Plans In Pencil

Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world. –Leo Tolstoy

I am sitting in the waiting room of a psychologist’s office while she assesses my son, who last had this done at the age of three, when he was preverbal and the doctor who saw him insisted he was uncooperative when it turned out–later, all over the carpet–that he was actually sick. Now, four-and-a-half years later, the decision we wait for doesn’t affect diagnosis-building or schooling, but residency; specifically, whether we attain permanent residency here in Australia. I wait, type, breathe, and pray, having once again–after so many times doing it–handed my kid off to another adult for safekeeping, for poking and prodding, while I can just…sit.

It’s impossible.

The whole thing is, really, this motherhood thing. The letting go and clinging, the giving and holding back, the constant push and pull of it all. “Two things I love more than anything in the world,” a friend sent me in a meme recently, “(1) being with my kids and (2) not being with my kids.”

My first inkling of the impossibility of it all, the kind not recorded and prescribed for in parenting books, was when the nurse on the maternity ward came in and told me that The Kid had not passed his hearing test and would have to repeat it. He was in the nursery at the time, and I sat in the room after she left and cried–my tiny newborn, helpless and struggling to hear it seemed, and the thought of it broke my hormone-addled heart. How would I survive the slings and arrows he would face when the thought of a hearing test wrecked me just a few days in?

Between him and Little Brother, in the days of waiting for a second positive test and feeling the emptiness of the fourth seat at the table, the second positive came but the blood tests didn’t match up with the numbers needed for viability. I clung to hope, clung to the idea of TK’s sibling just beginning within me, clung to this dream that had yet to be confirmed, and when the doctor called to tell me that the dream was not coming true this time, I hung up and climbed, crying, into the shower. It was only then, after weeks of spotting, that I truly let go–in every way. My body released what it had been holding, and my tears washed it all down, the drain spinning my hope away.

Only after they were both born, both breathing beside me, did I actually take a moment to stop and notice that this white-knuckling through life wasn’t good for them, or me. That this anxiety I had carried since childhood was now blooming on their behalf, flourishing so rapidly I often had trouble catching my breath. This was when I knew that the waiting and praying and breathing, that the counselling, it all needed backup, and I traded one pill–the kind meant to pass through me to LB to provide brain-building vitamins–for another, the kind that would keep me from white-knuckling my way through their lives, and mine.

And after we moved across the world, and I got them settled beside me, once again I realised I needed a bit more help, so my dosage went up. Then everything else settled, and I backed off the pills, taking them every other day, and I didn’t jump off any cliffs. So I officially bought into the lower dosage with a new prescription, proudly clutching it as I exited the pharmacy. Then I started forgetting to take it, and I thought: I weaned myself off allergy meds; maybe I can wean myself off this too!

It did not work.

The white-knuckling returned, the 3-am wakeup calls of fear, the tension headaches, the shortness of breath. In a way, it was nice–to show me where I’d been. I wondered…should I just wait? Until my next cycle was over, until school and its third term settled back into a rhythm, until this or that passed? Then it was no longer nice. I was no longer able to find silver linings. I was fighting to keep my head above water, and with two small people attached to me. It was impossible, but it didn’t have to be.

So I set the pills back on my countertop where I wouldn’t forget them, and I returned to the daily routine of them, and I emailed my OG counsellor, the one whose file on me is THICK but full of grace, to ask if he did Skype sessions, and he said he would. And my knuckles began to release a bit, to be less…white all the time. And I breathed.

“A sword will pierce your own soul,” an old man in a temple told the mother of God, and he may as well have been speaking it through the halls of time to every mother who ever lived. This tension, of taking care of ourselves and others, of constantly going against advice by putting on the kids’ oxygen mask first because we can’t imagine any other way, it is impossible. No one tells you these things in the books: how many conversations you will have from the toilet, and how utterly impossible it is to be a mother. It’s nonsensical. It’s unbearably difficult. And if it isn’t, I humbly submit that it’s…not being fully done. It is the rock, and the hard place.

But. Help comes. In the form of a pill. In the form of a counsellor. In the form of like-minded friends. Of partners who show up. Of wine, and bread, and tables. Of eyelashes fringing closed lids, catching the light of a Mario Brothers lamp in an as-yet unseen way so that you know, you just know, that there are still things that will be brand new and true, always, even after mornings when you would have been detained had child services peeked in.

And some days it will be the difference between holding on and letting go and the impossible balance between them, but you try to remember that when you are yourself, the right people will show up. The right help will show up. Like Dumbledore told Harry, like you tell your children. Then one of them, just as you are sneaking away to watch Netflix, murmurs through his sleep, “Stay next to me.” You want to, and you don’t want to, so for just a moment, and forever…you do.

And when the night is cloudy there is still a light that shines on me

It’s hard to sit through back-to-back movie remakes with your kids–in this case, Aladdin and The Lion King–and not think that life is pretty…cyclical. What goes around comes around. Everything old is new again. We’ve been down this road before.

I watched, between my boys and within the span of a few weeks, as the Genie and Jasmine and Simba and Nala and all the others came to life, in both human and animal form, and it wasn’t deja vu that hit me so much as the reality of repetition. Are we all just walking in circles? After three different versions of Willy Wonka and Charlie Bucket (the Gene Wilder movie, the Tom and Jerry version, and the Broadway show brought to Sydney–NOT the Johnny Depp version EVER, you shut your mouth right now), is there anything new under the sun?

Now I find myself, as I slowly back off my meds, covering similar terrain as the kind that put me on them in the first place: bouts of internal rage, lowered thresholds, rising anxiety. But there is also newness: my awareness of it all, namely. And my methods for dealing with it. The fact that there are methods at all. The choices I’m forced to make if I want to stay on this road: meditation, prayer, putting down the phone, watching what I eat and drink. I feel the effects of life and my mind/body reaction to it more keenly. This is hard, but not altogether bad.

I know, having covered the terrain of my own soul on repeat, that “being a good person” is both impossible on my own and, also, not at all the essence of what I believe. My faith has been sifted through the sands of reality, of rebellion, of failure, and what comes after those repeated bouts is not a can-do bootstraps mentality but a “where’s the oxygen?” plea from the end of my rope.

My language has been changed. I speak a different tongue now: a narration from the inside of the whale, rather than a victory dance on the shore. You stop minding so much what looks like darkness and defeat when you find, over and over, that it’s the site of rescue.

For example: last week, we spent two hours in an office building downtown getting questioned, poked, and prodded to be determined as worthy of permanent citizenship, which is just another way of being treated nearly the same as citizens of Australia–entitled to the benefits this country offers. After peeing in cups and having blood taken and chests x-rayed, The Husband and I paired off with the kids–he with Little Brother, I with The Kid–and entered exam rooms to be screened, for a third and final time, by a doctor. TK paced the room, both excited and anxious, narrating from inside his own whale: telling the doctor, unasked, about the surgery he had when he was two; talking about his formerly tilted head; mentioning the last time he’d (unwillingly, then) given a urine sample, through a catheter when he was five months old in the ER with a high fever.

The doctor went through her list of questions for me then regarded TK thoughtfully. “And is there anything you need to tell me about James?” she asked, sending alarm bells through my system: was this an innocent question, or an appraisal seeking specifics?

He’s RIGHT THERE, I wanted to reply. She was acting as though he wasn’t.

“Any problems I should know about?”

Well, that did it. Not to be reductionistic, but I’m finding, from the belly of the whale and through the hard gift of my children, that there are often two kinds of people in the world: those who see magic, and those who don’t. She…didn’t.

“There are no problems,” I answered pointedly as I pulled him to me (LOOK AT HIM! HE IS NOT INVISIBLE) and smiled directly into his eyes. “He does have a pretty cool apple brain. Some people call it autism.”

She continued asking questions as though he couldn’t hear them, and I continued to…not provide answers so much as tell the truth in a story. Narration. Our preferred language.

Some people are trained by life to see “same” and “different” and black and white. Others are split open by life, unrequested surgery that leads to more. To magic.

A couple of days later, we sat on the grass near the beach with friends as our kids played nearby. Occasionally a little one would approach with a request for food or a funny comment. The sun blazed in the middle of winter. The shade would have been too cold, so we remained within the rays.

TK approached with a tale of how he’d fallen off a step on the ladder–grin punctuating what could have been a fearful failure but, in his telling, was a survival story. He bounced away, and our friends asked questions. But they weren’t the alarm-bell kind. They were the marvelling kind. The recognition of magic. An awareness is growing within me, that hits me with the full force of life alongside rage and anxiety, that I recognise with them because it all tends to come together: the victories and setbacks, joy and pain. Maybe I’m tired of trying to parse them.

Maybe I’m just tired, period. Life is hard. The moment his teacher tells me that LB never does anything wrong and I beam with pride, followed by and wrapped inside the next moment, when she tells me that he’s being coerced by a friend into being naughty, and I see into the future this quality of his, of needing to please and be accepted, and this afternoon I’ve planned of cupcakes and playgrounds has suddenly gotten more complicated. So we talk, the boys and I, then we role-play, and later I whisper to each of them their worth, how it’s separate from what people think or scores assess, and the anxiety threatens to sit on my chest and overtake me. Then I remember: the darkness of the whale is the precursor to raging sun. Sometimes it’s even hard to tell the difference between them. I breathe and wait for recognition of the truth: magic is just another word for grace.

I feel the love, I feel the love, I feel the love that’s really real

Little Brother has adopted a phrase recently that I think he picked up from a friend: when he’s trying to convince me of something that may or may not be true (his mate at school just got a puppy; a dinosaur ate his toy) he adds, nodding furiously with eyes wide, “Yeah, really! In real life!”

This real life to which he refers often does not exist, as is revealed when his widened eyes begin to crinkle at the corners and a laugh escapes his lips. He is full of silly mirth, this one, always looking for a good joke to tell. But I’m learning, also, that the reality of him includes depths of emotion that we’re just beginning to plumb. Several times recently he has dissolved into tears over misunderstandings with friends in which the other fell down/got hurt and LB was not to blame, but profusely apologised through tears anyway, repeating it like a watery mantra: “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

It’s not real, this idea of his that he has to take the weight of the world (or at least the emotions of everyone around him) upon his tiny little shoulders; it’s not true, at least, because I don’t doubt that it feels very real to him. I know because he comes by it honestly, this internal emotional thermostat that seeks to mollify each person within its radius. His eyebrows and facial expressions may come from The Husband, but the thermostat? That’s from me.

I know, from my own experience, that not dealing with the emotional fallout is what leads to internal turmoil and, eventually, therapy–the latter of which is not a bad thing but can be expensive–so I try to talk to him about his feelings, and what they mean, and how to deal with them. I tell him that he’s a wonderful kid and a good friend and that he doesn’t have to say he’s sorry for things that aren’t his fault, and of things that are, one sincere apology is enough. I tell him these things while he nods and squirms in my arms, wanting to escape the introspection of it all the same way he wants to escape the pain of a knee upon which he just fell: “I want it to be done, Mommy!”

I often want it to be done too: the thing that is causing me pain; the eyes that turn toward it in acknowledgment then linger in a brand of attention I could do without; the lingering of the pain itself long after what I assess should be its expiration date. But real life doesn’t often work that way.

In real life, there is the rhythm of mistake and forgiveness rather than eventually just always getting it right. There is the rhythm of community and loneliness rather than just always the right amount of company. There is the rhythm of triumph and defeat rather than just the straight line of smooth sailing. There is the looking forward to a holiday that ends up being canceled; there is its replacement with afternoons spent with friends both theirs and mine, their laughter and our commiseration. There are the runs fuelled by endorphins and feeling like they could go on forever and the ones where each step is leaden. There is the email validating a crusade marked by truth-telling in the face of abuse, and there is the news that the outcome still won’t be what you want. There is the reality that telling the truth may be its only reward. That, and the friends who told it with you.

There is the reality that backing off your meds may be successful, but only if you face the rage and anxiety that come along with that choice and find other ways to meet them. There is the reality that taking your kids ice-skating may be a better memory for them than it is for you (and your back). There is the reality that pretending is not a lifestyle choice that will work out for you after all (except in those instances when you let your kid win the race). But that, eventually, you and your kid both will have to make that unpractical yet ultimate choice over whether to be shiny, or real.

And there are the moments when that choice will leave you looking out a window filled with grey skies and storms. But there are also those moments when you’ll find yourself flung up into a blue sky with your best friend, marvelling at the view that telling the truth led you to.

There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be

I remember when Mindy Kaling’s memoir came out and I dripped with jealousy over the title even as I felt seen by it: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? It’s a question I’ve asked myself all my life, one that either niggles at the edges of any self-worth I’ve managed to shore up or downright devours it and leaves me shivering in a cold pool of insecurity. (And melodrama. Possibly.)

Recently something occurred that sent my psyche back into high school or even earlier, back when I had never darkened a therapist’s door or considered that my baseline anxiety might be a shade beyond the pale or wondered if my value as a person might lie beyond what others thought of me. The happening left me feeling…left out, even as I was aware I could be grossly misinterpreting the situation. But feelings often don’t care about facts, or don’t initially leave much space for them anyway, and I found myself shedding tears in bed and wondering if this just might be about something more.

I think we carry all the different versions of ourselves around with us–the little girl who wanted to please all the adults, the teenager who both wanted to fly under the radar and get noticed, the young adult who was skirting rebellion and bad ideas, the new mother who didn’t know which end was up on this foreign planet to which she’d been exiled. When certain things happen–not all things, but certain things–they happen to all these people, piercing through the layers of ourselves and gutting/thrilling/grieving every one of them.

I must have grown a bit over the years, because I only shut down temporarily before remembering I could actually face things. Conversations were had, misunderstandings were resolved, and it was all healed into something better than before.

But the thing about healing is that there has to be a wound first. That’s the tricky part.

I decided I’d do something productive with my wound: I would turn it into a teaching moment for the kids. What a mistake. I am kidding of course. Sort of. Once I told the story, at bedtime in the dark between them, to the boys about how even grownups feel left out and sad sometimes, they decided to turn it into an endless inquisition. Now, weeks later, I’m still getting requests from them to talk about a time when I was excluded. My brilliant plan backfired, is what I’m saying, because their initial reaction–an incredulous “That’s never happened to ME”–has morphed into an exhausting cross-examination that shows no sign of ending.

Maybe it will all be foundational. Maybe one day, when they do realise they’re having a left-out moment, they’ll think back to that teaching moment and feel equipped to deal with it. Maybe The Husband will eventually stop laughing at me over their heads. Until then, all that’s left to do is distract them from their questioning, because this delving into my past is exhausting and I don’t have time for more therapy right now.

It’s a delicate balance for an introvert though, this line between being lonely and alone. I blurred it as a kid, yelling that “I want to be LONELY!” when I craved space for myself apart from my family, and I still crave that space so much that a couple of my favourite recent memories include seeing the movie Yesterday by myself (and a cinema full of others) while the boys watched Spider-Man with TH; that and an hour I spent at the hotel bar where we’re holiday-ing with a book, fire, and glass of sparkling wine. I want, and need, these moments; I just don’t want everyone else to be hanging out without me while I’m having them.

“There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be,” sang the Beatles, and the guy who ripped them off in the movie, and once I realised I was going to be a certain kind of mother, a certain kind of person–the kind who finally accepts that both she and at least one of her kids are pretty different, that image-polishing would be futile, that it was time to run clean out of f—s and call it a day on pretending to be anything other than the mess I am (we are); the kind who ugly cries at movies and life and is never going to get rid of those neck wrinkles that insist on showing up in photos; the kind who feels things painfully and inconveniently and gloriously deeply–I embraced that lyric as mantra. We are who, and where, we are meant to be. Period.

“It’s easy,” the Beatles go on, though, and that’s where I have to take issue. It’s a lot of things, this real life: messy, fraught, exhausting, beautiful, grace-filled–but it ain’t easy. It can even be lonely.

But I’ve learned that, after awhile, it’s really not. Because people show up–the right people. The kind of people who are also tired of pretending, who have stopped accepting the dividends on selling their souls and have instead started inhabiting their lives. And you all sit on your wonky little bench together. The bench that just happens to have a spectacular view and, no matter how many are sitting on it, is always perfectly full.

“I think being yourself–your true, entire self–is always going to feel like you’re swimming upstream.”

I have been told on three memorable occasions that I am, quite literally and extraordinarily, tightly-wound.

Two of those occasions were childbirth. When the anesthesiologists came to insert their horse needles into my spine to allow for the delivery of The Kid and Little Brother, both doctors asked if I was an elite athlete. After I finished laughing, I assured them I wasn’t, to which they replied that the muscles they had to penetrate (that’s what she said) to give me my epidurals were shockingly tense and hard. I knew the truth: that it isn’t marathons that bought me those muscles, but anxiety. Carrying the world, unasked and unnecessarily, on my back and shoulders for decades.

The other time was during my 60 km hike this past March, when one of the onsite trainers gave me a quick therapeutic rubdown (twss) and remarked that he’d never felt such tight hamstrings. It wasn’t a compliment as much as the registering of shock. He seemed to be in disbelief that my legs were actually functioning.

So yes. I am…tightly coiled, if you will.

So is TK. Any deviation from the usual will get, at the very least, a remark from him; a recognition of the change, and, often, an expression of displeasure about it. Another thing: he does not like to be, as he puts it, messy around others. Sure, when it’s just the four of us at a restaurant, he’ll go hog wild on a bowl of pasta with red sauce and only upon finishing it will he casually ask for help cleaning up his face so that it no longer looks like a crime scene. But around his peers, he is careful about looking presentable. He only partakes in certain foods–the time I bought him pasta from the canteen for lunch he came home and, even though he had pre-approved it, made it clear that this would not be a viable choice going forward: “Why did you get me messy food?!”

Because these are the terms of his existence, I was bracing myself last week as he ran toward me on the school playground before the bell rang to start the day. He was coated in thick mud on the bottom front of his shirt and on the back of it, not to mention the seat of his pants, which were just plain solid brown. I prepared myself for tears, for demands to go home (and, likely, stay there). Instead, he grinned at me. “I fell in the MUD!” he announced, followed quickly behind by his friend, who was even worse shape. “I’m such a MESS!”

His therapist took them to the office and got them sorted with new clothes after he announced to the staff that he needed HELP. When he returned to his class, apparently, he was still riding a high from his adventure.

Some people, like his speech therapist, refer to such moments as “small surprises.” I call them miracles.

These are the seismic events recognisable as such only to those of us who have been brought low–by which I mean, more deeply into ourselves than we ever wanted to go, beyond the realm of what we ever would have chosen and past it into a world where relief is not defined by a kid getting into the right school, but making it through brain surgery. Where gratitude is not limited to a good grade but safe passage across the planet into a new life. Where the world, and my own heart, is no longer manageable because its borders are past my control, because it has been blown open by love and grace into something bigger and deeper than I ever imagined.

Like I said, I never would have chosen it. This explosion was not an act of bravery on my part, but a seismic shift that, first, was endured. And–slowly, painfully, eventually–embraced.

When I moved to New York fourteen years ago, I had to laugh at people who called me brave as though they had just asked if I were an elite athlete. I wasn’t brave–I was desperate! I had run out of men to date in Alabama and I was running from the ones I’d already been through. Everyone I knew seemed to be married with kids or getting that way. I needed an escape route.

But then…then came some bravery, after all.

There was the moment I admitted to The Husband, who then was a friend, how I felt. Not the moment at night when I was drunk, but the one the next morning over the phone. The one followed by a year: of broken then restored friendship, of hope giving way to trust then to hope again, then of everything. These are the moments of bravery–the ones that come after the explosion we never had the bravery to choose. When we admit the thing that’s hard to admit:

This is hard.

I’m a mess.

Most days lately, I look down and see, on my hands, the mark of being the boys’ mother: the love heart on my wrist that serves as a button to match TK’s, to stay connected throughout the day. The squiggle taking up my whole palm, which is LB’s signature, his claim and his version of that connection, always singular and larger-than-life, like him. They are becoming themselves more every day–their beautiful, messy selves, and as so often happens when people become more who they truly are, I’m loving them more because of it.

And the other night, as TH slept off the sickness I gave him upstairs, I lay between these boys and awoke in the middle of the night to their breathing. And to the unmistakable briny smell of the beach–a smell that, at any other stage in my life, I would have had to write off to a dream. But now, now, we live metres from a harbour. And this anxious spine of mine, this anxious mess that I am, has been relocated to salty shores that rock me to sleep each night, often between two boys. Which is a dream–an unmanageable, messy dream–that happens to be real.

I remember reading about the concept of hygge a few years ago when it was all the rage in America: a form of sprucing up our winters so they’d be more fun (bearable); a way to transform them into something evergreen-scented and Instagrammable. We do this with everything, you know. We turn suffering into a cursively-printed meme so that it looks like we chose to put ourselves within our current circumstances, like this is all part of our greater plan to better ourselves and the world.

There is no dressing up the flu.

Last week, on the third day of my three days of antibiotics, I was driving home from getting fingerprinted for permanent Australian residency paperwork when my phone rang. My doctor was on the other end of the line: “You’re going to laugh,” he said. “Want to f-ing bet?” I wished I could say, because I knew what was coming: my throat swab had come back positive for influenza A.

So there had been no real need, other than placebo effect, for that gut-searing trio of pills, but I wasn’t mad. I felt validated. I texted The Husband from the next red light–I HAVE THE FLU, OFFICIALLY–so that he’d know the struggle had, indeed, been real, that my hacking coughs at bedtime weren’t just for show. My aches and exhaustion had a source, one I’d supposedly been inoculated against but JUST KIDDING NOT THAT STRAIN, and the preceding and next few days would be marked by mandated rest.

Cue the Netflix.

“I always wish I had more time to read and watch TV, and then when I do, I’m mad that I can’t do more,” I told a friend, who reasoned that it would be more fun to read and watch TV if I didn’t feel like shit. I forgot that part. Nonetheless, I camped out in front of of the brick-of-a-memoir I’m reading, in front of peppermint and camomile teas, in front of Adam Sandler movies, in front of a week devoid of the gym and sweating other than from a fever. Then, on Saturday as I was getting my hair did for a dinner, my hairstylist mused that maybe the alcohol that would be served that night would actually help me get better, and my recovery officially entered a new mode: back to real life.

But not too far back into it, as I sat on the couch Sunday and searched Netflix for Christmas movies, settling finally on 2015’s A Very Murray Christmas and spending the next hour charmed by its host. Winter in Sydney is not the brutal whitescape that motivated the Danes toward the philosophy of hygge, but also: it’s not the beautiful whitescape that motivated the Danes toward the philosophy of hygge. It’s a number of things, among them the good–sixty-five degree days at the beach in the sun; the bad–grey dreariness for days at a time; and the ugly–no Christmas.

So I made my own little hygge right there on the couch, Christmas carols and peppermint tea blazing. I had been forced into a week of rest and this was its swan song, the celebration of stillness.

This stillness is not one I chose, like so many of the hard-to-unwrap gifts I’ve been given. But the unwrapping has occurred anyway, the presents revealed in the present: closeness with the boys on the couch; laughing together at The Cat in the Hat‘s animated antics; watching them get bored, tell me about their boredom, and then create tools to deal with it; hearing them play together; forcing them into an awareness of a mom who can’t do as much or be as everything right now. TH took them to school one morning while I both luxuriated in this rare event and questioned my own value without my typical usefulness.

I had a lot of time to think, is what I’m saying. A lot of time to…notice.

And here is what I noticed, the things that pop out in stillness and reveal themselves as gifts: how easy it usually is to use my lungs. How beautiful the view is from the window. How good food can taste. How social Little Brother is, how he puts too much pressure on himself to please others, how gorgeously affectionate and sensitive he is. How The Kid may complain about what he has to do, but then he does it and I get a photo texted from his therapist of the artwork he spent hours on at school, a rendering–his incomparable rendering–of a book cover that is now on its way to be celebrated in the principal’s office with the teacher’s comment echoing my own: “I just love the way he sees the world.”

These moments of awareness, of the clouds opening up for the rainbow, of rest in the midst of everything else: like a song, maybe the one I chose or the one the boys did, echoing throughout the car as LB sings along in the backseat, music always waiting to be heard.

I hate my life.

I had the thought as the boys resisted, per usual, the morning routine of getting dressed; as they chose instead to throw each other’s clothes across their bedroom and cry about it while I struggled to swallow and talk around my fiery throat. I thought it as I repeated, over and over, for them to put their lunches in their bags and zip them, to put on their socks and shoes, to get into the car. I thought it as I pulled out of the driveway to their demands for songs. I thought about it as I considered what to make for dinner.

I love my life.

I thought it as I drove over the hill near The Kid’s school that boasts a sweeping harbour panorama. I thought it as a rainbow pierced through the grey sky that was slowly making room for sun. I thought it when both boys ran to me at their respective pick-ups, bursting with the news of their days.

I ran a 5K Sunday morning that was meant to be rain-soaked but happened during a break in the showers. I still struggled, though, considering quitting several times: how good would it feel to just slow down? I pushed through, then walked home, then later in the day got sick: aches and fever and that fiery throat. I wondered, during one of the many fire-engine wake-up calls provided by my throat during the night, if maybe that was why the race had been so hard: because I was sick. My performance looked a lot different with that possibility added to the mix.

On Sunday, during the gap between the race and the onset of aches, I took Little Brother to a movie at the mall that was near the site of a birthday party TK was attending. I outsourced The Husband to accompany TK because it was a stunt gym party and I wasn’t up for a race and an existential crisis in the same day. About thirty minutes into the movie (around the time the popcorn ran out; coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous?) LB announced he wanted to leave. We found the car and headed over to the party, where TK was engaging more with the snack table rather than the parkour activities, fair enough, and he begged to go home. Later that night, I asked them what their best part of the day was.

“The movie,” LB replied without hesitation.

“The party,” TK supplied as eagerly.

What the hell?!

It never fails to amaze me, how they change their stories later. How we all reach for the most readily accessible memory, or feeling. How we supply the easy answer rather than do the hard and dirty work of digging beneath that to the truth that may lie underneath: the fear, the insecurity, the trauma. How we see the past differently from the vantage point of the present. How a slog of a run can later look like a triumph; how a fear-filled party can later look like a good time; how the first thirty minutes of a movie can…suffice. I write this, for example, from a couch, one quarter of the way through a Z-pack, throat still on fire, hating life. But also not? I mean, there is Netflix…and all the books I’ve been meaning to read…

This morning after I’d dropped both boys off at their schools, I trudged up the hill to the car and caught sight of a rainbow. The rain lately, it’s been constant, shades of grey defining our days, defining our moods, defining our health. But then there are the moments when the grey makes space, when the sun peeks through, when it’s both things, all things, at once. The sky somehow always big enough to hold everything.

I was out to lunch with friends recently when one asked if I’d seen her driving by that morning. I had, because she’d honked, while I was walking into town to meet The Husband and the boys. She told me that I’d looked really happy–I’d had a smile plastered across my face. At first I was a bit embarrassed (my face often has expressions plastered across it that I’m unaware of, and it’s gotten me into trouble before), but after a moment I found myself clinging to that story the way I cling to my kids’ forgiveness at the end of a long and fraught day, or the way I cling to the way TH grins and bears so many of my quirks (read: bitchery), or the way I cling, like a damn life raft, to grace. To its redemption. To its hope. To its oxygen.

Or the way I cling to doing the hard, but right, thing–the times I’ve chosen to do it–and the people I meet on that path.

Call it a dustup, or a brouhaha, or, if you’re like me, a clusterfuck, but recently an event occurred in relation to The Kid’s teacher situation from last year that brought the whole damn thing WAY back up. It was like a wound getting reinfected: all the bad memories and stench of the drama floated back to the surface, along with new drama on both sides, much of it taking place in sidelong glances in the schoolyard or hushed conversations over tables or–my favourite–comment sections on social media. You know, those cesspools of modern society where fear and insecurity go to take giant, public, semi-anonymous, protected-by-a-keyboard dumps.

ANYWAY…I ventured into one such comment section, and overheard one such conversation, and may have been the recipient of some such glances, and at first it all felt like a personal assault. The victim-blaming mentalities on display, the inability to see the greys and complexities of people and life, the determination for the world to remain small enough to manage–it was all just…gross. Misguided. And, I suppose, completely unavoidable. People be hatin’, and such. People also be, sometimes, who they’ve always been.

But people also be…full of grace. People be oases in deserts. People be understanding, and willing to see all sides of an issue. People be coming through for you in ways you never expected. People be for you, period. People be incredible.

So after awhile, I stopped looking at the comment sections and just had to laugh along with the Lady Chablis–“two tears in a bucket, mother fuck it”–because there comes a moment when you’re just too old for this nonsense. You know who your people are. You know what you’re about. You know what matters, and what is worth defending. And that has to be–because it is–enough.

Because when you’re one of the people for whom life hasn’t gone as planned–and let’s be clear, it isn’t bravery or choice that usually gets you there, but brokenness and pain–one of the people who finally got crazy enough to remain above deck for the storm, and tell the truth about the space between what should have been and what is, and embrace the grief instead of maintaining the mask–when you’re one of those people, funny things start to happen. Your runs that don’t suck are punctuated by lyrics that now jump out at you and won’t let you go–you, right along with Bruce, want to know if love is wild, and if love is real. Or you punch a fist in solidarity with Maggie because you’re both still dancing at the end of the day.

Or you read words that become your own. When Emerson says, “People wish to be settled, [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” you know exactly what he means because that’s the topography of the land where you’ve been living for awhile now. When Margaret Fuller writes, “There is no terror like that of being known,” you mutter a silent, “Amen, sister,” because she speaks from her own experience and yours. And you know that unsettledness, and terror, are part of the whole package: the package of being fully alive. Not safe, but alive.

There is a difference.

You know that your friendships are built on rock, not sand. You know that even on the days when you’re not dancing at the end, you can look your children in the eye and know you’ve done every right thing you can to protect and honour them. You know that your marriage is a hard-fought refuge, and your home is a place where people can go to tell the whole truth, usually over a bottle of wine.

You become, like the Velveteen Rabbit and all my favourite people and like grace and love itself, wild. And real. And this? Well, this is painful, and hard, and scarred, and beautiful, and just everything.

My kids are the worst Hide and Seek players, like, ever. They make a mockery of the game, giggling in their secret spots then, when they get tired of waiting to be found, waving their arms or jumping out and shouting, “I’M HERE!” Little Brother is especially animated with his reveals, as though in doing so he’s winning the game.

And as far as games go, this isn’t a soul-sucking one to play with them (see: “playing” Transformers or Baddies vs Goodies or Zombies vs Plants, the rules of which are made on the fly, along with dialogue constantly directed by the little people, who punish for any deviation). The input of energy is minimal, and you even get a break while either hiding or counting, those few seconds of inactivity amounting to what feels like a holiday in the Caribbean depending on the day.

The other afternoon, I “found” Little Brother and the two of us set off to find The Kid in the remaining tiny radius of hiding options. LB came to a grinding halt and grabbed my arm: “SHHH! I heard his voice.”

TK’s voice has been the subject of much of my thoughts lately. And by lately I mean since the actual moment of his birth, when he was yanked from my abdomen and I waited to hear him before I was allowed to see him. I waited seconds in that operating room, then years–until he turned four–to hear him utter words (not anything particular…just Mama), then sentences (I love you may have been a highlight).

I’m not waiting anymore.

I used to hate it when people told me that one day, I’d think back to when I was waiting for him to speak and I’d laugh because one day, he’d never shut up. I wanted to scream at them that their experience wasn’t necessarily ours, and that there was no guarantee he would ever talk, because that was the hard truth and I needed someone to acknowledge it. (By the way, that’s a risky game–waiting on people to acknowledge hard truths. There is limited ratio of those willing to do it–better to stop waiting and start your own blog).

But some elements of those predictions did turn out to be true, even if the preamble to our constitution ending up being longer than was anecdotally comfortable (by most accounts, Einstein didn’t speak until he was four and I did not want to outrun that record). Now, TK’s days are full of words from start to finish. Many of them take the form of questions, particularly the exhausting Why? variety. There are also the long-winding whines (whinges in Australia)–these challenge my sanity on the reg. Blessedly, we get the proclamations of love and the jokes, my two favourite categories. These are oxygen.

Can’t forget, though, about the alerts, both excited (“The Spit Bridge is going up!”) and unnerving (“DRIVE WITH BOTH HANDS ON THE WHEEL! WHAT SPEED ARE YOU GOING?”) and the fact-providers (I would tell you all that he’s informed me re: dual clutches and make/model characteristics of hundreds of cars, but my brain does not retain such knowledge). His voice is narration to the day, and I try to remember that, not too long ago, I was the one who had to do the narrating. And that it is blessing, his taking this job off me.

But he’s not the only one. There’s LB, whose own personality is revealed in his speech: the way he looks out for others (“Mommy, are you okay?”) to the point that I worry whether he’ll define himself by the mood of the room. There’s his unceasing affection (“Mommy, you’re my best friend and my mommy. Your farts smell like roses dipped in flowers. Daddy’s smell like burgers and broccoli” #truestory; “Mommy I love you so much you can stay in this family forever!”). There are his endless jokes, all about chickens crossing roads to get to toilets, and penises. And there are the facts, partial to his own interests (“Did you know my friend Evie likes puppies?”).

Their demands and complaints drive me insane; their incomparable love humbles me. I’m usually somewhere between the two, my own voice remaining on the inside (“Breathe”) and outside, in some variation of love and admonishment. It seems I am always listening to one voice or another. And the loudest voices in my ear are often not the ones that should be, if you know what I mean: the self-recriminations, the schoolyard bitchery (not even talking about the kids here), the chorus of opinions from those for whom the world is not allowed to be greyscale or life, nuanced or people, complicated. These are the voices that I am, quite simply, having to learn to tell to f*ck off.

But grace shows up as sight and sound, and in voices that come as whispers and love and even questions and whines. I am learning which voices to hear, even when they take awhile to emit, or reach my ears. And more importantly, I’m learning to listen.

Taken together, the individual zings can feel like a barrage. A full-on assault, really: The Kid gets sick at school and I cancel my day (Netflix; KIDDING) to go collect him. ZING! Flu shots (and the boys’ looks of betrayal) booked. ZING! The Husband is due to travel later this week. ZING! Something weird is going on with my hand and I should probably talk to a doctor about the pain. ZING! Intermittent fasting (IF, which these days feels like it should stand for I F-ingcan’t) has not tightened my waistline. ZING! School and personal dramas (set to coincide with the second season-release of Big Little Lies, perhaps? I SEE YOU, HOLLYWOOD!) keep my blood pressure soaring and my sleep erratic. ZING!

I’m one to get more often lost in the details, in the trees, so that I miss the forest. But these zings are piling up and, with my Lexapro backing off, I am…managing them? Which sometimes looks like…freaking out about them?

And sometimes doesn’t. Sure, my “meditation sessions” usually consist of nine minutes of panic followed by one minute of nearly falling asleep, but there are things to offset the zings. Zongs, if you will. Actually, I won’t. I need to work on that one.

It’s like this: I am being forced to slow down, in a million different little ways.

I literally chop my medication in half rather than pop it mindlessly out of its blister pack.

I analyse the triggers set off by various ongoing dramas, and with the help of wise advice, I identify the shame I still carry around via that fearful little girl inside of me who’s terrified of getting in trouble because of what that will say about her worth. (Yes, I’ve been to therapy. Why do you ask?)

I breathe, deeply. And slowly, so I don’t pass out. It’s called self-regulation, people. And it sometimes even works.

I ask myself why I’m so concerned with what people think of me, or what they post on social media. And when I find out the answer, and realise it’s not a good enough one, I let it go. Repeatedly. And then I get that song stuck in my head.

I identify the anxiety-raisers in my life and I deal with them. Specifically, an example: because I don’t have as many meds coursing through me to modulate the anxiety, I see what the internet does to me and I stay away from it as needed. Sometimes.

And there’s this: I recognise, more than ever, that the world’s need to categorise every little thing into “Good” or “Bad” or “Black” or “White” or “Right” or “Wrong” may work for them (spoiler alert: it’s not working for them; see Facebook comments sections), but lays no claim on me and how I need to function. I see Little Brother, whose growing independence is both wonderful and heartbreaking: “Bye, Mommy. I’ll see you after school.” (AKA, you’re dismissed.) And how TK’s own independence, growing at its own speed, is the same: How he forgets to look at me on his way into the classroom now, or how he leaves me standing alone on the schoolyard because he’s playing lava monster with his friends. How my own friends fill in the gap in the meantime, until he runs over to me, furiously jabbing the red hearts I drew on his wrist–“HUGS! HUGS!”–and it’s all the feelings at the same time, but I can grasp each of them too.

It’s losing relationships and finding some people aren’t to be trusted even as you find that some are, deeply. And that gain and loss often happen at once but can be felt separately. And deeply.

It’s spending my time in each moment, so when the end of the school day comes it doesn’t feel so much like the end of something (though it still does, a little) and more like a return to someone–two of them, actually.

It’s finding out that we’re signing on for two more years here, and feeling both the grief that comes with distance and the deep relief that comes with knowing we’re where we should be, and we get to stay there.

It’s all of the things, at the same time and one at a time, and when they land, it’s feeling them less as wounds and more as gifts, some just taking longer to unwrap than others–but those usually end up being my favourite kind anyway.