne in plastic cups, barbecues, laser tag fights, and seamless blending of four families (that left The Kid, on Sunday morning, asking why “everyone” had to be in our tent). There were no devices; there was creek swimming; there was no makeup; no room for artifice; there were meandering walks and conversations. There was understanding.

When TK woke up both days and marched around our campsite giving off his signature voice alarm, there were smiles. There was one of his friends, in her sleepy half-consciousness, saying, “I love James’s positivity.” There was Little Brother “crushing” his three-years-older friend at soccer and talking about it still. There was laughter and good-natured ridicule. There was being seen, and known.

There was discomfort. There was TK holding it in until he couldn’t then erupting prior to laser tag. There was my own anxiety, kept in check by the presence of families besides our own but always reminding me of its presence in early-morning wake-ups and body tension. There were mosquito bites.

There was also seeing. There was getting to know myself and my own family better. When TK admitted that he was upset because he had counted on being on the red team, there was my awareness of all the discomfort that’d been tamped down to reach that point of explosion, and there was my chance to help others see that too. And my chance to see the way I do it myself. How he comes by it not just diagnostically, but honestly.

Because that is the purity of the neurodiverse: their honesty. Not this outdated lack-of-empathy BS but their, his, total immersion in empathy; this consuming feeling-it-all and having to learn what to do with that. And somehow, there is how I was recruited to be a teacher for that, I in all my own feeling-it-all-ness, the irony and anxiety and emotions all running deep, where things are most true.

Honest people reveal our insecurities; they reflect who we aren’t yet, what we aren’t yet. Every time TK smacks another adult’s ass and runs away, laughing, I watch for reactions at such wonderfully inappropriate behaviour and find that so many don’t know what to do with it; the discomfort is too great and there’s no space for it. But. There are those who have been given the space to find out who they are, and therefore are able to give that space to others. They laugh, they play, they ask questions. I’m becoming one of them, I hope. I know.

Lest I forget, though, my children are not me. They are a mysterious mix of The Husband, and me, and another magical element called Themselves, and I’m reminded of this every time LB stands up proudly in front of his class to tell a joke, or when TK announces to TH on a walk, “I love interacting with people,” and I think, who are you?

My friend tells me that on the way home from camping, her daughter, apropos of nothing, said that whoever ends up with TK is going to be so lucky. I look at him, and at LB, and I think about how, for now, that person is me. Who are you? I think again, in the quiet of camp and the other still moments life provides, in the midst of discomfort and anxiety and the hard and the true, and the answer comes back in each moment, that that’s what we’re finding out.

Fifteen years ago, I walked into my counselor’s office for one of our weekly sessions and opened by telling him, “I feel like a loser.” Over the next hour, we talked through what was going on in my life to lead to this utterance, and by the end of the hour he had gently steered me to the realization that the derogatory term I’d assigned myself belied a deeper truth: I was experiencing loss that was hacking away at my heart, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

No one had died. Nothing monumental had happened. Rather, it was more about things that weren’t happening. But the pain was real, and over the next decade and a half (and still), he taught me to recognize the space between what things are and what they should be, and to grieve it. 

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

I need to remember this.

It’s happened before: weeks after school has started back, once the kids are settled and no longer crying at drop-off or overtired at pick-up, when things seem to have all calmed down and the sailing is smooth…this is when my brain clicks out of Survival Mode and switches to High-Anxiety Mode. Also known as Exhaustion Mode. Also known as Struggling for No Apparent Reason Mode.

But there is a reason, isn’t there? There always is. There is brain chemistry, and hormones, and hypersensitivity, and this year, there is sensory overload after a year of relative quiet. There is a vital but triggering interview that shows that #starsandduchesses are #justlikeus! There is the latent that rises to the surface once the kids are sorted. There is anxiety and depression, and they always. Come. Back.

Or maybe just never leave. Constant companions, and I prefer to work alone, thank you. But the depression that is expressed as anxiety, and the anxiety that erupts as anger, they are not medicated or meditated or prayed away–that’s not how this works. They are there–they are managed, but they are there.

Also there? The Husband, the children, the dog, who never leave me!…and also never leave me. There are the dog’s snores waking me in the night, the sound of little feet padding up to my bed, the narration that persists from sunup to sundown. There is the boys’ relentless fighting and loyalty. Their relentless need despite my best-laid plans to procure small containers so they can make their own breakfast and not contend with my barely-concealed rage over having to make a tenth snack. The hours that fly by only to prove there are not enough of them.

When it hits–this prickliness, this inordinate frustration, this anxiety and depression–I know it now. I know it as separate to my soul, separate to circumstances, separate to reason. I know, now (#thankstherapy) about neurological regulation and integration. I know tricks and strategies. I know me.

But sometimes I need to see myself through different eyes. The way I go through photos on my phone and see the ones the boys have taken: the videos of adults’ conversations, the still-lifes of cars, the close-ups of faces. The way, when I sneak into Little Brother’s room to give him a goodnight kiss after putting The Kid to bed, he surprises me by being awake and grinning at me in the dark, a secret for just the two of us. The way he calls me “the loveliest mommy,” and how TK says I’m the best mom he could ever have, and I nearly choke on laughter and tears because God help us but somehow it’s still true–somehow, because of patterns of forgiveness and grace.

I’ve been diving into nostalgia lately because why not, and when Felicity said it she was talking about New York which I also feel, but then it sort of works across life: “I swear, when you least expect it this city is so beautiful. You could never describe it to someone who wasn’t here.”

I’m trying to describe my city, how it’s hard and exhausting and beautiful. How it’s joy and grief and all the things. How it will always be complicated, how it will always be “a thing passing strange to me, that the healing hand should also wield the sword.” How all of life comes wrapped up together, connected. How the hardest things to say out loud somehow come pouring out of a keyboard. How this anxiety, this “flaw,” brings with it an ability to so deeply feel as to see what wasn’t seen without it: the song on the way to school that makes me cry, the verse that tells me how I am seen.

“Would you love me more than God does if you could?” LB asks me as he’s drifting off to sleep, and of course I tell him yes, even as I know that the grace that holds us both is bigger than either of us can imagine. That these are the eyes through which we are seen.

I need to remember this.

Life is waves.

I’m not writing that because I think it’s particularly deep; it’s just that our family has been frequenting the local “real beach” lately: Manly and its surfer waves rather than the calmer harbour beaches we used to stick to.

So far, only The Kid has ventured out into the waves with me or The Husband while Little Brother remains at the shoreline or on the sand, safe inside his towel. But this week, we begged him to join us.

He refused. We begged again. He refused again. And so it went, this rhythm, until we bribed him with the promise of ice cream. And so it was that the four of us made it past the breakers and into the calm, then the cresting waves. We rode them together. It was everything.

On our way out, TK got a bit too confident and ran straight into a shoreline-breaker–with his face. It took him out, and he was a bit shaken. Then he told the story about fifty times, and we tried again. And we found, the four of us, a new rhythm: the rise and fall, the rocking, the lifting, the lowering. Together.

TH took the boys then to get the promised ice cream, and I returned the boogie boards to our spot on the beach. Then I turned back. Toward the water I went.

As I headed into the surf, I had a feeling that twinned the one I had whenever I stepped out of my apartment building in New York: a freedom, an excitement, an open-ended promise. The world spreading out in front of me.

I remember the first time I ever went to New York, how a friend drove The Sis and me to the airport and Weezer’s “Island in the Sun” was playing through her car speakers, and it was March so there wasn’t much sun yet, but we were headed to an island over spring break so it felt right. And now, we live on this island in the sun (per LB, who is studying Australia at school: “Did you know that Australia is an island that’s also a continent?”), and there are parallels to my old life: the rhythm of repetition, of a life lived in waves that both lift and pummel, that always lead back to shore. To home, wherever that may currently be, which is to say, here: on this island, in this moment, through this wave…until the next comes along, like it and different at the same time.

It’s a Thursday. I’m meant to be at home alone (well, with the dog) while The Husband is at work and the boys are at school. Instead, I’ve emailed the school to let them know that The Kid and Little Brother are sick(ish–looking dramatically better once that email was sent), they’re on the couch watching Netflix, I’m sitting outside typing this, and we’ve been to the grocery store, where–because I threw rules out the window–each got a “toy” of his choice. LB opted for Marvel figures and TK, a labelmaker. At the cash register, he told the cashier that he was kind of handsome.

I got two bottles of wine and a pack of cookies.

Last Saturday, it was meant to rain. Instead, it didn’t, and we all went to a kid friend’s birthday party at the beach, and I drank champagne and TH drank beers and the kids didn’t get lost in the waves.

On Sunday, it was meant to rain too. Instead, it didn’t, and I met a friend under the blazing sun for dinner and then, under the stars for an outdoor movie, and he brought me a blanket and a bottle of champagne and for a few hours I was taken care of instead of doing the caring.

This morning, it was meant to rain. Instead, it didn’t, and I ran and now I’m sore and tired and it doesn’t matter because apparently we are sitting on the couch today with Marvel figures and a labelmaker and cookies and, later, wine, and our lab who was meant to be chocolate but is white and who was meant to not get on this couch but oops, sometimes does.

It’s not just the weather. Yesterday, we were meant to have soccer after school. Instead we had a flat tire and spent an hour waiting for roadside assistance and TH and walking to a cafe that was actually closed and the kids were not fun to be with, but we made it home together.

I was meant to have children who followed the parenting books I read about behaviour and sleeping. Instead, I had two children who did not read those books, so now I find myself reading different ones–about emotional intelligence and “dis”ability (I prefer “different” ability, and you would too if you’d gotten the glowing report I received yesterday from his incredible teacher). Instead of the rule-following robots I was prepared to raise, I got one who’s finally adjusted to first grade but still doesn’t want me to leave too early because his heart is just enormous, and another who talks to me about his big feelings.

Instead of fixing teeth (currently), I’m sitting in classrooms talking about apple brains and the beauty of differences. Instead of staying in Alabama, or Atlanta, I’m sitting in Australia, reading about our sunburnt country with LB’s class, preparing for fall in March and Christmas in summer. Instead of voting the way I always thought I would, I’ve listened to other voices and made new choices.

Everything is turned upside down. I’m starting to love how that happens.

Last week, as part of my plodding attempt to be licensed to practice dentistry in Australia, I went online to request transcripts from dental school and my residency. Six years’ worth of classes and grades, and they were delivered in seconds to my email account. I shakily clicked on the link to read and download them, and when I did, an ocean of memories washed over me.

NOT TO BRAG (because, trust me, much has changed), but I did okay for myself through high school. College wasn’t so bad either, though I had to grow accustomed to being in a bigger pond full of people who also did okay for themselves through high school. But in dental school? In dental school I fell solidly into the middle of the pack. Average and mediocre were words that felt lobbed at me by many of my grades, and by the transcript that reflected them back to me after twenty years. But it was during my residency that the wheels truly fell off, in a stunning deconstruction of my identity, both the personal and professional sides of it.

What, like a girl would move from Alabama to New York out of anything other than a sense of desperation?

I’ve lived long enough that the memories are piling up faster than I can retain them, and we’ve even lived in Australia long enough now that the boys’ memory piles aren’t too shabby either. Yesterday, The Kid looked thoughtful for a minute then said to me, “I think getting stuck in that bathroom last week changed my life.” And how. He’s already announced that he’ll no longer be using public bathrooms, and even at home he kept the bathroom door cracked this morning when he went there for, as he puts it, “business time.”

And Little Brother? He’s lived the majority of his life here now, but I find myself being the one who needs to access more of his memories. He’s had a struggle adjusting to life as a first-grader after a stellar kindy year, and so many of our mornings have ended with his teacher urging him into the classroom as I reluctantly let him go. Yesterday he cried as he was pulled away from me, and I hotfooted it across the school grounds and into the car, where I burst into tears myself.

Good times.

Then I get reminded–by social media, no less–of last year, when he went through the same thing, and after I lamented this to The Sis at the time, she told that he was right where he was supposed to be, and he was going to make kindy his bitch. Both of which were true.

We forget, and are reminded, and this is its own rhythm. Grace reminds.

It’s so repetitive. But so many things that matter are. This morning, TK naughtily let the dog out just as we were leaving for school, and after a few expletives from me, he asked if I would forgive him. LB asked if I was feeling more forgiving or more angry. And we worked through it together, not for the first time and not for the last, this process and rhythm of mistakes and forgiveness.

Over the weekend, we went to the “real” beach–the surfing beach with its open water and enormous waves–and while LB was more content to stand at the shoreline, TK went out with me and his boogie board past the break and into the deeper water, where the waves were cresting, and we rode them together. Over and over, his joy reminding me of my own childhood in the Gulf, riding different waves that somehow still connect to these through water and time.

And yesterday, in the midst of a nasty mood, I abandoned previous plans and donned my swimmers and went back there, alone. I trod across the sand and into the water, colder than the sea I grew up in but no less beautiful, and I rode the waves again. And again. Until they sent me back to the shore, and home.

I dreamed a dream in time gone by…now [grace] has killed the dream I dreamed

I was having coffee with a friend last week when she wrecked my day by telling me that she had instituted a new policy in her home regarding her kid’s iPad usage: none of it allowed from Monday to Thursday. I almost did a spit take (both out of shock and because I’ve always just wanted to), but I couldn’t argue with her arguments as to the benefits of said policy: better sleep, better attitude, better life. I knew that I would have to do something with this information, and I knew what I had to do with it, but I was, like Linus said, sore afraid.

The Husband and I decided to try it, but gradually. So this past Monday was a no-iPad day in the house–and we survived. With benefits. In fact, we’re going to keep adding days, because honestly? It’s not just good for the kids, it’s good for me. I’m on my own phone less (intentionally, though the children would demand it anyway), which requires us all to show up for real life more. Which is harder, and better. I’ve noticed how I, and in particular the child who shares my anxiety, get so angry when our devices are taken away from us or our time with them is interrupted. And I’m pretty sure this is…not good? Maybe even toxic? It’s almost like I don’t have to constantly and frantically scroll through Twitter to get through a day.

It’s worth a shot, anyway. Besides, real life provides plenty of material worth being present for.

Yesterday morning, in what became a shitstorm of epic proportions, I took the boys to school, fresh off our device-free day and feeling quite smug about my newfound austerity and what it must say about my parenting skills. The Kid had to use the bathroom so I took him to the adults’ toilet at his school, and he promptly found himself trapped there due to a faulty lock. Little Brother looked both panicked and desperate to escape, and two of TK’s friends ran to get help. Soon, several teachers were hovering and helping, and I was talking to TK through the door wondering how this was my life, and the most hilarious thing about it all was that I was the calmest one. I can think to a time not long enough ago when I would have been freaking out, but here I was speaking in measured tones through a wall to my kid, who was soon rescued thanks to a pair of scissors doubling as a screwdriver, and who minutes later on the playground asked me why he still felt nervous, and I marvelled at the progress we’ve both made as we talked it through. Then LB cried when his class had to go inside and his teacher peeled him off me as I snuck away, feeling like an asshole.

It was A Morning.

But I’ve learned, through the divine rhythm of repetition, that we are safe, and held, and I think my children may just be learning this as well. I’ve learned that the life I planned was so much smaller than the one we’re living, and while there is likely no end to the number of times I’ll have to learn this, there is also no end to the number of gifts it gives. To the number of ways grace shows up to kill my old dream and replace it with a real life worth being present for.

There is no end fo the number of times we will jump off piers together, or while LB watches as a self-appointed judge, TK grabbing my hand and demanding I go with him. Then I stand on the beach, turn back toward the pier, and see him–the boy who just seconds ago said he wouldn’t do it again without me–jumping on his own, a grin dancing across his face the whole way. And me, there on the shore, seeing what it looks like to just trust, and leap. Over and over.

I used to love New Year’s resolutions. Are you kidding me? I grew up in a Southern church! I’d compose a list of them the week after Christmas and shove it into whichever version of the Evangelical Teen Guided Quiet Time Devotional Notebook was popular in my youth group that year, certain that within days I’d be a new person — or, at the very least, a new and improved version of myself. The idea of a fresh start was catnip to a girl who wanted to be anyone but who she was.

I never did attain aspirational ecstasy in the form of auditioning for the school choir or avoiding a fight with my sister for even a day. But that didn’t stop me from toting the notion of self-improvement with me into adulthood; I just found rules that were easier to attain … until they weren’t. Wear a promise ring and swear off premarital sex? Check! (No one was asking me out.) Go to the gym every afternoon? No problem! (My friend would meet me at the ellipticals and we’d talk trash about celebs.) 

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

The boys started school, officially, this week. And last night at bedtime, The Kid cried to me over how hard life must be for blind kids and their parents.

These things, like all of life, are connected.

Life is so much sometimes, especially the first full week of school, when you find out your new teacher and new class and potential new friends and everything is just so new. You find yourself making dreaded small talk at coffee socials meant to welcome new kindergarten parents, over-caffeinated and over-vigilant as you sneak looks past people’s shoulders to try to catch a glimpse of your children. You keep the smile plastered on your face longer so that those children’s teachers won’t mistake your RBF for actual bitchiness. First impressions matter. You call out to a friend from the car after school pickup to have a quick catchup and apologise later to her over how your children acted like assholes from the backseat.

It’s exhausting.

Especially when you’ve had your best summer yet, spending some time almost every day at the beach. When boogie-board-riding has been conquered and you see the same joy on your sons’ faces that was on yours as a child, finding the ocean as a second home and the waves not as threats but as vehicles. When you spend summer’s last rainy Sunday, on the suggestion of a friend, at the local water park zipping around curves in a downpour, which is somehow right. When that ends with Little Brother terrified and TK ecstatic, which is also somehow right for right now. When afterward, you get them Oreo milkshakes and while you’re trying to find a utensil for TK because he’s never been able to drink through a straw, you turn around with a coffee stirrer only to find that he’s inhaled half his drink. Through a straw.

You see your children at the top of the slides–nervous, excited, unsure–and at the bottom–victorious, angry, cold. And you find a way to fit both of those shapes into your arms, wrapping one in a towel and your legs around the other for another run.

After the small talk, you have deeper talk: a coffee date with a friend, a chat with LB’s last-year teacher about how she spied him in his new classroom with a “this is all so much but I’m trying really hard to be perfect and brave” look on his face, the one that makes you proud and breaks your heart, and how she told his new teacher how he thrives on praise, and so that’s what she gave him, and now he glows. You hear other parents say how good a fit TK’s teacher is for him, and you watch as he and said teacher bond over calculators, and you revel in you–all of you–being known.

You think about another win of the summer, a trapeze yoga class booked on a whim and rued the whole drive there by the assholes in the backseat, only for their minds to be cleared and changed an hour later as they both meditate in their own way on the floor of the studio: LB on his mat with his eyes closed and a blanket over him, TK peering through squinted-not-closed eyes, announcing to the teacher his every thought.

You remind yourself that they don’t have to be anyone but who they are, and as summer lingers but also recedes, and the air grows cooler, you feel something unlock within, something shift into place, and TK says, “You see? It’s all connected”–not knowing how very right he is, how very right it all is.

Sometimes, finding grace can be as simple as opening my eyes. Other times, when life gets especially, as Anne Lamott calls it, life-y, grace-finding looks more like an expedition six miles through the snow uphill both ways. Most of the time it’s somewhere in between, this hunt for the mundane miraculous, some combination of seeking and finding in equal measure, searching and seeing simultaneously.

This week, it’s looked like dusty moments in the garage, pawing through storage boxes of memories, along with sun-drenched jumps from ocean piers, plus a side of reading through old entries here. So…a little of everything.

We’ve filed our online paperwork for Australian citizenship. This is insane to me, as is the fact that we are starting our fifth year of living here, but both things are still true and wonderful. I had to find my birth certificate for the documentation requirements, and this led me to our aforementioned garage and some dusty plastic boxes that house important documents along with…other memories. Memories like old photos and angst-ridden teenage journals, boys’ birth announcements that invoke all the trauma of childbirth and post-partum depression and gratitude over not being in that particular moment anymore.

I got lost in all that for the better part of a half-hour, which is both not long and definitely long enough, and in the end it was The Husband who found what I needed in a different container altogether (insert metaphorical interpretation here). Nostalgia, though, is a hell of a drug, and even though my jaunt through the past didn’t leave me longing for it, just whiffs of it in the dustbin of memory reminded me of how many chapters our story already contains, of how many years we’ve traversed and lands we’ve travelled.

Of how many beaches we’ve seen. Of another summer break, the one before our cross-world move, when Little Brother was a toddler and TK, a just-speaking pre-kindergartener who begged for the kind of repetition that comes with walks through familiar ground, retracing our own footsteps. I found this old post and was transported back to a time when TK’s every sentence didn’t begin with, “Did you know?” followed by a recitation of erudite facts I probably didn’t know, a time when we walked the same paths over and over in near-silence, a time when there were so many more question marks than exclamation points. When I feel inundated by question marks now–the beginning of another school year, the hunt for a potential high school, the quest to teach independence–I try–I will try–to remember those early days, when a diagnosis was fresh and it felt like we were just getting to know each other. A time that predated so many triumphs and understandings. A reminder of the life that can come after the questions. After moments of terror.

Because now? Now we’re not just walking piers, we’re leaping off of them. On Australia Day, we joined friends and every other resident of the country at a local beach, and when some of them journeyed over to the pier for a jump, I had a feeling. A feeling that TH and the boys and I, we could do that. A feeling that LB would take more convincing but that TK–he might just be more than ready.

And he was. He and I jumped together, hands clasped, and then he went on his own, yelling at his friends to wait for him. And one of them, she called back, “I will! I don’t know about them, but I will!” And I thought about how that, really, is all we need: the one voice, the one presence, that promises and stays. And I watched them jump together.

As suspected, it took more to convince LB, including bribery, but what finally drew him in was all that was waiting for him in the water, all the arms prepared to catch him, all the hands to guide him to ground where he could stand. The same faces I prayed for before we landed here, before we could stand ourselves in this life that is now so familiar.

Because sometimes finding grace, it is both combing through the past to see how faithful it has been, and then looking out to see how it’s still waiting to catch you.

IN every object here I see–
Something, O Lord, that leads to Thee;
Firm as the rocks Thy promise stands,
Thy mercies countless as the sands,
Thy love a sea immensely wide,
Thy grace an ever flowing tide.

In every object here I see
Something, my heart, that points at thee;
Hard as the rocks that bound the strand,
Unfruitful as the barren sand,
Deep and deceitful as the ocean,
And, like the tide, in constant motion.

–John Newton, “A Thought on the Sea-Shore”