Plans In Pencil

I don’t want to sound like an asshole but I am crushing life lately: I’ve cut back on my meds, have completed a week of intermittent fasting, am decreasing my phone usage and being more present with my kids, and have started meditating every day!

Get this: last week I only broke one bowl in a fit of anger over The Kid demanding more apple sauce (and it was a shitty plastic PJ Masks one, whatevs)! I tweaked through a Sunday of no internet like an addict in need of a fix and, that evening, devoured people.com as though it was my job and the rent was due, like, then. I set the timer on my phone for my shavasana pose on my bed and worry my way through it (fun side note: did you know that shavasana means corpse? You’d think I’d be good at that! #tired)! Being present with my kids means laughing at Captain Underpants jokes in front of the TV at the same time! Long blacks are not as good as cappuccinos! AND I’M HUNGRY!!!

And the meds…

Last week I was embracing the return of tears to my life. This week, I’m battling the eruption of anxiety. There is somewhere between overmedicated and undermedicated and I’m in the distance between them right now, using CBT techniques to tell myself that it is very unlikely that Little Brother and I will be hit by a bus while standing a metre back from this kerb (and so help me God if you correct me, that is the way AUSTRALIANS SPELL IT). The stimuli that Lexapro dimmed for me–alongside the intensity of feelings that it also dimmed–now feel more like assaults I have to manage if I want to stay at this dosage, in this space between 10 and 20 mg, between then and now. The difference this time around the 10 mg block is that I recognise the assaults for what they are. I am better equipped. I am more aware.

But they’re still assaults.

Last week The Husband pulled his vagina, sorry his NECK, and as he hobbled around with a heating pad encircling him like a scarf, I congratulated myself on taking him to the doctor and being decent to him and not killing him while considering, in my own twisty mind, the ways I’m hobbled, the ways we all are, even Bran the Broken (WTF with that ending tho), legs and necks and minds struggling to function properly as we inhabit the gap between how things are and how they should be.

“He was so popular today,” Little Brother’s preschool teacher told me one afternoon last week, and my mind jumped ahead to the potential angst of his teenage years, this one with the people-pleasing trait that I’ve passed on, to the blessing and curse that social awareness and proficiency can be. And then his brother, revealing his innocence when he recounts a playground drama at school and asks me: “Why are people mean sometimes?” The gap between between popularity and insecurity, between innocence and being hurt, not being very big. The gap between their insightful questions and my insufficient answers feeling like an ocean. I am not enough.

And I don’t have to be. Because there are the gap-fillers that show up, the agents of grace that can supersede even meds and food: the friends who show up for TK when his therapist calls in sick at the last minute, rubbing his back and enfolding him in their circle. There is LB asking from the backseat: “Are you sure there’s enough space for God and Jesus in my heart?” and I, trembling under anxiety and the responsibility of being in the front seat–maybe even because of that–answering, “Ya damn right there is.” There is LB singing his favourite lines from the song I taught him and casting me a knowing grin. There is the hand cream that TK bought from his school’s Mother’s Day stall for me, that is pomegranate-scented but somehow smells like Christmas in this Southern-Hemisphere winter without one. All of these gaps between what I am and what I’m not, between faith and certainty, between now and not yet, somehow always filling.

I lace up my shoes for my new routine, this exit from the house in the space between my waking and everyone else’s. I am not crushing life, but I am showing up for it, and somehow this current gap, between darkness and sunrise, it feels like home.

I’m approaching my four-year anniversary on antidepressants (Lexapro, if you’re nasty) this October and recently felt motivated to make a change. I sat across from a dear friend I hadn’t seen in too long a couple of weeks ago and we talked about this drug that came at a time when we both needed it: in the throes of postpartum depression, in a valley where we both had lost our sense of joy and felt like searching furiously and trying harder wouldn’t recover it. She asked for help first and guided the way for me to, and as the pill kicked in I felt a space: a space between me and the anxiety, between me and the sadness that hadn’t been there before, or else had just been filled with turbulence and anger and reaction, and was slowly (not completely, but at least partially) replaced by glorious empty space, into which moved an opportunity for me to look across and see myself as separate from the anxiety and sadness. A chance to know that they are not me and do not claim me. It didn’t fix everything, but it helped.

And when we moved to Australia over two years ago, and the walls began crashing in again and I felt, again, like I couldn’t breathe properly if at all, I sat in my doctor’s office and he told me that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. That maybe it didn’t have to be. So he increased my dosage, and that helped too.

That was two years and twelve pounds ago, and lately, as my clothes have gotten tighter and the space has returned and provided tools for my belt (just kidding, I don’t wear belts, my clothes are snug enough already), I’ve wondered if it might be time for a reassessment.

Self-guided, of course, because you can take the girl out of the controlling, but…anyway, I just wanted to try it. So last week I began halving pills. Back to my original dosage. And almost immediately I noticed an effect: tears.

(Full disclosure: when typing that, I accidentally spelled teats first. Sadly, that was not accurate.)

My tears came closer to the surface and past it. I was more easily affected, and this felt…wonderful. My friend had experienced it as well, once again lighting the path for me. I let the thickened throat and watery eyes take over at a champagne lunch for a foundation telling women’s stories of infertility and depression; I let it erupt at the ballet the next day; during afternoons with my kids when their observations humbled and wrecked me. During one unexpected moment involving the Hound and Arya.

There are times when the feelings are all too much. And there are times when they are the perfect salve, the most welcome old friend coming back.

Now I seem to be in the latter times.

Now is when the days are shorter and the evening cold creeps–or blasts, depending on the day–in, when parenting is hard but also beautiful, when we are all cutting back on our screens, when I’m cooking new things and my running mojo has returned. There may be a new Now down the road when I need the full dosage again or I have to (God forbid) return to hiking for exercise or I just don’t have the energy to be “present” enough to relegate the iPads to the shelf.

And we are waiting, always waiting, to know what our local package is, or where we’ll be in two years, or whether we need to get serious about looking at secondary education in Australia or not. Somehow along the way I had fooled myself into thinking there would ever be a time when we weren’t waiting, though. When we would be settled: into a final house, final city, final plan, where everything around us would be both Now and Future. Where I could breathe in that space.

That’s not the space, but I am breathing. Through tears, and laughter, through the way Little Brother calls us “guys” and the dearness and immediacy of it makes me stop clamouring to look ahead and grounds me in the beautiful and hard Now. Where the way The Kid’s excitement to greet me in the morning shows up in his grin and knowing look. Where I’m halving pills and turning on the heat and waking up in the dark to run and we’re possibly gearing up to sell our first home a continent away.

None of this, really, being in the plan, but in the Present.

Last Friday, the last day of Year Two, Term One, The Kid emerged from his classroom with a huge grin and some extra baggage: a bean plant he had been growing throughout the term in his science class. The other kids popped out with their own plants, in various stages of growth. A friend’s daughter lamented that her bean, for its part, had basically not done shit over the last few weeks: “Why is mine still beneath the dirt?! Why didn’t it GROW???”

Naturally, I was thrilled that TK’s little green stalk had made something of itself; that’s one less question I have to answer. It’s the small things, right? But not every growth experience yields similar results. Not every pathway through the muck leads to such visible length and light.

We arrived home and found a sunny place where the plant could continue living, and the next morning TK noticed that the bean had appeared to grow overnight. “It needs the moonlight too,” he concluded, his typical observational simplicity covering the depths beneath it; profundity masked by brevity.

I’m going “on holiday,” as they say here, in a week’s time, flying solo across the Pacific Ocean and most of the continental US to arrive in New York, where I’ll meet The Sis and give a talk, and a couple days after that we’ll hop down to Atlanta for me to briefly reunite with family, friends, and Super Target. The trip fills me with anticipation and anxiety, unsurprisingly: I can’t remember the last time I ventured through an airport without The Husband trustily holding my passport; nor can I remember the last time I sat inside a plane without a small hand tugging at me to go to the bathroom. I’ll be savouring every moment while counting them down until I see my three men’s faces again. It will be wonderful and tough; sunlight and moonlight.

One of my favourite (read: most outrage-inducing) parts of this journey is how people have stepped up to ask how TH will manage. I’m not talking about friends who offer to have the kids for a play or to check in; I’m talking about the acquaintances who ask whether they should bring meals by as if someone has DIED, or the ones who question if perhaps TH needs some live-in help? Like a child carer or cook or maid? Turns out that in 2019, some are still aghast at the thought of a man taking care of his own children solo for a spell. I love TH and will acknowledge at every turn the incredible husband and father he is (unless that turn occurs at 6 pm on a weekday and he hasn’t arrived home from work yet…), but do I think he should be immortalised as some kind of GD folk hero because he steps up to give me a mental break and mind his own offspring? I most decidedly DO NOT.

Props to TH for changing hundreds of diapers compared to my own dad’s ONE (love ya, Dad) and for making his own sandwiches, but let’s not contact the Nobel committee just yet when sisters have been doing it for themselves for centuries without an effing Meal Train delivery schedule, JUST SAYING.

That said (and now with me searching for a place to live for the next week), I’m interested to see what shape everyone will be in upon my return. The boys, for their part, will miss me while having a wrestling, physical, nugget-filled good time with the Fun Parent. TH will miss me too, but likely will enjoy leaving his half-empty water bottles wherever he damn well pleases and allowing cabinets and drawers to remain open whenever he wants.

Yin and yang. Tit and tat. When one side of the equation is missing, the whole thing gets lopsided and starts to crumble. When TH was away a few months ago, everything was in its place around our place, but we were woefully incomplete and–even though the laundry didn’t pile up–we wouldn’t have lasted much longer without him. I need the calm to my uptightness, the blue to my red, the “it’s fine” to my “EVERYTHING IS FALLING APART.” I need the kid whose favourite word is penis and the one whose favourite is why; the one who demands I watch him as he watches his iPad and the one who pushes me away (“But I still love you!”). I need a TK and an LB, and the world does too: TK’s friends need their calm port in a storm and LB’s need a PJ Masks-enthused dance partner. And they need each other: LB clinging to TK’s neck and begging him for a hug (“Brothers of love ALWAYS HUG!”); TK teaching LB about manual versus automatic transmission along with all the other nuances that people can overlook while dancing to PJ Masks.

We all need plants that grow slowly, beneath the soil, and those that emerge through it early, when we’re barely ready.

I returned from a run this morning and, keyless, rang our doorbell. Cue the pitter patter of small yet growing feet, the door handle jangling, and LB’s face appearing through the screen. “Mom, I need to tell you something!” was his greeting, before exclaiming frustratedly, “How do I get this OPEN?” I heard TH patiently (what’s that, this patience thing you speak of?) prod TK to help his brother, and seconds later, TK’s face appeared and the door was quickly opened. As I stepped forward, they both grinned their particular grins at me, leading me inside to my place, where TH waited. To home.

I haven’t been honest lately.

I haven’t been totally honest, at least, which is the same as being dishonest. I haven’t been honest here, which means I haven’t been honest with myself. When I write here, I try to let it all out: be open about the struggles I face, we all face, and describe them in their ugly and beautiful totality. This is therapeutic for me, because it’s real. Because it’s a process, getting to the end and pressing “Post,” and usually by that point I’m feeling a sense of relief at the journey having taken place: events and thoughts transcribed, grace observed.

The appeal of tying things up neatly is irresistible. Plus, no one wants to be a Debbie Downer. People talk about Debbie Downers (so I have been informed). And my penchant for order always pushes me in the direction of a tidy, if not happy, ending each week.

It’s just that that’s not always possible. More importantly, it’s not always true.

I’ve been overwhelmed by anxiety lately. And through conversations I’ve had and stories I’ve beheld, I know I’m not the only one. So consider this a pit stop, a bench to sit on together, if you’re anything like me: short of breath, an inch from losing your shit, taking it out on your partner and/or kids, full of regret, battling an eyelid twitch, suffering from insomnia, having the shakes, feeling…crazy.

And if that’s not you, chances are it’s someone you know and love. Life is unrelenting, in all the ways.

I developed my eyelid twitch (not to be confused with my actual eyeball twitch, #blessed) when I was living in New York and I had to quit a dicey job. Along with the twitch came some fun heart palpitations that sent me to the doctor, who in turn sent me out with an external heart monitor. Good times. After I shed myself of the job and its issues, the twitch and palpitations disappeared. But lately, my eyelid has gone haywire again. The other day, I was driving the boys to their respective schools while stuck in traffic. They were talking over each other in the backseat. I felt the old familiar feeling returning: panic, breathlessness, a need to escape what felt like drowning. I wanted to scream.

A couple of nights later, Little Brother fell asleep quickly but The Kid did…not. The Husband was out and I was all set for an hour or so of a TV movie with a glass of red. TK would not acquiesce to this plan. He was almost asleep and I got up to go when he awoke, asking where I was going.

I am not nice in moments like these. I very actively, in fact, end up hating myself for moments like these: my terse replies and emotional shutdown, my impatience and irritability with life not going according to my preordained plan. I brought TK upstairs with me and turned on Failure to Launch. It was not as good as I remembered it being in a theatre in New York with girlfriends. I turned it off and we went back downstairs. My teeth were gritted the whole time. My thoughts were dark. My skin pricked with rage and stress.

Last week, we had our Parent-Teacher meeting at TK’s school. His therapist had given me a heads-up of some of the things that might be discussed, which was a gift. Without that gift, I might have gone in expecting either the pleased surprise of his kindy teacher or the easily-discarded dumpster fire of last year. What we got was neither. What we got was a lot of truth.

That’s always the best. And the worst.

His teacher this year expects more of him, which means more is expected of us, which means there is no autopilot for parenting (how could I have forgotten?? But I did). We have been lulled by a series of successes into a resting-on-laurels state, an enjoyment of all that he’s proven himself capable of: dancing on stage, improving his handwriting, doing maths, coding like a mofo. But what used to be our main concern–his social interactions and behaviour–has both improved, and taken a backseat to the very real needs of academic and independence growth.

He learns differently, and we have to help him, and this is both hard and wonderful. I feel both suited for it and woefully inept. To put it another way: I was a star speller growing up, winning the state spelling bee in sixth grade. Spelling is not TK’s strong suit. How do I parent from a place so different to his, in this one example?

Well, last week I parented him to a nine out of ten on his spelling test, his highest score this year. This is not a brag, though, for if you had seen the carnage and screaming (his…mine) it took to get there, well…

Beauty on the other side of difficulty? I’m counting on it.

We’ve had an amazing couple of years, and now shit is getting real. Kids are getting older and new demands arise. How do we help them become who they’re meant to be? The pressure is overwhelming.

Hello, eye twitch.

TH, who is kinder than I deserve, took the boys off me for awhile this weekend and I finished my conference talk. I breathed. I walked, and ran. I used my new ALDI back massager, which is changing my life. I finished binging The OA.

But the best moment came once we were all together again, after a Sunday lunch, when we walked down to the beachfront and the boys settled into the sand. TH grabbed each of us a drink and we sat there, shaded in the afternoon sun, and we just were. Tears and laughter, anxiety and peace, all of it coexisting. Which is not to wrap things up neatly, but more to offer–to myself and anyone else who’d like to join–a port in the storm. Even when there isn’t one, overtly–some days the sun is shining and I’m wearing makeup and decent clothes–but life and weather are unrelenting. And this is grace, and love, this constant acceptance and fighting and figuring it out and messing it up, this grappling, together–facing the waves that both soothe and buffet us and remake the shoreline where we sit, day after day, nothing and everything changing all the time.

We live down a hill, two blocks essentially, from The Kid’s school, and something magical happens a couple of times a day when I’m at home: the sound of the bell signaling break times floats down that hill to me, followed shortly after by the sound of kids playing and yelling, their glee filling the air. I imagine TK’s voice as part of that pack, floating down to me with all the others, even though he’s not typically one of the louder ones in a group. But there was a time when he didn’t use his voice at all, and we’re not there anymore. So for me, he’s in that sound. In that music.

Last week I spoke to his class about apple brains and autism, and I was amazed at how attentive they were; how their rapt expressions both buoyed me and gently pushed aside my anxiousness, unlocking a path for vulnerability. For his part, TK, sitting at the front of the group on the floor along with the rest while I perched on a seat, stayed close: he kept grinning up at me and reaching for my hand, occasionally interjecting with his own comments. The kids saw him as a baby with a tilted head; they saw him in his halo after his surgery; they saw our family as it is now, four-sided and complete. They asked me questions and laughed at my jokes. They were the best audience I could have imagined, because they really listened to the story of TK. And to think, just five minutes before I had been in the car sweating through every possible pore, trying to talk myself off an anxiety ledge.

Beauty, it seems, is most often on the other side of what seems hardest.

Also last week, the day after the class talk, I headed to the school for Grandparents’ Day because, although I am not a grandparent, I get to stand in for the ones who do not live down the street or even in the same hemisphere. The year two students perform a song on their recorders every year–it’s their introduction to instruments, this plastic noisemaker, and in case you don’t remember your own version of “Hot Cross Buns” from primary school, allow me to remind you that it’s not exactly symphonic. Along with the other parents, I laughed gently and took the obligatory video (to be used years from now for bribery purposes, and certainly not to help myself fall asleep). James’s therapist had told me that he wasn’t getting the notes quite right, but that this wasn’t unusual among the group and he was front and centre anyway, which was really what I was there for. Again, as the day before: a grinning kid, looking straight at me.

The next day, the weight of the week lifting as we headed toward the weekend, I drove the boys toward their respective days and told them–something that would rarely happen on a weighted-down Monday–a few of the things I love about each of them. True to form, they barely let me name one quality before they were asking questions, wanting more. Little Brother in particular appreciated my recognition of his sense of humour and told a couple of Fozzie Bear-inspired jokes in reward for my services. His unblinking acceptance of his given and perceived role in the world, in our family, is one of the most beautiful things about our life: when we named him William (“Protector”), we had no idea all the ways that would play out, including but not limited to his recent favourite game, which involves having either me or The Husband throw a basket ball toward where TK sits in his toy car, “driving” in front of the garage, while he (LB) runs toward the ball to keep it from hitting TK. (“Let’s play ‘I Protect James,'”, he says, making me wonder if his consciousness operates on deeper levels than I can imagine.)

One of the things that stood out to a few of the kids in TK’s class was when I told them about how he often experiences sounds and light differently than many of us. It was a concrete piece of information to which they could relate, and I was grateful for how it’s been explained to me by TK–fluorescent lights, for example, that seem to pulsate to him instead of shining continuously. It’s like he’s reaching across an invisible membrane when he’s able to tell me things like this, and I can only hope that I feel the same to him, a hand reaching across to where he is, explaining my version of the world. But so often he’s the one who comes up with his own, better answers, like recently when a playground encounter involved a student bullying TK’s friend, leaving her crying. “Why did he do that?” TK asked me later, unraveled and upset as he always is when he witnesses meanness, and concerned as he always is for people who are hurting. I told him that maybe the kid was having a bad day, or that he was unhappy, which didn’t make it right for him to be mean. TK quieted and appeared thoughtful for a moment. “Or maybe he was in Demo Mode,” he offered instead.

(In Toy Story 3, while the toys are all misplaced at a day care, Buzz Lightyear is switched into Demo Mode by a bully of a toy bear, which means that Buzz’s memory is erased, which means he forgets his friends and is unkind to them.)

Just to flesh that out: my boy, whose innocence often astounds me, reasoned that another kid was being mean because of a technical glitch. When people speak of autism as a disability, I have to remember that they don’t know my son, don’t know his depthless reserves of kindness and empathy. Disabled my ass.

On Friday we met some friends at a local beach and the kids fed the seagulls while the moms drank Prosecco, and before we all dispersed to our own homes, the pack of children were naked in the ocean. Their laughter traveled across the water and sand to us, like bells down a hillside, sounds that turn into notes that become music.

Last Friday I walked 60 kilometres (more, actually; the f-ers who mapped out the course went OVER the 60k mark) in twelve-and-a-half hours, but if it had been just me doing the walking, I’d likely still be somewhere along that course, probably sleeping under a bridge or drinking at a bar.

I did all the prep work necessary: regular hikes of increasing distances, acquiring blisters that turned into hard callouses; learning the route; carb loading; getting good sleep; even abstaining from alcohol the week before. The weather cooperated too: there was rain forecasted that was replaced by wind and clouds, that Friday the lone dry day surrounded by thunderstorms the rest of the week.

But still, on trek day, my legs felt like lead. My team seemed to be practically jogging even though we were travelling at our usual pace. I wanted to quit so badly. I could imagine myself just lying down–on the beach or in the middle of the street, I wasn’t picky–and surrounding to the aches and pains. Just letting go.

Instead, somehow, I kept going. I asked God to throw me a bone and make it easier. He did not. What he did do was open my eyes to the people who showed up along the way: teammates’ families and friends who brought food and massage sticks and Gatorade; kids who cheered us on and held out ice water; my own friends who waited patiently at the top of a hill I swore was designed to kill me and gave me an extra boost of love; and my boys, The Husband and The Kid and Little Brother, en route to McDonald’s, who pulled up beside us and grabbed my hand.

About an hour after that encounter, we crossed the finish line–the four of us, my team, together.

At the end of our first and only half-marathon together, TH turned to my excited face and announced, “That was terrible. I hated it.” I’ve always laughed at him for that, until now. Now I know how he felt. “Enjoy!” spectators cheered at us along the course as I wanted to vomit and die. I did not enjoy. But I didn’t want to be the weakest link (which I surely was). The pressure felt insurmountable, like the hills along our path. I surely would have quit were we not required to finish together.

What I’m saying is that I’m not a hero, but I am done. Blistered and sore and done, with a medal to my name and two boys who saw their mother make it across the finish line, and that is something. A lot of things, in fact. And our quartet stuck together, supporting each other, even when I seriously considered jumping from the Harbour Bridge.

A lovely friend of mine refers to her family, and mine, as “Team,” and not in the sickly sweet way that makes you want to gag, but in the “Hey, Team!” way when she and hers see us walking into school, or like, when I told her last week that I was going to lose it after being home with a sick kid for days on end, she commiserated that it can be tough having the team all together.

It can be. We know waaaaay too much about each other: how to push each other’s buttons, how each other’s farts smell. Togetherness can be exposing and hard, making us vulnerable and so seen–whether on a trek course or at home. It can be…chafing, physically and emotionally.

I took my yearly sojourn to a hotel by myself on Saturday, with my sore muscles and gaping wounds, and when I entered the blessed room I noticed how quiet it was. I lit a candle, popped the bottle of champagne TK had waiting on me (#grateful), and got to writing. It was glorious.

And annoyingly incomplete. So I texted friends. And FaceTimed my family. Apparently I can’t go eighteen hours without my teams.

“I’m so glad we get to be a family,” TK said on the way to school this morning, and it took my breath away. He is so aware–he and LB both–of being a member of this unit of four (five, when they count Google Home, which they often do; guess we don’t need a dog?), of their place in it: of being sons, and brothers. Of being part of a team.

A college friend used to joke that “there may not be an I in team, but there is an M and and E,” and it’s the me part of the team that I struggle with the most: my temper, my mistakes, my role. Along with making time for me so I don’t forget who I am, when I am so embedded in others. Others who both pull me out of myself and away from what I know of me into new places, paths that lead up hills and through forests and along spectrums and into classrooms and somehow end up making me more myself than I ever was. With the medals and chafing and heart to prove it.