Plans In Pencil

I would now like to discuss the past week.

Six days ago, we moved house. I was twenty-four hours off my latest counselling session and therefore riding high on enlightenment and well-being, or at least as close as they come for me when wisdom and peace are showered upon me from a trusted outside source. The Husband was, unusually for him, stressed and freaking and I was all Monica on Friends about it, breezy as f*ck, but really I’d just gotten to the point where I had nothing left to give and therefore no energy to expend on such luxuries as caring.

Besides, I had to get The Kid to school, Little Brother to sports camp and school readiness, and myself to TK’s awards presentation. There was no time to breathe, let alone freak out, and when people remarked about how calm I looked, I fought against laughing myself into convulsions and insanity in front of their faces because of how ridiculous it all was, is, our fifth house in three years, Christmas in summer, a cross-world trip, ALL OF THE THINGS ALL AT THE SAME TIME. What kind of assholes are we to keep doing this to ourselves?

Well, for one thing, we are the kind of assholes who are held by a grace that brings incredible people into our lives. People who fill our buckets, and glasses, and bookshelves. People who show up with a playmate for LB and a mini-Christmas tree for us, because who has time to put up a tree in the middle of a move? (TH does, but more on that later.) People who overserve me rosé at the end-of-year class picnic and give me a literal shoulder to rest my head on. People who cry when they tell me about how TH was looking at TK during the assembly; who cry when telling me how much he’s changed as he reads to LB, into truly the big brother he was made to be. People who hoot along with me during the pause when we were told not to applaud (so I YELLED, dammit) as TK made his way onstage to collect his award–for increased independence and a growth mindset. It’s not the award I got as a child, the one I had probably aspired to on his behalf before I met him–the standard excellence awards. It was a new one, designed specifically for him by a teacher who knows him, who knows what matters to him and what makes him…well, him. And it was pretty damn perfect, that moment, as he bolted to the stage and stood amongst his friends and grinned impossibly huge and I sweated and shook and felt it all, all the feelings, at the same time.

That morning, the kids had sung us to school in the car as we passed the moving van en route to our house as though there were nothing at all to obsess and stress over. Afterward, I had taken LB to his sports camp and watched, drained of energy, with nothing to do but relax and enjoy him. The day before, I had kept my hair appointment as packers boxed up our belongings as though I had time for that kind of nonsense. My roots had time, though, and as they sat covered in foil, I finished the book loaned by a friend, the one that I had almost given up on multiple times because it had enraged me, this main character’s BS, and then suddenly: a shift in perspective, an enlightening , some wisdom from outside, and I found myself affirmed like in my best counselling sessions–it wasn’t crazy to have felt that way!–and I read as it told me about dark matter, this thing that is everywhere yet unseen. This thing about which so little is known, and yet it binds so much of everything together, it pulls objects into rhythm with each other, and we know about it because we can see the objects, but not the dark matter itself. It is a mystery upon which everything depends.

Something we can’t even see…but its existence known by what it does, this invisible connective tissue that holds us all, that, as I write this while LB asks me one million questions and I get irritated then apologise and when I ask for his forgiveness, he looks up and nods, smiling. That, when I’m at the end of myself because TK is crying on the way to school because so much is going on and, once we arrive, his beautiful friend steps up and asks if he wants a hug. That sends TH home early once again because he’s been the one making this a home as I look around, no longer breezy but stunned and overwhelmed and shutting down, and he sends me to the cinema where I gorge on popcorn and White Christmas and learn to breathe again. Because sometimes you need Jesus, and sometimes you need your counsellor, and sometimes you need Bing Crosby in drag, and sometimes you get all of them all at once along with everything else, AT THE SAME TIME.

Three years go, I sat on my friend/spiritual mentor’s couch sipping tea and predicting how I would respond to our upcoming Australian relocation: I would feel disoriented, anxious, stuck in a dream- or hellscape, depending on the day. She told me something that, at first, I didn’t understand. She said, “You’re going to need to give yourself some space.”

I get it now, even if I’m still not fully able to put it into words. But I’ll try! This has been a week of radical self-awareness and care, our Unintentional Annual Moving Week, timed hellishly with so many other events. I’ve listened to my body as it reacts to each of the myriad (real and self-perpetuated) stressors. I’ve felt the anger and exhaustion. I’ve acknowledged the resentments and sense of loss and transience. I’ve exercised and slept. I’ve breathed. I’ve prayed. I’ve stayed away from the alcohol (for now). I’ve eaten chocolate. I’ve made list upon list and checked things off dramatically. I’ve been still. I’ve ducked away and stolen moments for myself. I’ve observed Advent with years-kept rituals that ground me.

This morning, I had a FaceTime sesh with my OG counsellor. It was another thing on another list, but it was also life being breathed into me.

Yesterday was The Kid’s birthday. It was also his school’s annual dance concert–what has turned into a yearly triumph of his spirit and progress. It was, also, another thing on another list. It was, also, life being breathed into me. Strange how something can be both.

I’ve had Little Brother at home with me 66% more of the time than usual because this is how we survive and do self-care too: by choosing not to put ourselves through the emotional upheaval of him facing a bully and what feels like an unsafe environment. There are times I have pushed, and will have to push, him into those zones, where he’ll have to see for himself that his perceptions are not always completely accurate, but this week? This week we’ve gone to the zoo and the mall and the couch for cuddles and this has been both hard and life-giving too. We are knowing each other in ways we didn’t before, all because some kid was being a shit to him, and that’s both awful and wonderful. Why do awful and wonderful so often have to arrive paired?

He has had space from school, from fear, and I’ve had…less space to myself. But more with him. More wandering around the zoo hearing him spill his knowledge on Sumatran tigers and meerkats. Time for him to be the teacher. This is also space, and life.

As we once again fit our life into boxes and pre-organize accordingly, I’ve held onto and thrown out slips of random paper, and on Monday I told TK’s school librarian: “I’m not the kind of person who loses books! Let me know what I need to do,” and she asked for the title of the book, and when I told her, she said it had already been found, it was never lost in the first place. Our family flits from house to house and home to home and I know we’re the same.

This week has lasted ten years and my schedule is all thrown off so I missed my weekly group Monday-morning hike. Tuesday morning instead found me going it alone, with a full day ahead and a short time available for wandering. I took to the footpaths I know, and from above the beach I could see the waves gently lapping. I ached to get down there, to spend a moment watching the calm of the early-morning sea, but there wasn’t time: I could only watch from a distance that day. I turned around and headed back toward home, which is to say my family, and thought about how giving myself space sort of feels like listening to Christmas music in the smoky heat or singing “It Is Well with My Soul” while chaos reigns all around me–two things I’ve been known to do lately–and believing that is can also mean it will be, that even when I’m not on it, the beach is still there, and I will get back there and until then, I’ll have to settle for it being a part of me.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and you know what that means…

We’re due to move to another f*ing house!

This, after a weeks-long roller-coaster ride of home inspections, auction considerations, banking consultations, back-and-forth decision-making… and emotions. Oh, the emotions tied up in where we live: the sadness of leaving one place that’s become home mixed with the missing of the landmarks we’ve enjoyed there (indoor pool, hiking trail down to the water in our backyard, cafes and restaurants). It’s such a gross, privileged thing to say–“How I’ll miss swimming early-morning laps in my indoor pool, Jeeves!”–but here we are, giving up some of our expat package-covered amenities in favour of a more realistic life choice.

So within the next week and a half we will do the following: manage Little Brother’s newfound bully-provoked fear of going to preschool on Mondays and Tuesdays (he’s sitting beside me as I write this, the second day in a row I’ve let him stay home); a weekday night of The Husband and me going in separate directions (he to a work dinner, I to The Nutcracker) while a sitter stays with the boys; The Kid’s birthday party; a Christmas dinner/farewell-to-this house party with close friends and their kids; LB’s end-of-year school performance; TK’s end-of-year school performance; TK’s end-of-year presentation day; and a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting.

My calendar, typically a sparsely populated smattering of events (and I like it that way), looks like a Rorschach test this time of year and I twitch every time I go near it. I don’t know how we’re going to get from where we are now–fully settled into our current house but with extra boxes from America strewn about–to settled (somewhat) into a new house a few blocks away. I don’t know how we’ll do it, but I know that we will, because we’ve done it twice here already and we haven’t killed each other yet (though I am glad we already had those family photos taken because I’m not sure we’ll be mustering smiles by the end of this).

And there are the teeny little bitchy things I’m obsessing over in the corners of my mind: I don’t love the house. The bathrooms could use some updating (look, I’ve been picky about bathrooms since I was a kid and smelled sulfur water at my grandparents’ place in the country and need I remind anyone of my childhood camping experience? I like sleek surfaces and new toilets and SUE ME BUT THIS IS WHO I AM). I am not high-maintenance about some things–I’ll buy the shit out of some clothes at Target and I only recently started investing, after years of my sister’s derision, in higher-quality hair care and don’t even LOOK at the state of some of my underwear–but show me a mild carpet stain of unknown origin at my place of residence and THERE WILL BE GAGGING.

It’s not lost on me, how this yearly chaos and search for home (and the attendant existential crisis about what exactly home is) falls during the season of Advent. A season meant for slowing down, for slow approaches, for promises kept by being fulfilled in ways surprising, unexpected, and unplanned. A fellow expat friend said it best over text recently when she talked about how Sydney real estate constantly reminds her that we will never have a perfect home this side of eternity. (“So true,” I responded. “But the bathrooms…” I still inwardly wailed).

But the moments, the slow burn toward Christmas, are where I’m looking to live right now. And they keep turning up, if I only look. There was the pop-up elf station at the mall yesterday, manned by a caffeinated, kindly grandmother-type and a good-natured twenty-something dude, where LB and I sat and made a reindeer mask and can I tell you that twenty minutes spent colouring with him were even more therapeutic than a hot bath and some Kenny G?

And there was the email I received yesterday, the first of its kind in the three years since we’ve been here, informing me that TK has been chosen for an award that will be given at his presentation day and the tears that sprang to my eyes were the redeemed kind: born not of the responses that the parent-I-was-going-to-be would have had (“Finally! Everyone will see what a great mom I am,” or “This will be fantastic for his resume!) but the burned-through-fire, sifted-through-his-story kind that just know what kind of joy will jump to his face when his name is called.

There is the pine-scented candle I just bought, the two Advent books I return to yearly as my story changes and doesn’t and so do/don’t I; the music piped through radio and phone, the tree we will put up at our new-old house, the self-enforced slowing even as the world seems to pick up speed.

And there was the moment on Sunday, while LB played downstairs with the rest of the kids and TK sat in his preferred spot on the pew between me and TH, when they were passing the bread and wine and I realised TK had never had communion. I asked if he wanted the bread, and his main concern was whether that would serve as his morning tea and would thus mean giving up the tray of cookies waiting outside. I said no, he could still have tea, and that the bread wasn’t a snack but a sign of something bigger done on his behalf. And I know he didn’t understand it fully–hell, I still don’t, but there’s this: we believe not in our own full faith and understanding of something as a necessary precursor before acceptance is acknowledged but in the full faith and understanding of the One who accepts us already, and that providing everything we need. Because it is that–that acknowledgment, that intrusion, that grace, that shows up not at my bidding but as gift. As unexpected and unplanned. As a welcoming–a welcoming home.

I just spent the morning driving around town looking at three rental homes for our family, who needs to be out of our current home in the next three weeks.

This is no way to live, right?

We’re straddling the decision of buying vs. renting in a city we’ve lived in three years and will stay in at least two more in a country where we’re permanent residents. My kids don’t even know about the Civil War (although they know about the Revolutionary one thanks to Hamilton) but they sure as hell know about huntsman spiders and quokkas. Little Brother is starting to say things like fust instead of first and he and The Kid are both aware that the blue-ringed octopus is poisonous.

Meanwhile, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade will air soon and I will sleep through it. AND THE DOG SHOW AFTERWARD.

This is all quite insane.

We were tucked into our three-story suburban home this time three years ago, with our endless yard and a swimming pool across the street. The Husband and I had siblings within walking and half-hour driving distance instead of across the world (maybe this is why I dreamed last night that The Sis died of an overdose? It was horrible; am I feeling guilty or something? Also, she doesn’t do drugs. I don’t think).

But this morning, we had our first (excuse me, fust) family photos taken since LB was a newborn. And we had them taken on a beach across the street from our (rental) home. And afterward, the boys had a quick play on one of their favourite playgrounds before I dropped them off at the schools they love (LB’s recent bullying experience notwithstanding; more on that later). And, yes, we are missing family (and I am missing cornbread and dressing) deeply, but we have a date set for a Christmas celebration with friends who feel like family. And TK’s epic dance concert is approaching–on his birthday. And on Friday night, we went with friends to the U2 concert I’ve been waiting for my entire life.

I have no interest in doing things normally.

My older kid has a diagnosis that doesn’t begin to define him, defined as he is by his kindness and empathy and ability to bring people together in ways they weren’t looking for, never expected, and wouldn’t trade for the world. My younger son has been targeted by a frenemy at school and has watched teachers and friends close ranks around him and stand up for him (while still being kind to the other little shit, don’t worry, though I’m considering purchasing a voodoo doll) and has learned, in the process, to voice his feelings and get special school-hours access to Mommy on occasion. He has learned that the world isn’t always safe but there are safe spots within it and that above all, our family is a team. (TK, for his part, is learning that there’s no I in team).

Friday night, after the rain poured down and the smoke (temporarily) cleared, I listened to songs that have become anthems only because they tell stories–and those stories don’t come from normal. They come from wars and struggle and defeat and triumph and glory. They come from not staying in one place, from standing up for what is right instead of what is comfortable, from faithfulness to what is bigger than ourselves.

So “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” echoes in my head throughout our current real estate saga. And TH and I, on a grey weekend afternoon, decide to tackle the shipment that arrived from America last week, and we find ourselves knee-deep in photos from decades ago, snapshots that tell our stories that eventually merged, and we show them to the two people who came from that merging, and I think about all the turns that seemed wrong at the time that got us here: the outsider status that led me to writing, the prolonged singleness that led me to New York, the diagnosis that led us to the therapist who just asked TK to be in her wedding, the people who led LB to his current hybrid accent, the unwanted offer that led us to Sydney.

An unpredictable, messy, unplanned life. Anything but normal, which can–and I say this with the love of Jesus–kiss my ass.

“The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.”

I am terrified of my boobs.

And not just them, but all the other accessories of being a female; these organs that allowed me to become a mom: ovaries and uterus and the whole lot, sitting there now not waiting to fulfil, or fulfilling, but like ticking time bombs. These are the places that are checked yearly with pokes and prods and massive machines that squeeze them within an inch of their life–and I thought nursing was painful.

I check what I can and leave the rest to the doctors and God, wondering secretly, pessimistically, if any of them will ever betray me. Though I threaten, within my own thoughts, to run away quite often, my worst nightmare is not being given a choice in the matter: of being forced by death to leave my family.

Uplifting, isn’t it?

But this is how I operate, I’ve come to realise: waiting for the next shoe to drop, the next big thing to happen, the next disaster to strike. If I get ahead of it, you see, I can pre-empt all the unwanted! Just like I sat in The Kid’s room while pregnant with him, my copy of Babywise at my side, and prayed over everything I could think of.

Turns out I didn’t think of everything.

I never do. And maybe this propensity to obsess so inefficiently is why, one month before we leave for America for Christmas and less than one month before we have to be out of our current house, I broke down in laughter last night over the fact that we haven’t found a place to live. “Hey, remember that time…WE FORGOT TO FIND A HOUSE?” I giggled to The Husband last night as he smiled, tersely, at the ridiculousness of our life right now: living year to year, day to day, moment to moment, planners with no concrete plan. We were meant to be returning to America to stay this trip. Now we’re returning to leave again. To come back to…a home we haven’t discovered yet.

This is insane.

The things that used to work on my behalf–boobs, day planners, calendars–now sit empty, mocking me, illuminating with blinding fluorescent light my lack of control.

I’ve decided to start laughing along with them.

“When I’m an adult, you’ll die,” TK said to me the other night as Little Brother snored beside us. “Or maybe we’ll die at the same time,” he concluded, and I had to stop myself from telling him, “Dude, that’s best-case scenario,” since I had earlier told them both, accidentally, about Hitler and I had no more room for questions and panic. LB has been going through enough at school with a friend who, by growling and hitting and yelling, has transformed into enemy and left LB drained of confidence and joy about his formerly safe home-away-from home. Just yesterday, I drew a love heart button on his wrist and mine as TK proclaimed, “I don’t need those anymore,” and I thought about how time makes fools of us all: fools, and champions, and wiser, and realising all we don’t know. It changes and it leaves the same.

And I’ve been doing it–time–all wrong.

The diarist and author Sarah Manguso writes, “All I could see in the world were beginnings and endings…I knew I was getting somewhere when I began losing interest in the beginnings and the ends of things.”

She goes on: “The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will–diagnoses, deaths, unbreakable vows–weren’t the beginnings or ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory. That history doesn’t begin or end, but it continues…I began to inhabit time differently. I used to exist against the continuity of time. Then I became the baby’s continuity…the agent of comfort that was always there for him…Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments–an inability to accept life as ongoing. It comforts me that endings are thus formally unappealing to me–that more than beginning or ending, I enjoy continuing.”

I have a fixation on moments, but not in a “let’s savour this and take a mental picture way;” more in a “let’s get to the next one” way. Let’s get past the next boob-smashing mammogram. Let’s get past the part where we don’t know where we will live, where we have boxes stacked up in our living room, where LB is afraid to go to his last few weeks of preschool, where TK has his next MRI.

Meanwhile, my own mortality sounds like a gong in the background. I get a death-defying sunburn in the one place I forgot to slather cream. I have a funny pain in my chest. My cycle is…off. And I think to myself…what if I just stayed here, in this moment, the one time will surely take away and turn into something else, but for now the only one I have?

Sometimes I succeed. Often I don’t. But when I do, I’ve noticed how much it can glow, suspended from yet connected to all the ones before and after it, like a sparkle on the ocean water that seems to disappear…yet always comes back.

It is only from the bottom that I can look up.

This is my summation of grace, and also of parenting hungover, which is the worst kind of parenting: worse even than parenting with a stomach virus, or parenting through a painful amateur musical performance. (Maybe not worse than parenting through a spinal surgery, but it’s been awhile, so don’t quote me.)

Because I am drinking less these days but also drinking older, it’s often tough to tell if I’m actually hungover or just really, really tired. The math behind forty-two years, post-midnight arrival home, pre-dawn wakeup call from kids, and erratic sleep ends in the negative column no matter how the result is reached, which is where I found myself on Sunday morning after a birthday party the night before (and I’m not, for once, talking about the kid kind): in the negative column, on the couch, without any desire to leave it (the couch, that is).

The night before had been everything I’ve come to love about Sydney: a walk down the street to the home of people we’ve known practically since we arrived. A spectacular view over the water. Free-flowing champagne. Endless banter with comfortable friends. Spastic dancing. Guttural laughter. Heartfelt conversations and proclamations of love. All leading to knowing glances at school drop-off on Monday morning, and “Do you remember…?” recaps throughout the week.

But between Saturday night and Monday morning lies…Sunday. Full of empty hours (especially if you just CANNOT with church that week) and needy children. And when I finally made my way upstairs and to the couch, I found my family waiting, and coffee brewing.

I really wanted the coffee.

But in those next few minutes of haze before the caffeine kicked in, in those gauzy moments of semi-consciousness–the ones I used to spend on a different couch, in New York, with a roommate who marvelled at the strange alternate reality provided in the morning after when she was surprised we didn’t fall down more–I looked around at my family and realised afresh but not for the first time how often I see them, and life, as something to do--to get through, to serve, to complete as an obligation. I had no energy for obligation, for anything really, so the shackles seemed to fall off and I just…sat. And watched.

I watched the way The Kid sidled over to me, contact on his own terms but always swinging the pendulum between no touching and lying on top of me. I watched his sneaky grins and mirrored them back. I watched Little Brother grow visibly excited over the prospect of having us all, all four of us!, together, at his disposal, for an entire day, and he could barely decide between the games of Life and Clue and Snakes and Ladders and his exotic animal book so he brought them all over, stacking them in front of us and burrowing into my smelly side. I watched as The Husband did the most romantic thing possible: downloaded Uber Eats on his new phone so he could order us a grease-laden meal.

I watched them all, and I loved them.

Which is not so much a revelation, because obviously I love them and already I knew so, but in the moment and for the day there were no demands of that love beyond the immediate. I felt my place in the world, and it was right here, with these people. My people. And it felt not like an obligation but a gift.

I don’t always let it feel this way–let them in this way–but they became my refuge.

And they still are.

Little Brother became obsessed recently with a book at his school called An Anthology of Intriguing Animals. (I have my suspicions that his teachers began hiding it because he wanted them to read it so often.) On a recent trip to Costco, I saw the book and grabbed it, proudly holding it up as I returned to the boys and The Husband. LB shrieked with joy.

We read it every day.

As kids’ books go, it’s actually decent. Better than decent, because there are enough animals in there for my memory to repeatedly forget the ones I read a few days ago, so I keep relearning interesting facts. Did you know that killer whales aren’t whales, but dolphins? That king cobras don’t hiss, but growl? Or that female sea turtles return to the beach where they were born to lay their own eggs?

That one made me stop and think (over LB’s cries for me to KEEP GOING). This time of year always upends me: it’s meant to be cold with shortened days full of baking and football in the background as Thanksgiving and the Westminster Dog Show approach. Instead, the sun is rising at 5:45 am, setting after 7:30, I’ve switched back to unnatural deodorant because pit stains, and there is no Thanksgiving.

And there’s this: the other day, LB asked why it’s cold in America at Christmas. BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY IT SHOULD BE! I wanted to reply, then realised that he’s had more Christmas seasons in warm weather than cold; is this his normal now? Is this their, our normal, waking up in hotel rooms on beaches or in former hometowns or in current rentals, doing Christmas not in the house we came to from the hospital with them but somewhere else? Often somewhere hot?

That can’t be right…can it?

The boys want to know about their beginnings, their stories, and ours. “You were born in Alabama and Daddy was born in California,” LB recited this morning, and I think about how continuity is a lost concept for them: they haven’t been to the city of my birth in years and to TH’s, only once. We’ve bounced around to three houses here in Sydney, each providing a delineation from the year before it (great for remembering and categorising, not great for familiarity), and are set to find a new one soon. How can they have–in the language of their current favourite video game–a base within all this nonsense?

Then I put them to bed at night.

I no longer remember what it’s like to tuck them in, turn out the light, and tell them goodnight from the doorway as I walk away. Bedtime has, for years now, been a matter of one of us lying down with them until they fall asleep. I take the weeknight shift. and it’s exhausting. It’s also amazing, when I let it be. Because every night, I get to bring them home. And they do the same for me.

We talk about our days, and our feelings. I remind them of who loves them most and best and how wonderfully they were made. They ask a million questions. I speak truth to them, and then at some point, they usually tell me that I’m the best mom in the world.

This is, of course, laughable. There are way too many frozen nuggets and iPads and temper losses in my parenting for their appraisal to run true. And trust me, I beat the shit out of myself for it. Then their tiny voices tell me something that runs counter to all my regrets, and I realise that they are showing me grace, reintroducing me to it all over again. They are telling my story, as I tell theirs. They are bringing me home.

And I stay, until I hear their breathing even out and see their eyelids close, and I think through all the things I’ve done wrong and try to forgive myself as they have forgiven me. They have made me their base. I may question their judgment, but I can’t deny the gift. This gets to be our story.

In the morning, when the sun is rising but they haven’t, I lace up my shoes and work on the next chapter, writing notes for them that tell the truth…fixing them to their iPads, where I know they’ll be found.

Monday morning, I climbed blearily into the dark car and drove toward the beach and my weekly hike there. The notes from the classical station–which I can never listen to unless I’m alone in the car, and I’m never alone in the car unless it’s before sunrise–wafted through the speakers as I hugged the curves of our street. The announcer came on, introducing a piece of music called “Dawn on the Moscow River” and noting its aptness for the present moment, minutes before Sydney’s own sunrise. I had the window cracked because we’re in the transitional part of spring where air-con can be too cold but static air too hot, and as the music played I couldn’t tell if the birds I could hear chirping were on the radio or outside the car.

They were outside, it turned out. And I had the thought in that moment–along with the one a few minutes later when I crested the hill on Awaba Street and saw the sun beginning its rise–that I often have in moments of beauty: Nice one, God.

Of course, a thought like that requires believing in the divine in the first place, and as I’ve learned since we move here, such a belief is…rare in Australia. A friend’s (cute as hell) kid has recently taken to asking me, repeatedly, “Do you believe in God?”, the notion confounding his five-year-old brain. I get it. I’m more comfortable in most bars than churches, and some of my least favourite people are those who claim to be believers (especially the ones who put Trump in office; excuse me while I vomit). When we first arrived in Australia we went to a BBQ dinner at my only friend’s house (my only friend at the time; now I have two), and when asked what we did that morning, we mentioned having gone to church. “Like…on a historical tour?” her husband asked, and I knew we were not in Kansas anymore.

Kansas being, for me, a Bible-Belt upbringing where not attending Sunday services was more notable than showing up in the pew. Then I moved to New York at the end of my twenties and had to actually articulate for some people why I took an hour out of Sunday Funday (not every week, but enough of them) to hear a sermon. It was an education…for me. Not in the sense that I was exposed to a new heathen world (gasp! insert pearl-clutching), but that I saw, through living in it, how cool the people were in that world, and how graceless it would be of me to get up in their faces and ask if Jesus was their personal Lord and Saviour and whether they were going to hell when they died (though I do text that to my friend on the reg now as payback for her kid’s questions).

The more questions my own kids have about faith, the more I understand why other people can’t embrace it. Virgin birth? Resurrection? It sounds dicey at best, a bit insane if I’m being honest, and they haven’t even aged up to the Left Behind series and the damage it’s done to critical Christian thinking.

But also? The more my kids talk about faith, the more I believe. The other night, Little Brother was struggling with insomnia brought about by a car nap sandwiched between two birthday parties earlier in the day, and his mouth was running nonstop. “Mommy, God is everywhere,” he told me, and I murmured my assent while wanting to quote the title to one of my favourite books, Go the F*** to Sleep. “I can feel him in my heart,” he said. “Great,” I seethed. Then he started sniffing his arm. “Mmm, smells like God,” he exclaimed. Then, he licked that arm. “Tastes like God!”

I nearly fell out of bed laughing at the absurd beauty of it: God as Axe body spray all over my five-year-old.

Then, pre-dawn this morning, I was lacing up my running shoes when The Kid padded up the stairs to tell me about his dreams. As he headed back down, he tossed a “Bye, Mommy,” over his shoulder, and I ran toward another sunrise, this one blasting pink all over the ocean beside me, and while I know it’s not what makes sense to everyone else, I couldn’t help–can’t help–but think it again, to think it always–because, besides the sunrises, there’s also the list of fears I wrote before we got on the plane that brought us to our new life here, the list I fretted and prayed over and watched as, one by one, each item on the list was answered, and usually in the form of a person: a therapist for TK, a playmate for LB, a job breakthrough for The Husband, a friend (usually a champagne-swilling heathen, my fave) for me, and with all these people showing up, I can’t help but think that a Person must have sent them.

Nice one, God.

I don’t remember jacarandas in America. But our first spring here, they carpeted the hill behind our house, and I recall The Kid’s therapist telling me their name. Up to that point, they had been “those purple trees” between me and the boys; now, they had an identity. That same therapist, this week, told me she wants TK to be in her wedding next year.

And I’ve read more about the jacarandas. It turns out they’re considered an invasive species here, because they’ve been brought from other places. When I found this out, I loved them even more. Because it’s sort of what we are, invading Americans who are now thriving in Aussie soil.

So when the time came yesterday to go to TK’s class at school to work on a tree project, I picked up some purple tissue paper on the way in addition to the green construction-paper leaves I carried in a zip-loc bag with me. We were going to make a story tree, an invention of mine inspired by a Brain Pickings email I’d gotten about the first American female cartographer, who transformed historical timelines into visual wonders: lists becoming trees, buildings, all sorts of things; bullet points into art. I told the kids, through the sweat and flush that always accompanies my speaking to groups, about why story matters to me, as a writer. About how it can matter to all of us, because it allows us to connect.

Yes, they nodded when I asked–they remembered the story of TK’s apple brain told earlier that year. And when we started talking about their stories, they lit up even more. We spent the next half hour writing those stories onto leaves and hanging them on the tree, then crumpling tissue paper into flowers. We had our jacaranda.

On Saturday, after a marathon birthday party of ferry rides and building bears, my friend had asked if I needed a tree for this project. I thought about the weak DIY ideas I’d already entertained, the best option being a metal garden tower with spokes coming off it, and answered affirmatively. She led me to a wooden tree with numerous branches coming off it, and it was perfect. I’d been hoping for the right tree. I was glad I’d waited for it too.

And this morning, I went to a different classroom: a kindergarten one, where I handed Little Brother off to a fifth-year “buddy,” watching and feeling my heart unexpectedly leap and break as his eyes scanned the area nervously but he tried not to show it, his gorgeous face trying to be brave. He went into the room while I listened to a maths lecture and ached for him, and when he emerged he was himself but changed. He had grown up a bit. I was proud, and pained.

This has always been my favourite time of year in the US, the shortening of days and cooling of temperatures as Halloween gives way to Thanksgiving and then the most magical of them all comes: the Christmas season. Here, now, the sun rises earlier and sets later and shines brighter and hotter, and I find it is possible for something to feel all wrong and all right at the same time.

They are young, but not as young as they used to be. They are growing, but still the same. We are home, and away.

This morning I ran along the path of the rising sun on a street overlooking the ocean, and the clouds and light arranged themselves so that it looked as though there were footprints out on the water. Miracles do still happen, I know this; walking on water just looks different these days. It looks like boys growing. It looks like stopping to take a photo, then on the way back seeing a cyclist who’s done the same. It looks like trees showing up in the right place, always at the right time.

On Sunday, The Husband and I rushed the kids down the streets of Neutral Bay and onto the ferry because I had thought it would be a good idea to book tickets for a classical music concert at the Opera House. “So…is this a regular, non-kid show?” TH asked me, revealing his lack of confidence in my intellect. “Do you THINK I would book tickets for them to see an adult show?” I responded, as we both turned to the boys on either side of us who were at that moment seated at Opera Bar, alternately playing on our phones and complaining about being hungry. TH shrugged and I shook my head, explaining that this was a family show of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons meant to introduce kids to classical music in a laid-back environment. It had seemed an opportunity at the time, when Facebook told me I might be interested in the event and I, like the chump I am, dutifully submitted by credit card information. Now–as usual with booked events involving the kids–I had doubts.

We went anyway, and the boys entered the Concert Hall rather than the Kids’ Playhouse for the first time, and we climbed to our nosebleed seats (I wasn’t dumb enough to pay for top-tier tickets, at least). Over the next hour, Little Brother and TH fell asleep and I tried to block The Kid’s foot from kicking the seat in front of him. I sweated and prayed. I rode my anxiety like the wave it is: retreating, returning.

But something else happened. There, in our post-holiday, post-time change, post-Saturday-rosé-tasting haze, we felt the familiar notes swell around us, and despite the anxiety and the rigidity of the seats and the lack of devices (and, for some, consciousness), we listened. It helped that the emcee was a presenter from a local TV show the boys have seen (well, it helped them; TH and I just rolled our eyes to each other at his lead-balloon jokes). And the boys were especially fascinated with the arrival, during “Summer,” of an eleven-year-old violin prodigy who, it was announced, practised four to five hours a day (I could see the fear in TK’s eyes when he imagined doing homework for that long).

But it was the music that filled the space, notes drifting around us and, I’d like to think, lowering my blood pressure and entering the kids’ brains for both educative and reflective purposes, showing them true and timeless beauty. I’d like to think this is what kept them still, though let’s be honest–it was probably the promise of ice cream afterward.

We didn’t make it through the whole show–despite it being advertised as lasting an hour, “Winter” had barely begun when it was time for us to go if we wanted to squeeze in a trip to Baskin-Robbin’s before we had to make the ferry back. So we climbed over the rest of the people in our row, straining the bonds of social propriety as usual, and headed outside into the sun.

The next morning, in my pre-dawn drive to the beach, I found “Winter” and listened to it from the car. I recognised the notes I’ve heard before, their familiarity filling my now-solitary space, showing me what I’d missed the day before but also reminding me that often, what I see myself “missing” is often just delayed, or replaced by something better. Like ice cream. And ferry rides in the sun.

The whole outing on Sunday–from rushing to the ferry to hurrying through lunch to nail-biting through the music to also kind of enjoying it–had been what these things always are: a high-effort shitshow filled with beautiful moments. Which is…a lot of life, really?

Little Brother is showing some musical prowess himself recently, having memorised basically the entirety of the Hamilton lyrics after a few weeks of listening to them Non-Stop (see what I did there?). He belts them out from the backseat of the car, filling the non-solitary space with familiar notes and words and grinning at me when I glance back at him and sing along. We have a way of doing this, our family, and maybe most of us? Replaying the same music, the same lyrics, the same notes. I have a way of doing it here, every week when I sit down to write: no matter what space I’m in–different time of day, different mood, different circumstances–playing the same notes and letting the same music tell the same story. A story of cynicism, of (I hope) humour, of failure, of forgiveness, of redemption. Of grace. The song I can’t stop listening to, or singing along with.