Plans In Pencil

A few weeks ago, I signed Little Brother up for two days of a drama camp and got one of his best friends’ moms to sign up her kid too. My apparently addled brain thought LB would be excited: two days with a close friend doing one of his favourite things (getting attention)?! Win win, right? The child is, after all, a born performer, tearing around the house on dance sprees while improvising lyrics that could easily qualify him for an Off-Broadway show.

Well, he was not amused by my choice. He rejected the premise entirely. When I told him that he’d get to perform Peter Pan onstage, he replied, “I don’t know how to do that.” Finally, the promise of an after-camp playdate including a trip to Ben and Jerry’s led to his reluctant acceptance of one day–ONE DAY!!!–of camp. Sure enough, at the end of the day when I picked him up, his verdict arrived: never again.

The Kid, meanwhile, was gleeful, both at the prospect of a day alone with me (awww) and at LB’s uncharacteristic hesitation toward a social event (not so awww). He kept asking LB if he was sad about drama camp, and when we pulled away after dropping his brother off, TK mused, “It’s a big day for Will.”

This is probably because he’s had enough Big Days of his own to last a lifetime, including but not limited to major surgeries, doctor visits and follow-ups, and birthday parties, and he’s happy to spread the wealth around. He was relieved, for once, that it wasn’t a Big Day for him. Meanwhile, The Husband was starting his first day of a new job, so half of our family, in the end, was having a Big Day.

And they made it through, TH arriving home after a commute he thought would be worse than it turned out to be, and LB having been smacked with a stick by someone he called “a toxic friend” whom he’d just met. As LB and I waited for TK at his speech therapist’s office, another little girl came in and he invited her to play. She declined, and her grandmother told him she’s shy. LB looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Sometimes I’m shy too.”

Ha. Not really. Except…maybe? He told me later that one reason he hadn’t liked the camp was because he had to be up in front of everyone he didn’t know. I would’ve thought he’d love that, but that’s what I get for thinking, and our children are, for better and worse, endless surprises. And if nothing else, I count the camp a win for what I saw register on LB’s face. That sometimes I am too moment that is the foundation of empathy, of relationships, of kindness. Of grace. The identification with others who once seemed so different from us but now (now usually occurring after some sort of unwanted struggle that tapped into a deeper place within ourselves)? Now, not so much.

It was a big day.

The weather has been, like my hormones, all over the place recently: our first Australian Christmas Day was cool, grey, and rainy, keeping us in the house rather than at the beach as was promised in our relocation brochure. But for the past week or two we’ve had glorious summer weather, sapphire skies and turquoise water and beaming sun. Which has translated, for me and the boys now that The Husband’s work break is over, into a daily routine that involves sleeping in (or me sleeping beside them while they play Roblox on their iPads), some exercise, and the real start to the day: a trip to the beach.

The only question is which one? Because, I regret to inform those of you whose lives were not upended by grace moving them to a coastline across the world, we are surrounded by them. There’s the one we can walk to and the several more that we could also walk to if we had an hour to spare (my children, apparently, don’t), and there are the ones we haven’t even visited yet, a longer drive away. So we’ve been alternating, usually piling into the car with the floats and towels and sand-digging gear, and unloading upon a stretch of sand of our choosing.

Then: we float.

Aimless bobbing in the water is severely underrated, especially in this time of pandemic and insurrection, of cult followings and impeachments. I’m usually trying not to get my hair wet so as not to upset its washing schedule, now that my other excuse (It’s too COLD!) has been reset/invalidated by frigid winter swims, but this summer I’ve run out of fucks and am just embracing it all: the drippy hair, the sandy car, the salty bodies. The middle-of-the-day showers (theirs and mine). The view of one digging at the shoreline and the other on the boogie board while I bob on my Aldi-provided float metres from them both. Sans phone, sans Twitter, sans anxiety. How weird. How wonderful.

Little Brother is still getting his cold-water chops and often glares at me from the sand when I’m spending too much time at sea, until I return to him and we bundle into a towel together. But The Kid’s aquatic confidence is growing and, armed with his boogie board, he ventures into the depths that tug at my anxiety and pride simultaneously, and fill my heart when he returns to tell me, “I just feel at home in the water.”

That makes two of us.

And then, they request The Mommy Boat, which is less peaceful than my solitary bobbing but not without its pleasures, like when LB says that The Mommy Boat, it may not be as fast as The Daddy Boat but it’s calmer. TK agrees–they’re both loving boats, but The Mommy Boat is, while less fun, more peaceful. I can accept that.

I can also, after some internal battling, accept when TK wraps his arms around my waist and says that my belly feels like jelly, the extra weight around my midsection since we’ve moved here, since I’ve hit forty, now a part of me for them, a soft place to rest. And here I was spending all that time and effort trying to get rid of it? Maybe now I’ll just run for the hell/health of it. I kind of like being their tender place to land.

One day I’m standing waist-deep in a tidal pool so still I can see the curve of the earth in its surface; the next we head down as four to a wind-whipped spray and TH and LB huddle on the shore while TK and I brave the choppy waters together. Storms and stillness can both have their moments.

‘Cause sometimes what’s meant to break you makes you brave

We’re big on brotherhood at our house. When The Husband and I found out our second would be a boy, one of the things I was most excited about was having a matching set: two of the same.

They are not the same. But also? They are not completely different. And, more than anything, they are brothers.

Of all the things I’ve done wrong by my kids (and there are myriad), one good thing they’ve seemed to cling to is the importance of their relationship to each other. At the beach the other day, a friend of mine was observing them. “They’re really friends, aren’t they?” she asked, and my heart swelled. Because sure, they press each other’s buttons (and kick each other’s faces) at home, but out in the world? They are a team.

They know that they are Brothers of Love because I call them that (and sing horrible impromptu songs about it) all the time. The Kid knows that, as the big brother, he forges a trail for Little Brother. And LB knows that his name means protector and he relishes the role. They are for each other, and we all need someone–preferably someones–who are for us.

Yesterday I took them to the beach, just the three of us, and watched as they laughed aboard a boogie board for an hour. The sound was as musical to my ears as that of a champagne cork popping. Later, we came home and they fought, but still…it was a magical morning while it lasted.

I don’t think you can be a person of heart, of bravery, in this world apart from relationship with people who challenge you, who are not your mirror. I’ve done a 180 on a lot of the beliefs I grew up with and much of that pivot is due to abandoning the home I knew for something entirely different (to be clear, I left out of desperation, not bravery, but the road still ended in the same place), where I met people I never would have seen back where I came from and found out that they weren’t the Big Bad Wolf after all, but actual humans. They became my brothers and sisters. They became family.

The other day the boys had a playdate with another set of siblings whose ages match theirs. LB navigated the afternoon with his typical social suaveness, while TK struggled through an exhaustion-fuelled tantrum. I hovered nearby, popping in and out and wondering why it has to be so hard sometimes. Beating myself up, getting angry at God, wondering how we’ll all fare for the rest of our lives…the usual.

And–I watched LB. I watched how little it all affected him, how completely they accept each other, and how that leads others to do the same. How I could learn from that.

This morning they watched the news out of America with us. Their disbelief was surpassed only by their questions, how? being their–and our–biggest. And while I don’t have a complete answer for that, I do know this:

The people I know who have been able to admit they were wrong, who can apologise most sincerely, who can put themselves in others’ shoes most willingly, who can face the truth most bravely, and who can love the most freely? They are the same people who have been rocked by what the world has dealt them at one time or another but, rather than bury their heads in the sand or cover it all with a floral tablecloth, have along with Gide consented to lose sight of the shore, have abandoned the places where they formerly found their safety in search of new lands that may be very different from where they started.

Very different, yet somehow also…home.

The Husband has been feeling better and, with his improvement, has put us on a schedule (timetable if you’re Australian/nasty).

I rolled my eyes the first morning this occurred, as I came downstairs and saw that he was at the kitchen counter instead of behind the bathroom door. He was talking to the boys about Our Day, and I thought to myself how ridiculous it was to have “standards” during the holidays and how breezy I am and how we should all just RELAX.

It turns out that the schedule has kind of saved us.

Gone are the screen-filled days of my tenure and TH’s sickness, the meandering hours with rare, pop-up, complained-about activities like “book-reading” that punctuated the otherwise Roblox-dominated hours. Now the kids are thriving in their workouts and soccer games and (eye-roll/gasp combo) maths sessions with Dad.

And I’m sitting here writing this, so…we all win?

I’ve discovered over the last near-decade that I’m the same thing a friend recently called herself–A Lazy Parent. I do not like to craft, I shudder when the kids want to “help” me bake, and wrestling is a trauma trigger. I have panic attacks during homeschool sessions. If it’s not quiet reading on the couch or, even better, Netflix piled on the bed, I start to feel an itchy urge for my phone. I like to read books about parenting. Parenting itself? It’s a mixed bag.

To quote a friend: “I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING ‘WATCH THIS’ ANYMORE TODAY.”

I love my kids desperately, am consumed with their healthy development and well-being, and if I have to sit through another dinosaur video I may jump off a cliff. All these things are not mutually exclusive; it’s just complicated, being more than one thing. Having kids and a husband who are more than one thing.

The Kid doesn’t love eye contact, but Little Brother positively thrives on someone (me) staring deeply into his eyes every time we speak. This same LB would climb inside my skin if he could, but settles for tangling himself around me like a pretzel, while TK is happy to study his rock collection on the other side of the room without any physical contact for hours (#livingthedream). And TH can’t cook, and is just learning to clean, but his presence brings the boys to life (and his milkshake, to the yard), and he saves me daily in all the ways I didn’t ask for or know I needed.

You learn these things about each other when you move across the world together, when you survive lockdown together, when you get through the holidays together. You learn the twists and turns of each others’ personalities, and flaws, and forgivenesses.

You learn through the redemptive conversations that my therapist mentioned this week–the ones that happen even more often when you’re stuck together and you know your own need for grace–that life is not a straight line but a curving, doubling-back and shooting-forward one, which is much more chaotic and beautiful. You learn that there are parts of you that are brought to life by your family’s mercies (and parts that will likely die if your kid asks you to “watch him watching this video” one more time). You learn that Christmas lasts longer than a day, and not just because you’re too lazy to take the tree down, but because of what it means.

And you learn that sometimes the too-close one wants space, and sometimes the one who doesn’t like eye contact looks so deeply into yours that you swear he can see your soul.

You learn to be surprised, and to see the surprises not as weapons formed against you but as gifts of grace that call you to be more than you were–and then make you into just that.

Christmas is pressing on me.

What I mean is that the pressure of Christmas is getting to me, but upon closer examination (and, as an introspective, navel-gazing type, I love closer examinations, though I need reading glasses for them these days) I can see that I’m the one creating the pressure, grasping Christmas with both hands and pulling it to myself then complaining that it’s all too much.

I remember Christmases filled with presents, family, and joy. The space just before Christmas, on Christmas Eve (the holiest night of the year, IMHO), became a sacred and still one, pregnant with anticipation. Appropriately, I suppose.

Now I want to recreate that magic and sacredness for The Kid and Little Brother (and even Kevin the Dog, about whom I just stressed as I came home from The Final Shop, fretting over whether the four bags of treats I bought for his stocking would be enough to make him happy. Someone help me). And seeing as how, the last few years, we’ve dragged them all over the globe at Christmastime, and spent most of our Christmas Eves in hotel rooms, the sacredness and stillness have been sorely lacking.

But this year we will wake up in our own home. To our own tree. And they will run down their own stairs, and I want the scene that greets them to be…everything.

It won’t be, of course. Like the hot chocolate LB has been begging to have for breakfast, it will disappoint in one way or another, will be something other than expected in some manner. Expectations are just unfulfilled disappointments, right? But that hasn’t stopped me from trying.

Trying, and tiring.

The week before Christmas that began with surgery has continued with sickness: The Husband’s, and that of a gastric variety, which has left me resentful of the shared-load-changed-to-my-load, and thinking things (or possibly saying them under my breath) like “Two C-sections and I was up the next day, nobody gave ME a break” or “Must be nice to not have to parent with the flu, I WOULDN’T KNOW.” I’ve been resentful and bitter and exhausted, and at times the mood has been…tense.

Oh, and also? We’ve been in lockdown. Again. Because an Australian version of a COVID outbreak is a dozen cases, and an Australian response to such an outbreak is swift and, hopefully, effective.

It’s sort of like being stuck in a hotel room.

So here I am, face-to-face with all my limitations and those of the world around me, and isn’t that the perfect time for Christmas to show up and tell me that I can’t make it happen? Because Christmas, like grace, happens on its own and in its own way and through no effort of mine–the parts of it that matter most, at least. And they happen better.

Because scattered throughout the limitations are the unforced moments of magic: the piling up of the four of us in one bed to watch a Christmas movie; the proclamation by LB that “Jesus looks like a girl but she’s a man;” the initially-impromptu-but-now-oft-repeated water balloon attack on the boys; the moments I get to sneak away downstairs with a glass of wine and watch White Christmas. And, you know, whatever else is in store…she wrote, as her husband drove to the doctor’s office to drop off a shit sample.

I’ve found myself hanging by a thread and come to realise that I don’t have to hang because I am carried by Christmas. I come with my limitations, and it comes with its grace. With its unexpectedness. This Christmas will not look like the others–it wasn’t meant to.

And so we wait, with trepidation and anticipation, in grief and and love, to find out what that means.

I’m not a big fan of the word lucky. Believing as I do in a divine hand in our stories, I find that luck leaves it all a bit too anonymous and chance-y. But The Kid likes to describe himself as lucky, and who am I to disagree with that?

“I’m so lucky,” he said the other day after we dropped Little Brother off at school. “I get to stay home and have a surgery instead of go to school today.” Wouldn’t have been how I narrated it, but he was right on the logistics at least: he was staying home, and he was having a (minor) surgery: a tongue-tie release, his second.

Apparently the absence of a move and trans-world flights this year left some empty spots in our schedule, so The Husband decided to leave his company of a decade for a new job, and I decided to finally book TK in for what his speech therapist has been recommending for months/years, this tongue clipping. On the day he had it, the rest of the school went on excursions: LB with the younger kids to a cinema and park picnic, and the older kids, minus TK, to a local water-slide park (site of a couple of recent existential crises/birthday parties).

So he was okay with missing the slides and staying home. Okay, at least, until the fasting went on too long and the waiting rooms were too numerous and, finally, the mask came for him as I held his hands in the operating room. He fought it, and I held him, in that counter-intuitive thing we do as mothers, parents, humans: hurting to heal.

It sucks.

And, not for nothing, it’s always harder, these choices we have to enforce, at this time of year: this month when school is ending and presents are to be distributed among teachers and friends and family and emotions, high and low, are meant to be given space, and this season of Advent that means waiting turns into the busiest, somehow, of them all.

And mothers get so much of the brunt of it.

There is a pile of Christmas presents for the boys in my closet that I’ve been collecting for weeks or months or decades, not sure which, and I’ll need to go through them with TH one of these days so he’ll know what they got (that was always the joke on Christmas at my house growing up–The Dad would ask what we got). So to prevent that stumbling-in, wild-eyed, confused, “how did I get here and who are these people?” look of TH’s that makes me want to go on a murderous rampage, we’ll catalogue the gifts together. Hopefully.*

This is after the distribution of presents at the boys’ school this morning, a chaotic, rain-soaked affair that skirted (broke) Covid recommendations and left me sweating in 90% humidity, ready for a drink at 9 am. After the online orders sent to family back home that we haven’t seen in a year, after TK’s (very small) birthday party in a seizure-inducing mall arcade with a grocery-store cake (when I go half-ass, I go full half-ass). After a year that has not been quite as busy but somehow still busy enough.

After the surgery, the holding him down and the post-anaesthesia grumpiness and the five hours at the hospital, just me and him. After the resentment that I’m always the one to do these things, to bear these loads.

Then I get glimpses.

I read about the first Christmas and what could easily be written off as fairy tale or credulity befitting another age, this girl’s acceptance of an impossible message, a birth and calling defying reason, and I find that her story befits me because I can see myself, however small, within it: facing impossible moments, mine in an operating room rather than a stable, put-upon by a divine writer whose plan is hard and unexpected and, eventually and at glimpses, wonderful.

“You get to come with me,” TK said as we walked, hands clasped, through another hospital, to another operating room. “You get to see the room too.”

And I do. I have to, and I get to, see so many things I wouldn’t have, and sometimes those two words feel very far apart. But sometimes they don’t, and an operating room can be a chapel, an operating table can be an altar, and I am bent beside it, in this season that makes no sense but somehow also, completely, does.

*Jason is a great dad and husband, blah blah blah, but this look is real and y’all know it.

Is there anything more mind-bendingly contradictory than Christmas shopping in the middle of summer as “Winter Wonderland” plays in the background of the toy store?

This is our life now, and this is our Christmas this year: staying put in the sweltering Sydney heat, waking up in our own beds (read: our own bed, as the kids will assuredly end up in ours, with the dog on the floor next to us all) instead of in a hotel, running down our own stairs to our own tree, half a world away from the place where this happened last.

It is crazy, and beautiful, and makes no sense, and–like so much else in our story–this is how I know it is right and true.

Tomorrow (today, when you’re reading this) is The Kid’s ninth birthday, nearly a decade of him, of being a mother. Impossible and nonsensical and true. Last weekend, though, we went to someone else’s birthday party, and as is his custom, he rued going. And so did I, with his constant query–Why–from the backseat, but I know that if he and I only ever left the house when we wanted to, we would never leave it. We were great at lockdown, not so much at regular life, and so I forced us both to attend a celebration to which we had been generously invited.

It was a soccer party, so we watched. We sat together, argued, observed, negotiated, expressed our gratitude, and left. I could feel his anxiety lift as we climbed into the car, and I knew that for him–just like for me–it’s not about not caring, but about caring too much, about being overwhelmed too easily, about feeling all the feelings. And this is why I push him, why I push myself, with compromises and limits and boundaries in place to keep us safe, but push nonetheless: to show us both that we can do hard things.

And then we can come home.

And, as always, the points of grace in it all: expressions of understanding, waves he gives his friends and the way they interrupt their rough play to wave back, as though he could even be their point of grace in the midst of a mayhem he’d rather avoid. What a gift he is, has been for nearly a decade.

And Little Brother? Well, he had a playdate on the weekend that was just all kinds of too easy, and as I heard him play Mario Kart downstairs with his friend, TK joining them to–don’t I love it–watch, I wondered what I should be doing? How I should be facilitating? And grace whispered, “Stop. Enjoy.” So I did. I read, and listened to Christmas music, and just sat. At the party, my place was on a bench beside TK. At the playdate, it was on the couch by myself.

We keep finding our places.

Even as I look for kitchen gadgets shipped over from America and hidden in the backs of drawers, or try to hunt down the still-missing beloved Betty Crocker Cooky Book from YM so I can get my bake on, or Annie Dillard’s A Writing Life that hasn’t materialised from the boxes that arrived a year ago, we find so much else: we find ourselves on the street in front of our house meeting neighbours at a Christmas party, the kids eating fairy bread and The Husband and me doing our best impression of sociable people and the guy who lives next door returning Kevin to us (“Kev” to all the neighbours) after he’s snuck out.

The kids find themselves in a beloved school, a second home of many, among friends who truly know them. I find myself in an online group that started as a joke–Suburban Housewives Against Trump–but has somehow turned into a joyful encouragement over the last few months. TH finds himself headed toward a new job, Sydney-based. I find myself running alongside the water, in awe of how we got here. That we got here. To our place.

I almost died last weekend.

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it is what I sent in a text to The Husband after I attempted an ocean swim and barely made it out alive. I’ve been doing “ocean” swims for awhile now, calling them that at least, even though they’ve occurred in the water on relatively calm harbour beaches where I can swim parallel to, and not far from, the shore.

But I’ve been wanting to try on more of a challenge, so when a friend offered her husband to accompany me on my maiden voyage from Manly to Shelly Beach–a trek through surf-level waves and (harmless) shark-populated waters–I assented, and we gathered there Sunday morning for a new kind of church. The kind where you almost die but then survive, and get gratitude and a blog post out of it.

The water was choppy, and my guide told me that if I could make the swim on this day, I could make it any day. Well, I’ve lived in New York and therefore can make it anywhere but this apparently does not include the Manly to Shelly swim because I did not make it. Less than halfway through, battered by waves and panicking breathlessly, I told my now-rescuer that I wanted to turn around and also, could I hold his hand the whole way back LIKE A SMALL CHILD?

It was humiliating, naturally, but also, these are friends who have seen me in bad shape before (and I’ve returned the favour) so I knew it would live on as a comedic memory in our shared history. But more than humiliating, it was scary. And I think it’s helpful to, every now and then, be reminded of how easy it is to sink, to drown, to die, if only to be simultaneously reminded of our need, always, to be rescued.

This same friend enlisted her daughter, who has a sewing machine, to rescue me when my volunteering to stitch an accessory onto the kindergarteners’ dance costumes met with a dead end (I remembered that I can’t sew, and when I try, I want to kill everyone around me). TH has rescued me countless times, most recently by not losing it when I got a speeding ticket in a school zone like I definitely would have if the roles were reversed (or at the very least I would have harangued him mercilessly, per what a friend and I recently rued as both our husbands’ bad luck in marrying people not nearly as nice as they are). My children rescue me with their forgiveness on the daily (one morning last week in the getting-ready-for-school madness, aka My Worst Self Come to Life at Eight O’Clock Every Day, Little Brother told TH in the face of his harmless ribbing of me to “stop judging Mom–she’s doing her best”).

We have to sink to know we need help, and the best way to be rescued is to need help in the first place. And recognising we need help? Recognising we’re sinking? It happens when we give up. When we allow ourselves to look around and see that darkness is enveloping us, and letting ourselves feel that: feel the grief of not seeing family at the holidays rather than wiping it away with a plane ticket; feel the grief of the still-wounded Inner Child and taking her to therapy; feel the insufficiency of our own efforts to Just Be Better and recognise that in that insufficiency is where we meet rescue. Forgiveness. Grace.

Which, metaphorically or if you’re really lucky (dumb), looks like a hand pulling your ass to shore.

I don’t like mandates. Parties that have forced games? No thank you. Ice breakers at training or social events? Gross. Conversations proctored with required input? Even worse than small talk.

I also don’t like (yes, I’m talking about things I don’t like right now; I never said this blog was a bastion of positivity) bullshit holidays. International Men’s Day, for example, can kiss my ass. Valentine’s Day is just commercialism on steroids. And Thanksgiving? Well let’s ask Native Americans how they feel about that.

I do a gratitude journal daily, not because someone told me to (that was the reason when I was younger) but for the more self-motivated reason that it’s been proven good for mental health, and, along with Lexapro, I need that kind of help. In the process, I’ve learned that Thanksgiving can be just a fun time to stuff my face if I’m already acquainted with gratitude, because here’s the secret of it: it’s not an attitude, like needlepointed throw pillows may have you believe, but a way of, simply, looking. Gratitude is looking. You heard it here.

Last weekend we had three other families over to celebrate not colonialism, but food with us, and in the process started some traditions: pelting the kids with water balloons, allowing them to get us back with water guns (so American!), and passing turkey around an outdoor table while the men talked about I-don’t-know-what and the women discussed The Crown. It was wonderful.

There was no Macy’s parade, no dog show, no dressing/stuffing even (!), but there was friendship and home, and I didn’t throw up this year. And that’s a lot.

It turns out that, as previously discussed, there is always a lot. And sometimes that’s oppressive. But this week it’s been pretty gorgeous.

There’s been my solo ride on the Manly Ferry to Circular Quay, where I met girlfriends at the Opera House for a play.

There’s been the loss of Little Brother’s first tooth, a milestone he allowed me to assist, and his pride afterward.

There was the afternoon I collected the boys early and one of The Kid’s classmates said to me, “You’re picking up the best kid in school. James is so kind.”

There was the orthodontic evaluation that I was anxious over but that TK charmed his way through, and afterward the three of us got ice cream and walked on the beach.

There is the hope instilled by a new political beginning, by the breathing room made possible by an impending absence of vitriol and hatred coming from leadership.

There are the countless moments of home here, of going from place to place with a real sense of belonging: friends’ homes, the boys’ school, knowing people and being known, and while the world is in flux this is a gift indeed.

I don’t have to be grateful. I am, however, free to be. And why not? I mean, just look.