Plans In Pencil

The other night I had a dream that our family was packing up the house we’d lived in since the kids were born: the home they were brought to from the hospital, the one that contains a marking of their various heights through the years, the one in which they spent their childhoods making memories.

I woke up and realised this house doesn’t exist.

What a strange thing. I have a house like that, one that had a dent in the wall in the bedroom my sister and I shared for years where she threw herself on the bed and skidded across it, knocking her noggin into drywall. It’s the house where we bicycled from in the mornings and where we returned at sunset after hours spent roaming the neighbourhood. It has the pool where my sister gave me a scar on my forehead after a stainless steel bowl slipped from her grip when she was filling it and dumping water on me.

My kids don’t have that.

Sure, we have the house in Atlanta where they came as babies from the hospital. The Kid spent five years there and Little Brother, two. They now call it our “Holiday House” because (a) they are under the impression that we own more than one house and are, apparently, some kind of real estate moguls; and (2) they now associate it with vacations because, much like Carrie and her 73rd Street apartment on the penultimate episode of Sex and the City, “WE DON’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE.” This is a strange thing to me, and bordering on the unacceptable: my boys have lived in four houses over the past four years and will surely live in a different one after the current year.

It would be completely unacceptable were it not for the fact that we didn’t ask for this; we were pushed off this cliff by grace.

I mean, we’re not even a military family. We can’t justify this wandering by saying we’re serving our country. And it feels wrong, in some ways, like when I dropped TK off for his first day of daycare as a baby and came home to sob. But it feels less wrong when I watch them run down the beach. When I carry them through the waves, literal and figurative, of our new life. When I’m carried myself through them, because I know we wouldn’t be who we are now were it not for a grace that moves us all over the map and goes with us.

We have gained so much more than we have lost. In fact, I’m trying to remember (besides proximity to some family and friends, of course) if we’ve lost anything.

Well, TK has. Last week, he lost his fifth tooth. In many ways, though, it was like the first. It was the first one he trusted me enough to let me pull–and I could see the weighing of options, the trepidation in his eyes. (I wonder if I ever look at God like that. Of course I do.) It was also the first upper tooth, which means that his smile his now changed.

“You have a new smile!” I told him, and he considered this–he, so resistant to change, but also strangely attracted to new things, to growth. I relate. He’s been playing with the new space, and verifying that it will soon be occupied by a “grown-up tooth,” and this is only one of the million ways that he, that they, that life reminds me of what I already know but always forget: that the empty spots are places to be filled.

That “home” isn’t a house for us because it’s the four of us, this equal-sided square bouncing around the world and growing ever closer, ever tighter. Sometimes painfully so. (See: trips to the bathroom.) That so much of life is spent in the tension between old and new, in the old leaving and the new becoming old again and over and over it all goes. That my children are learning to let go, and embrace. And so am I. (It’s not the easiest exercise.)

That we have front-row seats to watch, to participate in, what grace is constantly doing: new creations.

It’s exhausting. And wonderful. And awful. And messy. Just like so much, if not all, of the real parts of life are: the “beautiful moments through the tears” that a friend just texted me; the sunrise I woke up early for that was covered by clouds–clouds that allowed just a few rays through; the pain and blood followed by a gap followed by a tooth.

Yesterday I took the boys to the beach and we chose a spot right in front of the junction of a tidal pool on one side, and the ocean on the other. The boys stepped gingerly into the tidal pool, complaining of the cold water and wanting to leave. After awhile, they wanted to get into the ocean. And they didn’t. I hiked one up on each hip and we made our way through the waves. They protested; TK in particular felt his growing weight slipping down on me and said to stop, to turn around. I put him down and asked him to trust me, then held out my hand and turned back to the waves, fully expecting to be packing it in and heading home within seconds.

Then I felt a small but growing hand in mine. I hiked him up again–it was easier, because we were now deeper–and we got past the breaking waves to the place where we could ride them. I think we’ll stay there awhile.

Last week I hauled the boys to an outdoor playdate near a pool. In between the splashing and sunburn came a moment that often accompanies social events: the flashes of experience I linger over later, the happenings I sit on and overanalyse. I’ve done this my whole life, because #socialanxiety and also plain old #anxiety and also #introversion and….I could go on. Now that I have kids, though, I’m afforded many more experiences to study and feelings to interpret. Now that I have a kid diagnosed on the spectrum I have even more. It almost seems like Someone is doing this on purpose to me, hitting me right where it hurts and making me deal with it.

At one point, The Kid asked if he could do a wee in the garden. A “bush wee” as we call it here–it’s a cute way of saying “piss outside.” And, here, “garden” is not a word to describe an English outdoor masterpiece but, rather, a yard. A patch of grass. Anyway, I figure a couple of the benefits of having boys are (1) The Husband has to take them to the bathroom when they need to go and he’s around; and (2) when those conditions are not met, outdoor wees are often permissible. Let’s be honest–they’re probably too permissible in my book, because I’m lazy and it’s easy. So TK and Little Brother are used to dropping trou all over the place: music festivals, kerbsides, once on the side of a highway…you get it.

This trou-dropping is not about being on the spectrum. If anything, it’s a product of the parent I’m becoming because of this foreign sojourn–the very opposite of the rule-prioritising oligarch I planned to be before life and grace intervened. It’s about Australia, not autism: they’ve been spraying their golden showers all over this gorgeous country for two years now. And people who clutch their pearls over this…test me as a symbol of something I’m not. I think it’s actually a pretty good screening process for potential friends: you react in horror to my kids relieving themselves outside, we probably won’t be besties (see also: shock over f-bombs, hangovers, talks about mental health, etc).

Anyway, TK asked permission to go outside, and I considered running him inside before imagining the trail of dripping pool water certain to accompany us no matter how much towelling off occurred. So I asked my friend, the host, if bush wees were allowed at her place, and she said they were. So he did. No harm, no foul.

A few minutes later, though, a scene occurred that has defined so much of the angst in my life and the reason why I relate so deeply to the title of Mindy Kaling’s first book: two of the moms there were huddled together in the pool, and one of them cast a glance my (and TK’s way).

RED ALERT TO MY SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. I immediately felt my defences arise–on behalf of myself (my parenting, my personality, my very identity) and, especially, on behalf of TK. See, something often happens with people who aren’t around him much: there’s this thing they do, where they know something is “different” about him, and they stare. They take furtive glances; they study him surreptitiously. It’s creepy, and it’s common, and it annoys the shit out of me, and I often wonder if I’d do it myself if I were them, briefly, before I get back to eviscerating them in my head. On this particular occasion there were several glances and even instances of pointing out offences he’d committed (food dropped on the ground, for example; CALL THE F-ING POLICE). Both my anger and despondence were piqued.

A few minutes later, the boys none the wiser, we said our thank-yous and goodbyes and left. Cut to me on the car ride home, and for the next several hours (kidding, DAYS) analysing the whole thing.

A close friend who knows that I obsess over, well, everything, but especially how people treat TK, tells me that the differences that I think about people noticing are not actually that noticeable. I love her for this, because she means it, and because she loves TK, but she’s also around him a lot. Around us a lot. In other words, she would not have to enter a psychiatric facility if one of my kids pissed in her yard. And these are the people whose opinions should matter, right? The people who know us and love us?

Sounds like a great idea! TELL THAT TO MY EVER-WOUNDED PSYCHE. Because the truth is, there will always be a part of me that is operating from that raw, hurt place inside (my counsellor called it The Inner Child, yes I’ve seen some counsellors CAN YOU TELL) that the world damaged long ago and that is still struggling to recover from it. “The world” being, well, everyone in our history, reacting to everything about us that they notice: our size, our looks, our weird personalities. I’ve heard that there are a few rare people, Galinda-style, who sail through life without anything offensive in their natures drawing the attention of the world around them. But I think that, like unicorns and compassionate Trumps, these people don’t actually exist because none of us escapes childhood or adolescence fully unscathed. No, I think most of us–even (especially) the pearl-clutchers–come into adulthood with our factory settings switched to a default of “respond out of wounds.” Out of shame.

Ugh, shame. (noun) the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another. Yep, that pretty much covers it. Painful.

So whether you once farted in front of a group of people, or had a phase of really bad acne, or were just a didn’t-fit-in-anywhere outsider (hello from your friend me, who nailed the trifecta!), maybe you know something about this? Maybe you have it buried deep beneath layers of since-improved-to-acceptable behaviour/size/hairstyle. I don’t know, I’m not your counsellor (can you imagine? We’d just talk about me the whole time).

It’s there, though. And dealing with it is messy and involves lots of thinking and feeling and admitting and all kinds of other activities that cut into social media time and override filters. But dealing with it is the only thing that keeps us honest. It’s the only thing that keeps us real.

And I’m beginning to think that, inconveniently, it’s the only thing that keeps us from dumping it all over our kids.

On my best days, I examine. On my worst ones, I obsess. Most of the time I’m riding the wave between the two and trying not to screw my kids up too much, only too aware of how so much of their stuff coincides with mine in a way that feels targeted…almost as though Someone is doing this on purpose for me, hitting me right where it hurts and helping me deal with it.

The other night we watched The Greatest Showman for the thousandth time and TK, ever with his eye for/obsession with detail (wonder where he gets that from) asked about the men who burned down Barnum’s building and beat up his employees. “Why did they do that?” he asked, and we talked about how some people are afraid of what is different–of what they don’t know. I didn’t get into the subject of shame and how closely it’s connected with hate; I figure we’ll get to that. He kept asking questions until the next scene, when all those “different” people showed up in a bar. “Look! It’s the good people!” TK exclaimed.

We watched as these outcasts danced and sang–two things hard to do if you’re clinging to shame. “They’re dancing,” I told him. “And singing,” he replied, then sang along, the refrain of the outcasts who know their name, where they’re from, where they now belong.

“And we will come back home.”

My phone sits in a bowl of rice on the kitchen counter right now, the product of it being soaked in a torrential downpour last night. It was our third New Year’s Eve in Sydney, but somehow also our first: for the past two years we have landed at the airport that morning, and jet lag kept us from staying awake for festivities. This year, though, our feet had been on terra firma for a good three days after a week in Hawaii. We were rested (somewhat) and ticketed, for a celebration with friends at the North Sydney pool to swim, drink cans of wine, and watch fireworks. So we did.

Several bouts of thunder and lightning led to several pool evacuations, during which we ducked under cover and/or headed to the indoor pool behind the stands where our belongings sat, getting drenched. Once the rain finally lifted, we returned to our seats to grab some food (wine cans) and assess the damage. While the band played a medley of Mamma Mia hits in the background, I surveyed my poor lifeless phone. Then I jumped into the pool with the boys and bobbed around to the sounds of “Waterloo.”

And now, the morning after, I’m tempted to assign a New Year’s-sized batch of meaning to the fact that this morning, I was forced to drink my coffee without checking Twitter, and instead watch the boys playing. I feel the familiar urge to check my phone, to grab it and place it on the bathroom counter while I shower, to press Play on a podcast so sounds can fill the silence. Each time, the urge gives way to the realisation that the only thing touching my phone for the next few hours will be rice.

I went on a run with an old iPod The Husband found, one full of infant songs that I’d bought when The Kid was fresh and new, and I downloaded my own stuff but set it to shuffle, which left me fast-forwarding to the former soundtrack of my days, passing through hits like “Mommy Train” and “I Have a Doll!”. It’s the same feeling I had when the boys asked to watch Fireman Sam the other day for the first time since we moved here two years (!) ago: a crystal-clear nostalgia that invades through memories, memories of TK being tiny and me being so tired and fearful and confused by new motherhood; memories of hot days spent pushing TK and Little Brother through our new suburb, ten thousand miles from our old one, in a season that should be winter but was somehow summer. Newness drenching all the memories that, because of the arrival of new years, are now old, but can still hit me with the force of having just occurred.

Time is such a weird thing.

Our last night in Hawaii, I stood on our hotel balcony, twenty-one floors up, and saw the city to my left full of lights and the ocean to my right, dark yet full of its own life. It reminded me of summer nights on the beaches where I grew up, sitting on different balconies looking at an ocean of a different name that somehow still connected to this one. The days of our lives have been likened to sands in an hourglass, but I think of them more like water, passing by us yet never lost, connecting where we were then to where we are now. My newborn is now a wobbly-toothed seven year old; his brother so much more than an anxiety-filled hope enlarging my belly. That night as I sat on the balcony, they were feet away inside, their exhaustion giving way to sleep while mine gave way to frustration and irritation and, as usual, anxiety. It was time to return home, and my vantage point gave me views east and west. Two directions, two homes, with us in the middle.

Two directions. Two homes. Two years. Two kids, who, despite my shortness of temper and regretful outbursts, greet each day as though it’s brand new–which it is, but I of course forget–a shiny thing full of possibility. And last night, those faces bookended mine, with TH beside us, as the fireworks we’ve missed the last two years exploded right before us. Those two small but growing faces resembled TK’s one Fourth of July while LB was three months out from his first appearance: lingering smiles and eyes full of wonder. My own eyes collected tears at the true wonder of it all: how a place, and people, can be old and new at the same time–how all the best ones are, their history surpassed only by their promise. How grace keeps transferring us from one fireworks show or ocean or home to another, all of them still somehow connected.

If it’s possible to be self-aware to a fault, I would like to raise my hand for candidacy as president of that club. All my life I have worried, fretted, sweated over what people think of me; over how much space I’m taking up; over how I appear to the people around me. I’ve spent countless hours considering the impact of my words and actions on others (and, in an ironic twist, remaining completely oblivious in, doubtless, countless other situations).

Which is why this past hectic week has been such a gift to my fear-ravaged soul.

The boys each had their end of year/Christmas concerts with their schools: The Kid’s was an all-day affair last Thursday, beginning with a bus ride to a local school with a hired theatre where he and the rest of the students would perform both a matinee and evening performance of their choreographed and costumed dance, set to “The Final Countdown” by Europe. I remember running and spinning to this song in a past life, constant awareness of my “form” and endurance and energy level plaguing the course. This time, though, there was only him: TK blasting, as usual, through our expectations and crushing it onstage. His grin lit up the room. There were tears–and not just on my face. I sat by his kindy teacher from last year for both performances, and she brought her daughter–who had helped out last year–along. “I just love James,” the daughter told me, and the three of us matched TK’s grin as we watched him dance across that motherfucking stage like he owned it alongside his classmates. He was lit up like a Christmas tree by that incomparable smile of his, wobbly front tooth and all (though the sequins on his costume didn’t hurt either).

At the evening performance, his teacher brought him to me a couple of songs before they went on–apparently he’d gotten upset when he couldn’t locate us in the crowd–and I sat with him on the floor as we awaited his class’s turn. When that turn came, I returned to my seat beside his kindy teacher and waited. We wondered if he’d pull it off again, given the emotional obstacle he’d just endured and the exhaustion of such a full day. Then we watched–and embraced each other as he gave another knockout performance. He was rewarded with Oreo ice cream and an early exit to head home, where, after we put them to bed, a thought popped unbidden into my head: how boring it must be to have a “normal” child…

Enter Little Brother for his Monday morning preschool performance. He tossed his “shy/excited” smile across at The Husband and me, along with some exuberant waves, and launched into what can only be described as World’s Most Enthusiastic Performance. There was stomping, waving, dancing, grinning, singing. “We Mish You a Merry Christmas” was a highlight. Getting so many words wrong, so wonderfully, as he does (for example: sharp for him is shark–because, DUH, shark teeth are sharp). He bounced back to us afterward, red-faced and joyful and undeniably pleased with himself.

And I realised I don’t have “normal”–I have neurodivergent and neurotypical, but I also have quirky, for both, in spades. I have a wonderful lack of self-consciousness doubled and modelled to me. I have freedom times two, walking through the world, personified.

This is healing. It’s annoying, because it means my toes are constantly stepped on and my boobs constantly run into, but it is healing.

I have heat at Christmas time–have I mentioned that at all?–but, stepping out into it from LB’s concert, I have a counter-intuitive lightness along with the sweat and sun because I have a boy playing in that heat in his sunhat with his friends who bids me goodbye with a kiss and wave because he knows he is loved. I have a boy who waits for me as I take LB into his preschool and who, when I return to the car to take him to school, has left a map on my phone because he’s been traveling while I was gone. “Where have you been today?” I ask him, and see that this morning we get to talk about Italy, where–he already knows because he’s checked–they drive on the right side of the road. This is who they are, these unhurried souls who tell me things like “M’s my therapist because I have an apple brain” and “H’s feet are bigger than mine because he’s older,” without any, as yet, worry or concern about differences. How, exactly, do I bottle and extend and absorb that, please?

Before we left America, on our last Sunday before Christmas Sunday, our pastor-friend gave a sermon about the angel visiting Mary. The most outrageous thing that angel said? “Do not fear.” Then he named us, those sitting there that day, he named us knowing the things that we’re afraid of. I wept as he told us not to fear, knowing Sydney and goodbyes were on the horizon. But not yet knowing that concerts full of joy were too.

When we were in Tasmania a couple of months ago we entered a room in the museum that people were queued up for. A gradual approach revealed that it contained an interactive art installation–participants placed a mask over their faces and threw a china plate at a wall, allowing it to shatter and fall into a bin below.

I hesitated. There were people in line–they’d be watching. What if I did it wrong? What if I looked like a weirdo?

The desire to shatter dinnerware trumped the (ridiculous and impossible) possibility of “getting it wrong.” I popped the mask on and threw and heard the satisfying shatter. And my boys watched, cheering me on.

Yesterday I was tired and sore and sweaty after a marathon Monday, and when the boys and I stumbled in at 6 pm all I wanted was a shower. So, while our takeaway dinner sat on the counter and they played with cars on the floor, I absconded to my bathroom and jumped into the lukewarm water. Because–and I may not have mentioned this–for all our new house does have, it does not contain a single bathtub. So I stood–STOOD!–and let the water run over me. Soon enough, naturally, I heard my name yelled out, followed by one set of feet running toward me. LB spotted me in the shower and, in a flash, was naked, climbing in with me. A minute later, in came TK–same protocol. I remained there, the pain of being a woman radiating through my lower back and abdomen and legs, as these two creatures stood beside me, unabashedly hogging the water and unselfconsciously naked beside their mom. This is probably inappropriate, I thought. And I don’t give a shit. “HOTTER!” screeched TK, and the water kept flowing, running down the three of us like a baptism.

Yesterday was The Kid’s birthday, capping off a ten-day celebration that started on the 1st and would, were he to choose, still be going on. He woke up to balloons scattered throughout his and Little Brother’s room–both of them bounding up the stairs to announce, “Guess what?! There are balloons all over our room!” (yes, just like every year)–and a donut breakfast replete with Cars candle. I took more of those donuts in at the close of the school day and his class sang happy birthday to him while he grinned so hard I think his face stretched a bit.

We went to therapy afterward, because what kid doesn’t want that for their birthday, where we heard that he’s progressing so well that his sessions will be scaled back considerably next year, as will his school shadowing. Then we came home to a takeaway dinner with Oreo mousse dessert included. He fell asleep upon a pillow of questions as usual.

Meanwhile, I headed upstairs feeling like a Grade A asshole as usual.

It’s a broken record that I keep playing anyway: I want to be more patient. I want to answer questions enthusiastically and winsomely and in a way that encourages their curiosity. I want to stop, when they ask questions, picturing that kid at the beginning of Home Alone who follows the van driver around with queries until he’s told to get lost. I want to stop saying “because that’s the way it works.”

Christmas edition: I want to slow down. I want to stop transforming what should be a season of rest into a season of constant doing, or at least stop buying into a culture that does that. I want to stop turning everything–including viewing my favourite holiday movies–into a To Do List. I want to be still.

Meanwhile, the dining room table is covered with chocolate and cookies and Christmas cards that I will stand over TK and beg him to sign so that people will feel appreciated, dammit.

I remember one winter in New York, when I trudged up the steps near 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue toward Tudor City and the preschool there, where I was due to give a talk about teeth to the kids. Once I emerged on level ground, I saw the snow that had been my nemesis on the stairs–but here it was carpet, perfect and white and still falling in flakes. It felt like I’d been given a glimpse into a dream, into a scene to which I alone was privy in this moment. It was quiet, still, magical. Another world.

I want to see Christmas like that. But it’s SO HOT HERE.

And this is the deal–this weighing of the demands and realities of life, this day-after-the-birthday depression alongside beginning-of-Advent joy. The difference between complaining and recognising–recognising that it sucks that I won’t see my parents and sister this Christmas for the first time in years. That I won’t laugh with my cousins when the uncles make wonderfully inappropriate jokes. That I won’t see the marathon of A Christmas Story on TBS.

Unless they show it in Hawaii, of course. Because that is where I’ll be–poor little me–alongside my three male companions. It’s not a shitty deal, but it’s also not everything. I’m allowing myself a little space for the parts that are missing.

This morning my run was short. Because heat. But instead of turning around, I kept walking: over the bridge, down the stairs, and through the woods (“bush” here) to a private beach at the beginning of a hiking trail. I stood in front of the water, looking out for snakes, and felt it–what I had felt in Tudor City, but now years later and dozens of degrees warmer–the sense that I had been brought here. Led here by a love, a grace, that wanted to get me alone to show me something. To show me the magic that can happen in snowstorms and on beaches, in New York and in Australia, after Christmas and during Advent. The magic that has a name–Grace–that leads, and carries, us through hospitals and diagnoses and heat and cold and birthdays and day-after-birthdays and Christmas Day and Boxing Day and across bridges and past snakes (I assume they were there, hiding) and through days in which we are assholes and days in which we are…smaller assholes?…and through everything to moments like this: scenes of stillness and quiet, Nativities and the like, where we are singled out and loved and reminded that it’s not about the cards we make or the surprises we pull off or us at all, really. Advent is bigger, because grace is.

Anne Lamott writes, “This is how most of us are–stripped down to the bone, living along a thin sliver of what we can bear and control, until life or a friend or disaster nudges us into baby steps of expansion. We’re all both irritating and a comfort, our insides both hard and gentle, our hearts both atrophied and pure.” I’ll try to remember this tonight when the kids ask me a hundred questions starting with “Why?”–seriously, sometimes they sit on the toilet and just say “Why” and don’t even have a question prepared; I think they like saying it for the hell of it–and I struggle to maintain my sanity. I’ll remember what my friend CR said, that one of her Advent words is expansion, and that my kids sure do love to expand me–always have–and, mercifully, so does grace, which holds them and me both.

I should have known to turn around–and part of me did at least, as I watched car after car head the wrong way down the one-way slip near our house. One of them even approached me with a lowered window in the driving rain, its owner attempting to say something as I angrily drove past all the people breaking the rules on this dreary morning.

As we approached the curve ahead, the water’s depth grew, and I finally saw what was redirecting traffic: a fallen tree at the top of the hill. I pointed it out to the boys, who responded with approximately seven thousand questions (most beginning with Why), and turned around myself. That day would go on to be one of the stormiest in Sydney’s recent history, with mass erosion on the beachfronts and flooding of businesses and homes.

And the thing is, we could see it coming. The weather reports didn’t forget to warn us, didn’t neglect to recognise that a storm was on its way. There are just some times when preparations are in vain, when you can’t do anything until after the storm hits.

This blog used to be graced by a header photo of me and a nearly-two-year-old version of The Kid, sitting on the beach in Seaside, Florida, he with his characteristic pre-surgical head tilt and I with a beer on the other side of me. We were facing the water, its waves lapping before us, while a collection of dark grey clouds loomed above and ahead of us. I took it a bit literally, knowing as I did that TK’s surgery was approaching and that he should really be talking by then. I hoped those clouds didn’t include another chemical pregnancy and setback to our hoped-for-family of four. My second grandmother had just passed away, and those clouds carried grief within their billows. On the beach that day, though, all we could do was wait: wait for the storm to hit, then pass.

This year in Sydney has been more of Real Life. Gone was the idyllic kindergarten year for TK, with its constant triumphs and perfect teacher. His treasured therapist moved on, and we approached his Year One hesitantly. So much change, again. The year brought teacher woes but, still, victories. Another wonderful therapist. Some exclusions, as is typical with age, but new friends in his circle as well. New ones in mine too, more Fridays full of playdates and champagnes, more hangovers and wondering over drinking habits, more weight gained as comfort grew. A new church after a sabbatical. Another new house, dammit.

We’re rounding the corner on our second year here, approaching our third, and besides the house, we’ve capped it off in our traditional way, with LB’s and TK’s birthday parties. TK’s was this past weekend, in the house we just left: empty of furniture but full of people; a bounce house out front and water games in the back and beer and bubbles inside. This year has both flown by and felt like a marathon. It’s had more cloudy days, metaphorically speaking, but deeper and fuller ones. More serious talks over the wine glasses–but serious talks are my favourite kind–the ones that hold both laughter and tears are really the only ones worth having, I think.

I didn’t see TK or LB for most of the party–they were busy running around with their friends. Last year, when everyone started singing to TK, he hilariously ran around the corner to avoid the attention. This time, he merely covered his face partially with his arm, not enough, though, to hide the grin that stretched across his features. He clung to me, but loosely. He has come so fucking far.

I’m in awe of this boy who has undergone multiple knives, countless waiting rooms, MRI machines and offices; who has moved across the world and through three houses, who sees the world through lenses I’ll never fully have and deals with obstacles I’ll never fully understand and rises to meet every challenge in ways I’ll never fully know. I’m in awe of his brother, who waits patiently for his brother in waiting rooms and cars, who repeats himself when TK doesn’t hear him the first time and asks TK to repeat himself when he doesn’t understand (“I don’t know what you’re saying, buddy”), who cracks jokes with an ability beyond his years. I’m in awe of their dad, whom they recently have taken to calling Jason, and how he’s led us, because of his hard work and irreplacability, to this new home, to three houses, each better in some way than the last, to views I never imagined. I’m in awe of the grace that has been in charge the whole time, grey clouds and sun, storms and their aftermaths.

I’m tired because we just moved and because my stomach is cramping with a virus TK likely passed onto me. I’m emotional because it’s the Christmas season and with the hot weather here, I’m playing carols nonstop to make me remember. I’m reflective because it’s the end of another year here–another year away from family and so many friends, and another year embedded among more friends. Also, I have to pee and I’m holding it in, and I’m trying to avoid unpacking. There’s a lot going on.

On TK’s trip to the art gallery a few weeks ago, I was drawn to a colourful painting and read the card beside it, which described the artist’s “theory of colour harmonisation based on analogies between colours of the spectrum and notes of the musical scale.” Which, to me, is a fancy way of saying that there harmony exists because of the differences–in colours, in notes, in people–not in spite of them. Spectrum is obviously a fraught word for me but I often forget how there are so many different examples of it around us. As one of my favourite, yet somehow also strangely terrible in hindsight, Christmas movies might say (paraphrase): spectrums actually are all around us.

This is good news for me as I slow to a walk, stomach cramping, around the harbour behind our (new, again) house and see some clouds gathering to the west. There could be a storm coming: in my bathroom? In the sky? In life? But once you emerge on the other side of enough storms, you develop this weird ability…to see past them.

This year, we will celebrate Thanksgiving by moving.

Specifically, on Thursday, packers will enter our home and start boxing up our possessions. There will be no turkey in the oven; by the end of the day there won’t even be forks with which to eat. We’ll spend the next few days in the in-between, split between two houses much like we’re already split between two countries. We’ll dine on takeaway and pull our clothes out of suitcases, and I’ll grow increasingly anxious and unsettled, and we’ll get a key over the weekend to start hauling some stuff over, and then on Monday–traditionally the busiest (and usually the worst) day of the week–movers will load up their truck with all those boxes and take them to our new location.

Except they aren’t called movers here. They’re called removalists. Which is apt, I think, being that what they do is remove things from your home. Unpacking those things and making their new environment a home? That’s up to us.

And we’ve done that here, twice. Two houses, each holding our family for a year. Each with its own view and features and advantages and disadvantages. I rejected this new house the first time I saw it, The Kid and Little Brother in tow, because I couldn’t see us there. Another house was higher on my list, a smaller and more traditional (less modern) one, with a turquoise backsplash that reminded me of our Atlanta home. I clung to that detail while this new, polished, marble-filled house imposed before me. I looked at the bidet and the sharp-edged stairs and the (I KNOW) indoor pool and shook my head. Didn’t suit us. Weeks later and still without options, The Husband and I took another look. This time, it suited us. Funny how things change.

And now, I’m imagining us there. I’m browsing rugs on the internet and placing wall hangings in my mind. I’m arranging furniture and envisioning dinners with friends. This morning, I took a hike.

After dropping LB and then TK off at school, I hoofed it to the new house to map out the walk from TK’s school. On the way there, I saw a path with a sign marking its entrance: path to beach. A few minutes later, I found myself on a tiny beach in front of a harbour full of boats. I gazed across at the restaurants we’ve already frequented, a short walk away. I gazed upward and saw our new house on the hill. I imagined the four of us on this beach, swimming and building castles. Right below our house. Suddenly moving didn’t seem so burdensome.

I miss turkey. I miss the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Westminster Dog Show. I miss wine on the couch with my sister and sarcastic comments from my dad and letting my mom clean everything up (kidding. Or not.). I miss the temperature dropping and Christmas creeping in, slowly, until the day after Thanksgiving when it barges through completely. I miss shorter days and dark, sacred nights around the holidays. I miss not moving every year. New is hard, worrisome, and often defeating.

But maybe I need to be defeated, annually it seems? Because there is also this: TK delivering speeches to his class. LB showing me rugby moves. TK’s therapists telling me they’ll be fading out of school completely in the next year. LB singing me songs from the toilet. Both of them running off to join their friends at school and birthday parties and on beaches. There is this picking up–this removal–and dropping back down to somewhere different, where new life is to be found. Life I would never have sought out of my own, as I like to stay still thank you very much.

The other day I was walking home (to our current one, anyway) after a different hike. I spotted a snake in the tree in front of the house and snapped a quick photo of it, then ran inside to tell TH. He spent the next few minutes on his phone, researching the type and danger of the animal. Turned out it could either be very poisonous or completely safe, based on some colouring patterns that we weren’t willing to venture close enough to the creature to see. Over the next few days, the snake continued to hang in the tree, unmoving. We reasoned that it had died there. But not other creatures came to pick at its remains. Could it be…? A few days later, I noticed it lying on the ground in exactly the same position it had been in the tree. Plastic. The damn thing was a toy. It had been harmless the whole time.

Much of what I’ve feared in life, what I’ve obsessed over and worried about, has been, in the end, harmless. Some of it has not. In this case, TH simply tossed the thing into the trash with all of the others things we’re letting go of as we re-move yet again to a new view, together.

Little Brother has been performing, for weeks, a song he’s learned at preschool (fun fact: according to him, the literal translation of “preschool” is “the place where you throw dirt”). Due to LB’s…shall we say, reinterpretation of many words, I’m not sure if these are the exact lyrics, but the song goes something like this:

In upsy-down town, the sky is in the sea
The rabbit’s in the nest where the bird should be
The rain is going up instead of falling down
Down in upsy-down town.
There’s a chocolate cake as white as snow
And the more you eat it the bigger it grows
You walk up on your nose, you stand up on your toes
Down in upsy-down town.

Most days I feel like I live in upsy-down town.

Navigating life alongside a kid with superpowers/special needs has been described many ways: as Holland replacing Italy, as a marathon rather than a sprint. For me, one of the defining features of it (besides getting tagged on Facebook ad nauseum when people could have just sent me the damn link in a private email thanks) has been the steps forward, steps back, steps forward pattern that, only years in, is realised to be a dance. The movements start out erratic and unpredictable at first, uncertainty reigning, and then time goes on to reveal a rhythm not initially noticed, a pattern among the pattern-less seeming days, and beauty sets in. Brutal, terrific beauty.

Example: I can no longer count on Mondays to be awful.

Last year, The Kid’s teacher was simply wonderful. On report cards she discussed his weaknesses, praised his strengths, and told us (and others) what a gift he was to the class. She credited him with bonding the kids together. I accepted the compliment on his behalf and basked in its glow.

This year, we haven’t been as lucky. At least, not at first. But as situations have developed and meetings have been called and battles have been fought (I am especially handy in war departments; see my LinkedIn profile), other teachers have been added to the mix and what started with gritted teeth and reports has led to a now-growing list of People Who Know Him and Love Him, like the teacher who stopped me on Monday morning, as I was about to lose it over TK’s distracted focus on his hangnail rather than my instructions to change his reader. She simply said, “He is such a wonderful boy. You know what? He’s going to be such a beautiful adult. He will do so well.” A few minutes later, I spoke with the teacher who was in his class last Friday, who told me how social he is (!), and how much he loves interacting with his friends.

Monday mornings have typically been the locale for birdshit falling from the sky, tearful fights, and regrets to be apologised for later. Now they’re flipped upsy-down.

And there’s the birthday party thing. Long ago, I accepted (so willingly and graciously, I might add, and not with any resentment) that, as other parents began dropping their kids off for these affairs, I’d likely be remaining at the scene for years to come. So far, so true. But whereas in years past, when I’d follow TK around the perimeter of the location and silently plead for him to join the group, now he stays close to me for a few minutes before he either jumps in himself or is led by a mate. This past weekend, the party was at an indoor gym set up with activity stations: rope swings, monkey bars, etc. He lined up with everyone else as I hastily approached one of the helpers, telling her he may need some extra help, and I watched as he took his turn at each station, held by the helper at most and smiling through it. He came up to me afterward, red-faced and sweaty, saying, “I’m so TIRED. I’m really fit though.”

But he does still cover perimeters. Last week we were at LB’s touch rugby practice and TK came up to me beforehand. “I’m going to run twice around the oval,” he announced, and I told him to go for it even as I thought that I’d believe it when I saw it. As he circled one loop, I waved at him. “Want to come back?” I called. “I said TWICE!” he shouted back, covering the not-insignificant distance one more time before returning to me and my thought that we may have a cross-country runner on our hands–this boy who took what felt like forever (seventeen months) to walk.

On that afternoon, and at the birthday party, I thought of all the ground we’ve covered to get here, to this place where our 10 still often looks like others’ 5 (but don’t let that fool you; now he’s often finishing his worksheets first in class without help which is weirdly not a skill that is acknowledged at social and sporting events). To this place where he is forcing the Me I would have been out of the way in service of the creation of a better Me: a Me who can’t rely on being the person who has all her ducks in a row (it’s hard to line them up when one of the ducks doesn’t speak until he’s four); the Me who thought underdogs were just cute until their songs became our anthems; who gets that the track “Popular” from Wicked is satire rather than instruction manual; who would rather stay in the lane with all the Differents rather than be in the one who audition playdates for their kids (yeah that’s a thing). I know now that life can amount to keeping a list of rules–of How to Fit In, of How to Maintain an Image, of How to Not Rock the Boat–that end up amounting to BS and untold wasted years.

I know that it took awhile to get here and mean it, but that I’m okay in Upsy-Down Town. Especially when it has a bakery where I take him every Monday, before that string of therapy visits that could be (and often are) trying and long but also wonderful and ground-breaking, and when he walks up to the counter and orders and hands over the coins like I taught him, the server tells him, “You’re a lucky boy.” And I know that it’s true.

Last week when I was writing I had a singular purpose, narrowed into place by anger and endorphins and all the other things I mentioned. This week my rough edges feel a bit sanded down, by different things. I have been humbled (and not in the way that word is typically misused to mean humiliated, or #humbled to have reached a million Instagram followers. Ugh).

I think singleness of purpose can be great. It can be helpful in a season of needing to get shit done, of being focused and attentive. But more often I find myself in the land between What’s Definitely Right and What’s Obviously Wrong, in a territory where people are more than one-dimensional Disney characters (circa the 90s; they’ve upped their game recently), where there is more of the story to be played out than my current scene. This can be annoying, as I’m often ready for the play to be over so I can meet everyone at the bar.

This in-between place is akin to feeling adrift, not fully anchored–say, to a house to live in, or a desired outcome regarding a school situation, or…my sanity. It involves more tension, more floating and finding, a bit more nausea due to all the rocking. It involves iffy moments between friends, meeting conflict with them and biting your lip until you reach the other side, together and stronger for it, but damn that part before the other side was awkward, wasn’t it? It involves more terse conversations over the kids’ heads. It involves more meetings and more letting go of what people think (not my strongest suit).

But the company out here can’t be beat. So there’s that.

Lately (by which I mean his whole life), The Kid has had trouble articulating himself when he’s angry or anxious (wonder where he gets that sense of frustration from…). He will wave his arms about wildly as if they’ll do the talking for him when, more often than not, they’ll collide with me instead, and reader, listen when I tell you that THIS PUSHES ALL THE BUTTONS I NEVER EVEN KNEW I HAD. There is material there that has so much less to do with him and so much with my own past, of being treated roughly or misunderstood or met with physical responses to an emotional issue, and I could get counselling on that for the rest of my life and still show up to heaven’s gates mid-therapy. So the other day, when I was trying to get him to change his reader before school and he responded with The Wave, as we’ll call it, I felt like something snapped. I asked him if he would like it if I hit him when I was mad, and I immediately wanted to die and come back to life as The Mother Who Never Loses Her Temper (Fairy-Tale Edition because that shit ain’t real) and erase the whole morning and start over or maybe just skip it and go straight to dinner. No, bed. I was humbled by my own constant inability to be who I want to be, my constant mistake-making, my constant repertoire of regrets that lies waiting for me just outside the school gates when I’ve left the kids for the day and finally have some mental space…to recount all the awful things I feel I’ve done.

I pulled him aside minutes later to have a Talk, and to apologise, and he told me to stop apologising because I already had. I told him I felt horrible. He said, “You’re not horrible,” which was less a reflection of generosity and more a reflection of his desire to go play with his friends. I beat myself up about it all day.

That night, in bed with him and Little Brother, I apologised again. LB recommended a solution: “How about we just don’t make any more mistakes?” I laughed, ruefully. “That would be nice,” I began. “But I think we will anyway. What we need is forgiveness.”

Which is inconvenient, because I’m not good at forgiving myself or others. I’m not good at being in that place between shores, where feelings are a bit icky and there’s too much uncertainty and I’m not fully Home yet, in whatever sense of the word I’m currently using.

Yesterday I went on a friend’s boat though, and while there was rocking, there was also the kind of view you can’t have from the shore–the kind where there’s water all around, and conversation, and moments you just don’t have on dry land and within its certainty. There was movement, and healing, and, though it felt like we were adrift, there was also an anchor–you just couldn’t see it.

And this morning, LB was playing with TK, and he turned to me and said, “Mommy, I just want a cuddle. James–I’m going to get a quick cuddle.” He interrupted his play to come over to me and bury himself within my chest for a hug, then went back to playing. It made me think of how movement from place to place always gets us to where we need to be. That the depths we travel, of water and feelings, when we are adrift, they can be so uncomfortable but so full, and if I don’t face those depths–the depths of my own sadness, and frustration, and mistakes, and also love–that I’ll never meet the depth of love that meets me in return, upon my return, stepping onto shore once again, for now, until the next trip.