Plans In Pencil

Saturday was a date night: The Husband and I had booked tickets for a party at the local yacht club, which we attended last year and which yielded a priceless photo taken by a friend, an immersion in the ocean, and a foot full (mine) of sea urchin quills. This year, we booked the sitter early so we could go to dinner nearby beforehand.

We went to a place I’d gone to with friends over two years ago–which sounds crazy to say, that we’ve even been here long enough to have gone somewhere “years ago”–so it was my second round there, too. I had forgotten how the owner tried to make meals there an experience–last time I’d been with a big group so the treatment was spread out more broadly. This time, though, we were told, “Welcome home” no less than half a dozen times, including when we left. TH was over it, seeing as how we don’t live in that restaurant and neither of us likes being treated too familiarly by strangers.

We haven’t stopped saying it to each other since.

Which is appropriate, really, given that we are home these days, and looking for our home still. We’ve been chasing a few houses, off and on, eyes glued to the real estate website and minds wavering back and forth over all the old issues: finances, location, size. It’s a decision that feels–and is–monumental, given the money and commitment required for it, and our choice–to assent to a search, then step in gradually, then just, maybe, immerse ourselves–is weighed down by the thousand other tiny choices it entails, statements about making Sydney our home for a bit longer or much longer, our original three-years-later departure date fading in the rearview mirror.

So maybe we’ll get a house soon? I don’t know. This whole process is crazy, full of bids and auctions and anxiety and back-and-forth. The last time we did this was for our first house. It was just the two of us but we were planning for the future. Now there are four of us and we have things like future teenagers, and possible high schools, to consider. It’s an exciting, terrifying chapter.

So Saturday night, after we were welcomed home upon leaving dinner, we headed down the street to the beach. We joined friends and poured drinks and talked. This year, no one jumped in the water–a recent storm has left it too polluted. (Which is to say that the local beach smells like a pile of gorilla shit. It’s sad, but it will change.) Instead, we stood in our bare feet on the shore, bottles of wine in buckets in the sand, and one of us (not me) who has always been good at recognising the beauty of small moments said, “I love this place. It’s like home.”

It is. We have adult gatherings there; Little Brother’s last birthday party was there; we go there on Fridays after school and take flying leaps of bravery there. We do life there.

Home is growing to be a bigger place than I ever realised, full of sand and water and FaceTime calls and uncertainty and life. Beaches, harbours, flights across the world, internet voice apps, text chains, Skype counselling sessions, fires and floods. Frederick Buechner wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” In other words, welcome home.

If there’s anything the movie This Is Where I Leave You taught me — besides that Tina Fey should not do accents — it’s about shiva, the Jewish tradition in response to the death of an immediate family member. I’d heard of shiva before but for the first time saw it dramatized in the film, and the images have stayed with me. Unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of opportunities lately to reflect on the practice of grief.

To wit: the spate of celebrity deaths, encompassing everyone from Robin Williams to Kate Spade and, most recently, Kobe Bryant. While Williams’ and Spade’s deaths were fraught with discussions of mental illness, Bryant’s has been a beast of a different nature: an accident, a young life ended too soon, the included loss of his daughter and seven others on the plane. There are countless angles from which to examine the situation.

To be continued, over at Mockingbird!

Our house stinks.

I know I’ve likely belabo(u)red the point, but this situation is getting beyond the bounds of normal limits. We’ve entered mildew/mo(u)ld territory now. This is some apocalyptic shit.

In my former life as an aspiring Fox News consultant, I blindly believed–and doubted–many things. One of the doubts was climate change, but whew chile…there are no doubts left now. Many scientists have surmised that climate change will hit Australia harder than the rest of the world, and if our carpet is any indication, the proof is RESOUNDING.

The shot: four months of drought and fires.

The chaser: a weekend of the worst flooding in thirty years.

There is airspace next to the downstairs aircon vent that I hold my breath when I pass through, like I’m walking by a graveyard in the fifth grade, and there’s a spot on the stairs to the front door that is just sort of…sopping, and a couple of mornings ago there were two frogs by that door, and yesterday Little Brother found a tiny lizard indoors, and y’all I cannot anymore. Tennis lessons and birthday parties have been cancelled. A boat was washed ashore, unmoored at the local beach the other day. This is the same harbour beach where people were surfing due to the storm-induced swells. The water everywhere is brown from whatever shit is stirred by these floods.

EVERYTHING IS SO GROSS.

Which means that when it comes to the real estate website, you better believe I’m right on top of that, Rose–countless times a day, imagining marble countertops and immaculate tiles and hardwoods and every other HGTV wet dream because hope is what saves us. I mean, kind of. Partly, at least.

I find myself wondering, and asking others cutely, if we can’t just have weather that’s, I don’t know, somewhere between fires and floods? Like, is that possible? And then we all laugh and go back to our mildewed houses and I forget that most of life? Is exactly that–between the extremes, in the mundane day to day.

(I just checked the real estate website again. At this point it is a verifiable tic.)

We drag the kids from house inspection to house inspection (open houses) on Saturdays, in search of a dream that will turn out to be a compromise that won’t answer our deepest longings, then coming home to our current house which is totally sufficient for our needs and even great in a lot of ways but still feels like sliding back into an old set of clothes after trying on brand-new ones. And I realise that yes, there are fires, and yes, there are floods, but there are also parts of life that I turn into extremes.

Parent information night was at the boys’ school a few days ago and at the year three session, the standardised testing that begins this year was brought up and I felt the tension in the room rise. Questions were tossed around that really amounted to “how can I propel my kid as far ahead as possible so I’ll feel okay as a parent?” and I felt the pull that used to drive me–the one that tells me to give in to being defined, and having my children defined, by how well we all perform. The undertow was there to yank me down.

Then I thought of my boys, currently at home with The Husband, and how–generally speaking–happy they are. How full of hope. How they don’t even smell mildew. How what they really need is space to feel, and recognition that they are exactly who and where they’re meant to be, and that mistakes are like muddy puddles–they can get you dirty while also being fun as hell.

So I removed that particular concern from the Fire/Flood column, much like The Kid proclaims when he hears something he doesn’t like: “DELETE!”

And I’m trying to do the same with the other moments that threaten to undo me, like when LB waves bravely at me from his class’s line formation in the morning–I want to crumple, and I let myself feel the feelings, but I remember that they are held by hands bigger than mine so I cry a little, then breathe. And when I do, I feel a bit of the weight I’ve been voluntarily shouldering begin to slip off, consumed by fires and floods that seem to just take away, but actually reveal what will never leave.

We were meant to be back in America by now, with Little Brother finishing preschool and The Kid wrapping up second grade. Instead, TK has just begun year three and LB, in a stunning (to my heart) turn of events, now wears a red and navy uniform alongside his brother as he marches into a kindy classroom every morning.

OH, MY HEART.

I knew, once we settled in here among friends and a community that feels like family, that I wanted desperately to see LB in that uniform alongside the mates he’s had for a few years now, little siblings of TK’s friends. I knew that it would be easier this time around, our tenure in Australia three years rather than three weeks, my awareness of what food to bring (and in which containers) cemented, the walk to the school being a familiar one. I knew that LB, having accompanied me every day to drop off and/or pick up TK, would be more comfortable with this new stage in his life.

But that doesn’t mean I was prepared.

I still, often, have flashbacks to my last nursing session with LB. It was a memorable moment: I sat with him on the couch a couple of hours before I was due to take TK for his second MRI, and I had plans to spend the rest of the weekend toilet-training TK. So there was a convergence of goals and emotions that morning, a perfect storm of my own creation, to some degree, swirling around me. The minutes felt precious, fraught, important. It was a “last time,” and those are always hard, even when they should be happening.

Maybe I hadn’t fully examined the “last time” nature of this recent life shift: LB standing there in his uniform, hat perched nattily on his head, expression on his face wavering between excitement and nervousness but eventually falling into “determined to be brave”–the one that pierces my heart the most. And then, he was inside the classroom, along with all the other kids, the parents remaining outside scattered, and I realised what I so often forget: life is almost always full of grief.

It’s the laugh/cry emoji in real time, these moments that are called both bitter and sweet, that hurt and bring freedom, that feel good and bad and everything in between. I walked around town that morning free of hands reaching for mine, free of questions without answers pelting me, free of urgent bathroom requests, but also devoid of the buddy I’ve had for the last three years.

It was, like so much, a little of everything.

As was one afternoon last week, when the boys and I headed down to our favourite after-school setting, the beach at a local sailing club, and they slurped ice cream then hit the sand and water while the grownups had a drink. After a few minutes of happily building villages in the sand, TK sought involvement with the group, who were jumping from a nearby pier. LB was already racing around with them, abstaining from the jumps, and I heard TK ask one of the kids if he could play with them.

It nearly broke my heart. But that’s because projection is a hell of a drug, and my own isolation as a child was coming back to haunt me. But that wasn’t happening here.

After he asked a few times and his friend finally heard him, TK realised he had a choice to make: abstain from the jump like LB had chosen, or…not. I could see him weighing the options there on the pier. He looked up at me. I walked over.

“I’ll do it with you,” I told him, not sure I even wanted to, but when’s the last time that mattered to a mother? His friends began to cheer him on. My heart was being reassembled there on the dock. I honestly didn’t know, though, what he was going to do: he stepped forward, then pulled back, about a dozen times.

Then…something shifted. I felt his resolve, whether through his hand or our connected hearts and souls, I don’t know, but I looked at him and I knew: he was going to do it. He stepped toward the edge, his hand still in mine, and then–he let go.

The kids cheered. LB sloshed toward him through the water and bear-hugged him (then bravely refused to do the jump himself). I was reminded that my childhood is not TK’s, and vice versa. And that everything that is right also hurts a little, because of the letting go.

And yesterday? At his school’s swim carnival? He swam twenty-five meters. To more cheers.

So this morning, after such displays of bravery from my kids (and an absence of accompaniment by them), I headed down to the beach to do the thing I’ve been thinking and talking about but haven’t, yet. I put on my cap and goggles, and I sloshed toward it: the open water. I fully, finally, submerged myself in the Pacific.

At first I felt I’d drown, because the pool doesn’t have waves or fish or currents, and it does have a line that keeps me going straight. But after a few minutes, my strokes became more sure and I looked around at this world: unpredictable and vast, and adjacent to the old one, but still somehow brand new.

This afternoon I sat at a table next to the school playground. The playground where both of my kids go to school, as of this Monday. I watched The Kid as he played ball with his class ahead of me, and I looked at the door to the kindergarten classroom, behind which Little Brother sat talking with his new teacher. And it was glorious.

It took awhile to get here, but here we are.

TK was laughing on the field ahead of me, talking to his friends and raising his hand to answer questions from the new teacher. Then LB emerged from the classroom grinning, with his teacher–who was also TK’s teacher in kindy–telling me how ready he is to start school.

I thought, while sitting at that table, about this scenario three years ago: how we were less than a month into our life in Sydney; how I was drinking a bit too much rosé every night; how The Husband and LB and I all tagged along for this meet-the-teacher moment with TK and how nervous TH and I were, wondering how he was doing in there–if he’d even speak to her. We were raw and tired and uncertain. Which are not bad things to be, actually–I’ve found they often describe me right before something wonderful happens.

We were supposed to be back in America now, three years later, but here we are. Sitting in the same spot, the same school, the same teachers. And it is wonderful.

It’s wonderful because it’s where we’re meant to be, right now. It’s wonderful even though I’m still anxious and there are still occasional nights when I have too much rosé. It’s wonderful even when I lose my shit with my kids and have to apologise. It’s wonderful even though I’m on the real estate website every day looking for another house, one that does not have stank carpet, and even though there are still people who piss me off and I’m still not a paragon of peace and adjustment. (Dammit, I forgot to meditate again today. That must be it.)

It’s wonderful because we’re here, and we’re together, which makes here home, and we’ve relearned, in the last few days, that life is short and people you never thought would disappear, do. It’s wonderful because, in the best moments–between impeachment coverage and celebrity deaths and sibling fights and smoke-filled air and all the other annoyances of life–it is full of wonder. I am.

Last week, the last full week of summer holidays, I took the boys to a birthday party at a waterslide park. I went down first with LB, and felt him tensing up the whole way down, proclaiming at the end that he didn’t like it and was DONE. Then I watched as TK came down on his own, grinning. We left early to get to a show in the city, meeting some friends for dinner in the brutal heat and sweating our asses off, then walking over to the theatre. LB alternated between watching the show and asking to leave, while TK and I stared, transfixed, at the magic occurring with light and air onstage.

Sometimes LB arrives places earlier; sometimes TK does; and often they both lead me to where we need to go. For three years we’ve been home, and we march ahead into another. They came out of the playroom the other day, announcing that they were taking an inventory of their toys: “We’re remembering them all,” they said. I felt the way I did in the theatre, at that table on the playground: full of wonder at the fact that I’m the one who gets to know them best for now–not always–but for now, each of my hands holding a sweaty little one. Wonderful.

It would not be the same, but it would be familiar.

A few weeks ago we decided to squeeze in a quick holiday between our return from America and the boys’ return to school. One of The Kid’s friends was spending January at her family’s house on the Gold Coast and invited us to visit, so we used that as a jumping-off point to organise an entire vacation. A three-day one, at least.

Our expectations were nonexistent, considering The Husband booked the hotel and flights from his phone in an Atlantan Marriott Courtyard a couple of weeks before we left, but as we drove through the lights of the city and arrived at our hotel just before bedtime, TH and I looked at each other and came to the realisation: we liked this place.

We continued to like it when we awoke the next morning to blue skies and bright sun. We continued to like it as we built sandcastles on the beach and ordered drinks by the pool; as we went to a BBQ at TK’s friend’s place; as we returned for sunset on the beach. Well, I did. TH took the boys to the pool for an end-of-day swim and I headed down to the water solo.

The pounding surf and whipping wind greeted me. I felt like I was returning to a place I already knew, where the world Gold replaced Gulf, where the current was stronger and the waves rougher and the buildings down the road were taller, but that felt familiar nonetheless. I felt the way I always feel at a beach: at home.

Something within me is set aright when I’m surrounded by the vastness of the ocean: I’m reminded that I’m not as in control as I like to pretend I am, that there is a story grander than the one I could tell, that the world is dangerous but something bigger is keeping me safe within it. Because the ocean, it is brutal, and filled with all the danger one could imagine (hello, Titanic remains), but when I stand on the sand before it, just out of its reach, I can remain in protected awe.

I think I may believe in God because of the ocean. At any rate, its existence fosters within me a sense of recognition: I have been here before. I know this place. Even when I haven’t, and I don’t. Which makes me believe there is a connectedness, and a source for it, beyond what I can see.

And there’s this: after I texted TH to come down with the boys and see this beauty–because for all love does to curtail freedom, it is also an end to loneliness, to living without witnesses–I turned and saw a boy wrapped in a white hotel towel appear at the crest of the hill leading to the beach. He ambled toward me, and I recognised him. As my own. As my home. And he told me the same: “I saw a woman on the beach and it was you, so I ran.” And so we remained in awe, together.

Finding home, I think, demands this recognition. And to find this recognition, we must pay attention, be attuned, so as not to miss the echoes of home: Little Brother’s hesitation on the sand that echoes that of my sister’s when she was younger and called it stinky before coming to love it, as he has (sort of). The map on our bedroom wall that TK hung the other day, created by the illustrator of our book cover, that details how he and I found each other. Finishing the first Harry Potter with the boys at bedtime and being reminded of all the best parts I’d forgotten.

These stories, these beaches, these echoes, these recognitions, all like stones leading our way home.

Grace does not do things tit for tat; it acts finally and fully from the start. –Robert Farrar Capon

We’re no longer jet-lagged, so that excuse is off the table. But life itself is tiring, especially to two active boys, and bedtime at our house can get…emotional. And since I’m all about making space for the feelings (a goal recently reinforced by a book my friend recommended, and then my therapist affirmed), I find the process can be…exhausting.

You would not believe (or maybe you would?) the “issues” that resonate with young boys when they are exceptionally tired. There was a full joint meltdown recently over whose Bot Bot was bigger (and this was at 10 am). One gets mad when the other laughs/breathes/sneezes too loudly–and I mean “mad” to the point of “tears.” But what has consumed The Kid’s mind most recently at bedtime is a cosmetic issue of sorts. And it’s piercing my heart.

He doesn’t like his smile.

Self-awareness comes with age, usually, and therapy, definitely, and as my kids grow in self-awareness I both enjoy its fruits and despise its difficulties. They pick up on everything: being treated differently (by friends and…me), they recognise their own emotions and often indulge them to the point of hysteria, and they see the discrepancies between themselves and those around them.

Hence the Smile Issue.

“Why can’t my smile be like my brother’s? I want a perfect smile!” TK wailed the other night as Little Brother slept peacefully on the other side of me. “WHY WON’T GOD LET ME SMILE?!”

Well, that got me. Silver lining notwithstanding (hey, at least he believes in God?!), his pain was evident and I had no idea what to do with it. He’s in that transitional developmental stage that lasts…well, forever, but especially while teeth are being gained and lost, and I think part of the difference he sees is that: the gap-laden mouth of an eight-year-old compared with the white picket fence of his brother.

But there’s also this: their very natures contribute to the way they smile, and LB is adept at the posing. He knows how to pose. And he loves to do it. So when the camera appears, he squints his eyes cutely and grins widely; meanwhile, TK–not much for artifice–is focused more on the effort of it; the technique. So his smile, while its own form of posing, is a bit more…strained. Like me at a social event when a lens is thrust into my face.

Because he and I, we sort of walk through life like this. (Also, not for nothing, there’s the weakened oral musculature with which he was prematurely born, so it actually is harder for him to smile. Which makes him a champion for doing it in the first place, IMHO.)

LB, though, he’s a force of nature–not nurture, apparently, because his social savviness was definitely not derived from our gene pool. He can work a room like no other, talk to anyone, make friends in an instant. I’m stunned by it because I have no idea where he got it and I will never personally achieve it. The flip side of that social mastery, though, is an awareness and sensitivity to the way others treat him, and an intuitiveness about their feelings–both in general, and about him. So while his smile is real, there is so much more behind it.

And isn’t that always the case? Because with TK, while the smile in photos is more forced and effortful, he has another one–we all do–that is free and unfettered. It’s backed up by laughter and euphoria. It’s honest.

We all have an honest one and a…photo-friendly one. A fraught one.

So I tell TK, lying in bed, the truth: that I love his smile, that it’s one of my personal favourites, that every smile is different like a fingerprint and is exactly as it should be, right now. And I feel quite smug and pleased with this well-researched and maternal answer. And it is not enough.

So I tell him–maybe even more gently–that we can practice his smile. And I place my fingers on the corner of his lips and lift upward, and we do that a few times, and I tell him we can do it again tomorrow. And something within him seems to unlock, a weight drifting off. Because for all the truth of different being okay–being wonderful, actually–sometimes we just want someone who will walk alongside us and help lift the weight.

There’s no perfect smile. I know that. But as he drifts off, finally, into his own complicated form of sleep, I do smile–a complicated and real one.

This is what life looks like: feeling the plane descend through clouds and smoke toward the city that is now one home of many, watching my children’s faces lift with delight upon recognition of that home, feeling the cord stretch between our hearts and the home we just left and the people there even as it slackens with our approach toward our people here. This country is on fire and we are returning to it, thankfully. This is crazy. This is life.

I got to see Little Women on our last day in America, and I say “got to” because it was an opportunity afforded to me by The Husband, who recognises the tenuousness of my mental health on a good day but especially on a day that is: post-Christmas; devoid of a hotel-room base because late checkout was at 2 and we don’t fly out until 11; full of choices regarding food that my body now regrets; tired from the weeks before and the impending hours of travel. So he took the boys to a cartoon while I sat, by myself and among others, in a darkened theatre and watched the March sisters charm their way, once again and more than ever, into my heart. It felt joyful. It felt comfortable. It was perfect.

Then I left through an exit and saw the “Emergency Exit Only” sign but pushed the door anyway and the buzzing started and people stared and an employee rushed, looking at me directly and saying, “Did you do that?” And I responded that I had and gave no explanation because there wasn’t one, I couldn’t explain except to say PEACE OUT, AMERICA, I AM DONE FOR THIS YEAR. And so my boys and I had one last hurrah in the lobby of our hotel with snacks and drinks and then boarded our plane and the welcoming arms of the Virgin Australia flight crew. And…scene.

For that part, at least. Now “real life” begins, whatever that means, but here’s what it seems to mean so far: trying to get used to this new house that I vacillate between tolerating and hating, filled as it is with carpet (I cannot, and in Sydney one should not, humid as the air is and I do NOT want to use the word moist but you know where I’m going here); two beaches in two days with two boys; running through smoke to get some exercise for lungs that are probably blackening; reconnecting with friends who are family; organising my way into a more hopeful attitude about said house; trying to maintain self-awareness about how this all is affecting my mental health (no worries, I get therapy on Friday, #blessed).

But here is what has come before and, in its beauty, gets sprinkled throughout the present through memory and grace:

A Sudanese Uber driver who piques The Kid’s interest and they go on to have a conversation about whether the government in Sudan is good (it is, now, but watch out for that country to the south); a flight attendant whose intuition seems to lock her, kindly, onto both my kids but especially TK, and I watch but can’t hear yet can only grin as they have a conversation through breakfast and are both smiling themselves; a girl at the hotel pool who befriends my boys and they proceed to pretend to be dogs and dolphins (her dad sounds like Harvey Weinstein and I try to ignore that); a boy in the airport lounge who sees my boys on their iPads and they proceed to make said lounge louder than it’s ever been with their exclamations over Roblox and, for some reason, poops. Bonus: his drunk mom makes me feel better about my comparatively modest alcohol intake, #grateful; running into the kids from TK’s (and now Little Brother’s!) school vacation care at the beach and seeing faces light up when they recognise the boys.

There is no longer a hotel card key in my wallet, but a house key in my pocket. There is smoke and missing family and present friends and beachside lingering and waning jet lag and wondering about the future. There is a love committed to us, that proves itself beyond my doubts and disbelief in every moment, until all I can do is just behold it and try to breathe in its beauty.

Just look how far we’ve come. Thousands of miles and back. So far, yet right where we started. Across the world and always home.

I, I’m a new day rising
I’m a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
Do I stay or run away
And leave it all behind?

It’s times like these you learn to live again
It’s times like these you give and give again
It’s times like these you learn to love again
It’s times like these time and time again

This is my favourite time of day.

These waning hours–after sunset and before bedtime (because we are in winter here and the sun goes down hours prior to lights out), during which the four of us are sprawled across two beds, immersed in books or screens or toys, bodies not merely adjacent but connected, crossed over each other, resting upon and underneath each other, because what are boundaries when it’s just us anyway?–these are my favourite. They don’t hold the ensuing obligations of the morning hours, the expectation to fill a day, the weighing and consideration of priorities, the heaviness of to-dos. (It should be noted that, yes, we are on vacation, and yes, this is still how I think on vacation.)

These hours hold laziness, and freedom, and rest. They hold a glass of wine or two, ice cream, binge-watching, boys splashing in showers, and winding down. They hold sleep. They hold the untouched moments between lying down and rising, full of promise for the next day without demanding anything yet, not so much as an early wakeup call other than the 7-am sunrise that will move, soon, to 5:30 am but for now beckons only half-heartedly, refusing to blaze until hours after we’ve had time to exercise, or eat breakfast, or just lie still some more on those beds.

I guess I’m…tired or something?

And it’s not just jet lag. Not for nothing, we’ve sort of become pros at that, mapping out allowances for it months in advance, knowing our own and each others’ bodies well enough to account for rest stops in hotels without any plans on our way in and out, and–when those allowances aren’t made but are needed anyway–shooting apology texts to say we aren’t going to make it to church on Christmas Eve after all because, well…we just can’t? Because we aren’t physically, and emotionally, able, even though we’d like to be? But we know well enough when it’s time to raise the white flag, and the people who know us, they know and love us well enough to tell the truth: that they’re disappointed but understand.

That’s one of the things you learn when you splay yourself across homes on either side of the world: how to tell the truth in love. How to say things like, “We’ll see you soon…ish?” and hear in response, “Not soon enough.” How to hear from the people back in Sydney that they miss you and tell them the same even as you’re missing the people you just said goodbye to here, dreadfully so. How you watch your youngest cry in the backseat after he’s said another farewell to the cousins he’s finally old enough to remember and enjoy and how not to distract him from the tears, but encourage him to feel them and, in so doing, feel them yourself. It hurts. And the hurt is so necessary, because it’s real.

Love is hard because it’s real. Because it tells the truth. Anything else is just cheap. Love that is strong enough to not only withstand the truth, but grow stronger because of it? That shit is real, man. It elevates, and it pulls you under, and it takes your breath away and gives your life back.

It’s what we’ve found by moving across the world. By spending Christmases in hotels and saying goodbye a thousand times and returning to kids who were way younger when we left, so much so that their growth punches you in the gut. It’s how we know each other, this four-sided square of ourselves, as well as we do. It’s the only way to have gotten to where we are: to leave everything we knew and go somewhere new, then toggle back and forth between the two over and over. It’s insane.

It’s also this:

It’s meeting The Kid’s first therapist in the park, and hearing her say, “I don’t even see autism anymore,” and it’s feeling your heart soar at the words, but not for the reason you would’ve thought five years ago when the doctor handed you those papers; it’s because you’ve finally learned that it doesn’t matter whether that word is even real, because whatever it means, whatever it holds, it doesn’t begin to contain the multitudes that make up your boy. It’s finally believing that, and would there have been any other way to get there than through there, through the doctor and the papers and the therapists and the journey across the world? It’s not because the words–autism, or apple brain–are a bad thing, it’s because they’re a nothing, not when compared to the person they can’t begin to describe.

It’s standing in that church, not on Christmas Eve but, finally, on the Sunday after, and feeling a presence brush against you and a hug wash over you and a face who knows you across oceans, much like the ones back across that ocean. It’s “I love you”s not held back like, I don’t know, but maybe they would’ve been if we’d all stayed in the same place? It’s walking toward the table you miss so much, the one with the people in front of it without whom your life is incomplete but, now you see, you aren’t without them. And the bread is pressed into your hand until it breaks, because that’s how love gives–so hard, so unyieldingly, without reservation–and the voice of the giver, who is also your friend, it breaks too as he says your name through tears.

It’s knowing you are home, even as you are not, even as you always are. It makes no sense, even as it does. It’s fraught with tears and laughter that seem to always be adjacent–no. Connected, splayed over each other, resting upon and underneath and within each other. Love is nonsense. And we are wholly immersed in it. What a glorious surprise, over and over again.

I write this from the children’s hospital in Atlanta, with which we are so familiar that my computer immediately defaulted to its wireless. That is just…lots of things.

Wrong. Helpful. Funny. Sad. Exhausting. All the things, really.

The Kid is getting his yearly MRI, the one where they check various places in his head and neck, a follow-up we’d very much like to #cancel, but so far have not managed to avoid. When I just took him back to the scan room, he writhed in my arms, screaming, “WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THIS?” That was what got me: all that he’s been through, all he’s had to endure. It’s not fair. And yet it’s made us who we are. Funny. Sad. Exhausting. It’s all the things.

I just filled out a “coping plan questionnaire” for TK which is well-intentioned and probably helpful, but I know that, like me, the best way he has of coping with hard things is for them to end. I’m forty-two and still haven’t completely accepted that this isn’t how life works, so I can’t expect him to have arrived at that realisation yet, but here we both sit, anxiety riddling our bodies, “STOP!” being our battle cry, trying to put on brave faces while, inside, spiralling.

And yet…we’re growing.

It’s been three years since we moved to Sydney, and this was the year we were meant to move back to America. Joke’s on the me from back then, since we’ve signed on for at least two more years, which makes this trip to America just that: a trip, a visit, a round-trip holiday, not the bookend return to our arrival. Our house here in Atlanta is sold and holds new occupants. We’re on our fourth Sydney house. It’s all quite ridiculous, really, and yet not? Because it’s our brand of making sense now, this dual life we lead, loved ones on both continents and within both hemispheres. Home scattered across the world.

This most recent move may have been our fourth in three years, with conventional wisdom telling us it should get easier, but a recent shipment’s arrival from the US meant it was a bigger move than the others, and our new place is the smallest. I’ll give you time to do the math there. Visually, it looked like rooms full of furniture scattered about and me standing in the midst of it, shutting down in a panic.

One of the pieces of furniture that made its way across the ocean is the rocking chair I used to feed both boys in as newborns. I remember sleepless nights spend in that chair, frustrating feeds and angry words shot from that seat toward The Husband, who annoyingly hadn’t been cut open and turned into a cow himself and therefore deserved all my resentment. Now, though, it serves as a seat for an eight-year-old and his five-year-old brother and their older yet slightly less tired parents, this four-pointed family who have come so far–literally and figuratively–together since those early days (and nights).

Then, we barely knew each other. Now, we are bonded by a glue stronger than anything we knew of back then: travellers in a strange land together, navigating fields both foreign and familiar, jet-lagged yet aware of each other’s “tired signals,” each knowing how to both push the others’ buttons and make them laugh uncontrollably. So, yes, I know how to fill out a coping plan for TK, and I’d know how to fill one out for Little Brother and TH too, but really? What we need most is grace, followed by each other. Luckily we have both in spades.