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When Jason and I dated, we bonded over a variety of shared interests, but our favorites were the holy trinity of tapas, Jesus, and camp horror. The two of us were among the dozen viewers who kept Harper’s Island on the air for an entire season. (He figured out who the killer was by the second episode, thus cementing his status as the Smart One in our smart ’n sassy combo.) We shared nightmares over The Strangers. (Okay, I had the nightmares and he listened to me complain about them. Don’t nobody kill Ben Covington on my watch!) And when I heard whispers of a show called American Horror Story, which was premiering just a few months after our wedding — and a few weeks after I found out I was pregnant — I emailed him trailers and we set our DVR.
WARNING: This post brought to you by persisting anger over a shitty American president and an abusive Australian teacher, endorphins, high-idling baseline anxiety levels, and a running soundtrack that includes songs like the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” What I’m saying is that, today, I’m here to chew gum and kick ass, and guess what? I’M ALL OUT OF GUM, BITCHES.
There are only a few weeks left.
This is what I keep hearing: from kids, from parents, from myself, even, as we approach the end of The Kid’s first-grade year. It’s been a hell of a year, too, in all the ways. He’s grown more independent, which means I’m off the hook for everything from poo accidents to pulling teeth (#usedtobeadentist). His language has skyrocketed in both amount and articulation. He’s made and kept friends. He’s kicked ass.
He’s also had a teacher that has been angry, abusive, and awful at most every turn, and much like the Dixie Chicks, I’m not ready to make nice anymore. I’m so over this that I’ve gone back under it, around the block, and past it again. I’ve hinted around, I’ve tried tact, I’ve stayed calm (for me). But this morning on my run, I remembered the wise words of Sean Connery of SNL‘s “Celebrity Jeopardy”:
I’ve got a pen(is) and I’m prepared to use it. As The Husband would say (when he’s trying not to call me a b*tch), I’m Fired Up.
Some background.
Recently over Voxer, where I speak my love language (outrage with an underpinning of heart), I was talking to a friend about having the kind of kids that are considered “different.” See also: “special.” “Challenged.” Any number of words that are meant to soften the “blow” that is the hand some have been dealt. And what a blow, what a hand, it can be–there’s no denying that. She and I have spent countless hours in waiting rooms, under lead aprons next to X-ray machines, holding our children down on tables, fighting for them at schools, crying over them in bed. We’ve stood on the edges of birthday parties and social gatherings wondering if it will ever get better or if the perimeter is where we should look for long-term real estate. We’ve fretted and feared and burned with pain and righteous (and unrighteous) anger. We have felt, and damn, can that hurt.
We’ve also laughed. Oh my, how we’ve laughed. We’ve pounded wine–not enough, too much, and just the right amount. We’ve held hands and jumped for joy. We’ve done victory dances. We’ve let our jaws drop in wonder. We’ve shaken our heads in disbelief. And oh, have we felt.
We’ve felt it all: the bridge between the way things are and the way they could and should be; the gulf between Same and Different. We are travellers who never stop moving. We are tired and weak and strong and able. We’re all the things, because we’ve had to be. And yet we’re never enough, which constantly both confounds us and sends us to a power outside ourselves, a deeper mercy and a bigger grace than we have within us. We fail miserably and win stunningly. And oh, how we love. But even more: oh, how we are loved. By that deeper mercy and bigger grace, which we forget about all the time but which still manages to lead us home every moment.
We are not the kind who can say, with conviction, “It’s just a few more weeks!” because, as advocates who have been through it, we know that injustice of any kind, that mistreatment of any kind, is not something to be shrugged off and tolerated, but fought. And we? We fight. We fight because we were put here–in a place we never would have had the bravery to choose ourselves–and we know that shrugging is no longer in our DNA. It’s been erased along with the passivity and lack of identity that plagued us before. We’re so done with that.
And yet…
(I’ll switch to “I” here)–
I’ve been left in a wonderfully awkward position. Because I love every person reading these words. Every person who disagrees with my politics. Every person who supports the abusive teacher or the shitty president, and this is why: because I’ve been there. I’ve been on every side of it. (Travelling will do that to a person.) I’ve been the one who wanted to fly under the radar, who wanted to take up arms for protection, who laughed off inappropriate comments, who questioned whether what they were doing with her kid was right but didn’t want to offend. I don’t have the luxury of a high horse (which I hate, because I would look so majestic on one, especially with a tiara) given that the primary agent of grace in my life rode into a city on a donkey (I would ask for an upgrade to at least Lil Sebastian). It’s so annoying, how I still have to love people.
Last week at the zoo, in between his teacher kicking students and stepping on their fingers and screaming at them, I tried to stick with TK and his group. I’d lose him momentarily and look behind me, searching for his face. Unfailingly, it wasn’t there. I would turn back around, look ahead. He used to be the one on the perimeter, at the back. Now? Unfailingly, he was ahead. Always ahead, and in the mix.
We will always be different. We are destined to be. That’s no longer the curse I thought it was. Because here’s the deal that goes along with that: I will fight for my child, and for yours–whether you want me to or not. I will pray for mine, and yours–whether you ask me to or not. I will laugh and cry and dance and feel harder than I ever did before I accepted that different is our lot. Because the difference–along with all the other ones that define us–is that now, I’m finally someone I would want on my own side.
Monday I hopped into the car with the boys after our usual weekday back-and-forth fighting and existential angst-ridden morning. They alternately blabbed and went quiet in the backseat, and the classical music station that The Husband loathes–the one I would like to glue into place on our dial because it is my sanity–began playing a familiar tune. As we turned from our street now onto the street where we used to live, the notes went from tumbling around my head to organising themselves into “God Bless America.” In between questions shot from the backseat about why we have a Hyundai Tucson and what would happen to the power lines if there were an earthquake, I tried to hear what the DJ (do they call it that on a classical station?) said about the musician who performed the song–how he was an Australian who moved to America by way of England and fell in love with the US.
I thought of how our journey as a family has been the reverse path: how we were at home in America, then considered moving to England, but instead landed in Sydney and proceeded to fall in love with it. I thought about this as the questions pelted my rapidly-shrinking head space and pangs of homesickness bounced around my insides, missing one place while loving another, feeling always-in-between homes. I thought about it as I felt the urgency to check realestate.com.au one more time (for the hundredth time) that morning, as I debated over the house we may have settled on, as I wondered when or if we’d ever stop moving. I thought about it as Little Brother cried from the front seat about wanting to go to Mommy School today, not preschool, and The Kid told him, “WILL. STOP IT. YOU HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL.”
I was a bit of a Monday morning.
That LB, the one who needs coaxing back into the old routine after a holiday, who needs a morning filled with cuddles on the couch and oh-so-much attention, his birthday party was this weekend and while I agonised over the thunderstorms that were predicted and how they’d affect our planned event in the park, I tried to focus on celebrating him. It’s not hard to do: he is celebrate-able, you might say, with his knowing grins and easy excitement, with his utterances implying his assurance of his own identity the day before: “I’m going to James’s class with him at church today so I can protect him.” The morning of his party he kept clapping his hands together in exultation: “I’m so excited for my birthday!” This one walks through the world with an air of confidence, an absence of self-consciousness, and this comes to his own language as well. While TK constantly assesses our individual linguistic patterns–TH and I speak/are American, while he and LB are/speak both British and Australian–LB, well, he just speaks. Often incorrectly, which is somehow better than correctly, because it brings us words like payooter (computer) and Dark Mader, and, most recently, hilarious.
Yes, LB has reclaimed and renamed hilarious for us. A few years ago, Louis CK tried to with a bit that TH and I had practically memorised about how the word is overused and incorrectly applied (it was funnier when he did it), but lately, in the wake of allegations admitted as truth, that bit (or its author, at least) has become less quotable. So LB stepped in and decided that hilarious meant something different altogether. Somehow he came to associate it with negativity, throwing around proclamations like, “I don’t want to go to the doctor. It’s HILARIOUS there!” or “You said we could go to the mall. That’s not fair–you’re HILARIOUS!” Fittingly, it was hilarious–these unknown-to-him misreadings, his attempted insults that landed instead as jokes as he grew more enraged while we laughed. Even after I explained it all to him, he kept doing it. So we kept laughing.
And last night, TK leaned in after I asked for a cuddle, and he assessed our language again: “Cuddles is Australian for kisses,” he said, and I thought about correcting him until I realised I like his definition better, so I planted one on him–his cuddle.
It made me think of all the words we use to define what we know, and to try to pin down what we don’t, and how sometimes they’re just…wrong. Or not enough. How you can live in a country that is both foreign yet familiar. How a home cannot, for us right now, be captured by a house, because we keep getting kicked out of them after a year’s time anyway, but also–and this is such a big part of what the last two years have been for us–home is where the four of us are: in rentals, in hotel rooms, at tables in the twilight piled with pizzas and bottles of wine. No, make that five of us, because grace is right there with us, whether you call it that or spirit or God or love or whatever word you use, the four of us walking within its eternal fifth presence, always somehow heading and being home.
The boys have taken to an expression lately: “when I was a baby.” You know, once they utter this, that whatever comes next is going to be at best revisionist history and, most likely, complete BS. Recent examples:
“When I was a baby, I didn’t have watches.”
“When I was a baby, I didn’t like Transformers.”
“When I was a baby, I couldn’t run fast.”
Okay, so these things are all true, but as the boys tell them, they’re meant to convey how far they’ve come. “Baby,” of course, is a term meaning anything they want it to: last year, or before they were even born. It’s history, is what I’m saying, and they’re the ones writing it based on what they know now.
Meanwhile, I look back with my somewhat faulty yet still more complete memory and can see a sweeping vista of both change and sameness.
Mine might go like this:
“When I was a baby, I moved to New York and finally grew up. And met your dad.”
“When I was a baby, I didn’t know how to stand up for myself so I let people walk all over me. Now I have BOUNDARIES. And swearing.”
“When I was a baby, I could stay awake until 4 am and not be hungover the next day.”
“When I was a baby, I voted straight-ticket Republican and thought I couldn’t be safe without a gun.”
“When I was a baby, I thought that everything–including people–was either one of two things: black or white, right or wrong–and didn’t let anything transcend that.”
Last week, the second and final of school holidays before summer, the four of us flew to Tasmania. Hobart, specifically, and as we walked around its streets and gazed upon the sea, I thought about how a few years ago–when I was a baby–if you had told me I’d spend the better part of a week exploring this island off continental Australia, I would have asked for a paper bag in which to hyperventilate. (I didn’t even know until way too recently that Tasmania is actually an Australian state.)
But there we were, even deeper into the Southern hemisphere than usual, ambling around cobblestone streets and alleyways, exploring shut-down prisons and insane asylums, boating to museums, driving up mountains, and ferrying in our car to an even smaller island to eat cheese and drink beer. We have been evacuated/ejected/moved/sent to corners of the world we didn’t even know existed back when we were babies, and there is something devastatingly wonderful about all this. How easily it could have been avoided, rejected, missed. How beautiful that it wasn’t.
On that island, after a lunch of cheese, bread, and more cheese, we drove to what they call the island’s neck. Our family has a deep familiarity with necks, so it felt only fitting that we pulled the car over here and looked around at a spot, the thinnest on the island, where on one side were the calm, smooth waters of a bay and on the other, the churning, slapping waves of the Tasman Sea. An array of colours, all within the blue-green range yet more than that, one side sparkling and the other frothing. Stuck between two totally different yet somehow similar places.
I don’t know, seemed apropos.
Later we celebrated The Husband’s birthday and Facebook sent me a video of our friendship, going back to when we were babies, and on to now: now, living on a huge island in the South Pacific, between homes in more ways than one, with two kids who are so different and so similar. Then, and now, with now always turning into then to be replaced by another now. And amidst it all, the wish that we’d uttered to each other–to someday live near the water–turning into a prayer so laughably and abundantly answered that there are oceans on all sides of us, all leading to this moment on a neck surrounded by water that, as I write this, is now a then.
And I look outside and still see water now.
It occurs to me that I’m quite awful at being in the Now, and that meditation is supposed to help this but I’m shit at that too, but that over the past few days I’ve woken before even the kids (thank you, weighted blanket) and haven’t pushed the wakefulness away like I did in that Tasmanian hotel bed but instead have embraced it, lying there in prayer and meditation and, hopefully, the Now. The moments that I complain are fleeting are that at least partially because I truncate them myself in search of the next one, always moving to get past rather than seeking to stay. To look around. To take in.
When I was a baby, I hardly ever did that. But now…and Now, I’d like to be here and try. Because Now feels holy.
The other morning I was rushing out the door to get a swim in at the local pool before my Holiday Schedule with the Boys began and we were immersed in therapy, hastily prepared lunches with small people barking orders at me, swim lessons, and too much screen time. I slid into my flip flops (thongs here, but that term could be confusing for the Americans among you) and stepped off our front porch. It was a rainy, grey day–like so many the past week–and the smooth steps beneath me were just slick enough to send my feet flying out from underneath me.
I haven’t fallen too much in my life. There was the time in junior high when I was rushing down another set of stairs at school and tumbled down a couple; it was enough of a spill to not be able to cover it up completely and a few people laughed. There was the time in ballet class at the same junior high when my pointe shoes had just the right amount of caked-up resin on them and I crumbled while doing a pirouette, kicking off months of fear heading into our spring performance that the event would repeat itself. And there was the time a few years ago when I was carrying Little Brother downstairs in the early-morning dark and I slid on the hardwood, sending us both to the floor in tears.
This most recent fall, like all of them really, took forever and an instant. My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but that scene in Million Dollar Baby did, and I helplessly thought to myself that this could be bad. Very bad. At the very least it could be a “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” situation culminating in an injury that aged me well past my, ahem, twenty-six years. Also, I wondered who might be watching, which was probably the scariest possibility.
That moment of suspension in between the beginning and end of a fall carries more than time allows; it holds the weights of expectation and fear, of pleading and prayer. What if I hit my head and got amnesia like the woman in that Liane Moriarty book–would I still have to make lunches? What if I broke a leg and couldn’t run anymore and depression set in, along with voluminous amounts of chocolate on my slowing-metabolism-twenty-six-year-old hips? What if I broke my hip and had to become more acquainted with Australia’s healthcare system than I’d planned? If there were pain pills involved, would I be able to drink wine with them?
Last week we went to the playground (#holidayschedulewiththeboys) and I let the kids loose. At first they stuck together, each grabbing a pair of handles hanging from the play structure and swinging to do their “exercises” together. Then LB caught sight of a boy his age. They hesitantly approached each other before running off together, fast friends. This is LB: outgoing and friend-acquiring, the lone extrovert in our quartet. Immediately, The Kid protested. Exhaustion and emotion got the best of him, and he yelled across the playground, “WEEEEE-ILLLL! WEEEE-ILLL! BE MY FRIEND! COME BACK!”
It was heart-wrenching, naturally. There I was, torn between the two of them and their separate and unique personalities, but totally empathising with TK: I’ve often been the one abandoned for other options, left too shy and fearful to do anything about it. I encouraged him to play with them anyway, knowing how hard it would be. He continued to melt down. Two other mothers approached and kindly asked if he was okay, if there was anything they could do. One was the mother of LB’s new friend and tried to get him to offer TK some food or a play. TK would have none of it, preferring to become a puddle of tears, exulting in his emotions, despairing over his lack of control (of his little brother).
I can so relate. This world and its people hardly ever do I what I want.
He remained on the ground beside me while my own emotions swirled: irritation, frustration, sadness, that special kind of despair that only a parent who’s wondering what to do can feel as she fears she is ruining her child’s life.
After a few minutes, he stopped crying. He looked up at LB and the new guy, and something switched. He got up, resolve now written across his face instead of tears, and joined them.
There are so many moments in their, and my, life, when I hang suspended between the before and after on that Ferris wheel. So much so that it feels like life is made up of only those moments, the in-between, the “during the fall” while the unknown permeates the air around me and I can only wait. I realise more now (as I enter my late twenties) than ever that the control I fooled myself into thinking I had when I was younger was always an illusion. It took kids, and the spectrum, and an across-the-world move, and a million other things (with some falls thrown in) to make me finally laugh (and cry) at the truth being revealed. I am always mid-air: waiting for a new house to move into, waiting for another milestone to be achieved, waiting to know we’ll all be okay.
Meanwhile, a grace beyond and within these mid-air moments, these forever falls, guides me both to and through them, and promises that whatever shape I land in, there is only one true home and I am always headed there.
Which can be just words when I’m dealing with a sore ass, but also more when I think of how I landed on the part of my anatomy that is best-padded, and that the glass water bottle that shattered within my bag was beside me, not underneath me, and that even if there had been blood and guts and gore, there would also have been grace. Just more pain pills along with it.
The rules of the game keep changing. But when I look more closely, when I actually grapple with life as it happens, I begin to strongly suspect that the rules don’t exist as I think they do, and it’s not a game–it’s more.
We found out yesterday that the owners of our house are moving back in, in two months’ time. Just like last year: different house, different owners, same scenario. Searching, packing, unpacking, adjusting. This is not what home is supposed to look like, is it? Sitting still momentarily in a place we don’t own, only to be thrust out after a few months?
Anxiety laps at my rough edges, threatening (as always) to undo me.
I found out yesterday, in the form of a text from The Husband, the one (but not The One) who brought us here in the first place, his texts emissaries from the true author of our story, upending the Known for the Unknown and whispering gifts at the same time that I was too anxious to hear until later. I was on the Ferris wheel with our boys, the second Ferris wheel in as many days, finding out about the second move in as many years, and it wasn’t lost on me, suspended as we were there over the water of the harbour, the bridge nearly close enough to touch, the Opera House practically beside it, these landmarks of our now-home dotting our view as we sat there, in motion yet still, helpless in the sky with an incomparable view: this is life.
I struggled to regain control. Anxiety works like this: always grab for control. I imagined our gondola free-falling into the water below; how would I secure our exit with steel bars blocking our way? On to more manageable things then: realestate.com.au. I resisted the urge to grab for the phone, the boys clambering over me. I tried to trust. It felt both Herculean and natural.
There is a moment now that wasn’t always there, but has been growing since I was a high schooler who, looking back on life, had finally realised that my constant surprise at grace always coming through for me might be more a reflection of my own distrustfulness than a verifiable slight on the nature of unconditional love. “Maybe I should just…trust from the beginning?” I thought then, imagining a life where that was possible, and how it would look. Less sweat, more peace. What a concept!
And now, at forty, at mid-life (ugh) if I’m lucky, I’m different and not. Similar yet changed. These upendings, these shock waves via text, they are somehow accompanied by an undercurrent of surety: as my New York roommate once said (when I found out I falsely owed ten grand in taxes), “this is not a surprise to God.” Grace remains unperturbed by the waves that rock my life, and so they don’t pummel me like they used to. The text came, and with it–before the urge to grasp at control–there was that assurance, that moment that used to not exist, that awareness: “Oh, this is going to be okay. This is part of our story. We are not suspended; we are held.” I sat there for a moment.
Then the Ferris wheel moved, as it always does, and the boys scattered, and I grabbed for the phone, but even in my grabbing and searching I knew, knew, that I wasn’t in control, and this somehow amounted to freedom. Oh, it sucks. Don’t get me wrong: it truly, truly BLOWS, the searching and packing and unpacking and unknown and adjustments, and when I think about it too much I want to simultaneously head for the bottle and barf. But. With all that is the almost giddy, insane certainty that this is not a game but a story. That we are ridiculously and lavishly loved. And that this changes everything.
So I both have to look at the real estate website…and I get to.
Last weekend we went to the Hunter Valley, New South Wales’s wine country, with the boys. Wine tasting is…different with children around. More bounce houses, less lingering sips. More laughter. A little of less, and a lot of more. Saturday morning, we went to the pool instead of champagne brunch, and I went underwater with The Kid. Under the surface, I “talked” to him, and he laughed. We tried to understand each others’ words. It was a level playing field for me, the one who’s been speaking for decades, and he, the one who still struggles to be understood. It’s not like we could breathe under there, but somehow we could speak. It was a new world, just one thin layer beneath the one we know. One where we were suspended, and held.
The next day we went into the city with friends to watch a live-action seizure-inducing PJ Masks show, and afterward the boys and I got turned around finding our car park. I felt anxiety lap at my rough edges, felt the rules shifting under my feet again: Why does this always happen to me, this getting lost over and over? Several blocks’ hike and one car spotted later, and a different question: Why don’t I question why it also happens to me, this always being found?
Every morning, he wakes me up with verbal dissertations on watches: where they’re made, whether they’re digital or analog, how expensive they are. He speaks as though he’s addressing a lecture hall, bursting with knowledge he can’t wait to share. I sleepily nod and mumble “Mmmhmm” at this wonder of a boy, this one I prayed and planned for who upended every one of those prayers and plans.
He and his brother are not what we imagined. They are more.
And this is the way it goes with grace: the expectation supplanted by something different that feels at first like subtraction; then there is not an exclusion that isn’t replaced by a better inclusion, something taken away that isn’t replaced by something infinitely better, either via the promise of One Day or the gift of Right Now.
There is a lot of Right Now right now.
At the beginning of this, the third of four terms in a school year that is flying by, The Kid brought home his News packet: a bundle of pages designating the weekly topic for speaking in front of his class. I flipped through it and saw, at the end, that they’d each be picking someone in their grade to identify via clues. I sighed. Who would he pick? More importantly, to my bleeding maternal heart, would anyone pick him? Included or excluded? Remembered or forgotten?
Last week, a dad approached me for a playdate. His daughter was insistent: James must come over. Maybe even spend the night? We decided to start with the two-hours-in-the-afternoon version of events, and that day I had a cup of tea with her parents then left as the kids went to to the park with the dad. As I was leaving, the mom told me: “She’s picked him for her News this week.” The next morning, at school, the girl asked me to lean in and she whispered, “I picked James for news.” They lined up moments later with their class, she behind him with her arms wrapped around him, he holding them in place. His therapist and I shared the kind of look that only those who have been through battle can share: tearful, exuberant grins.
This is the math of grace: always more.
And on Saturday night, I sat at a tall table of women, in between two of my closest, and listened to those two talk about what he’d taught them, how much he means to them, this boy of mine, and I feel the math take shape into something more than numbers, into a gratitude that is begotten of answered prayers and kept promises and all the light I couldn’t see before: my fears, once again, allayed, over wine and love.
At birthday parties, he charms the guests with his questions about their watches, inspiring outheld wrists and patient listening, and then he grabs Little Brother and they tear around with the rest of the kids as if they’ve always been here. I drink a glass of champagne to celebrate. We move about, this family of ours, among people who understand and know us, who make space for us.
Facebook lets me know, through its Memories feature, that I used to post WAY too many pictures, used to overshare on the reg (who, me?!). It lets me know that LB was the one who taught me to use a Q-tip as a laxative (#blessed). And that TK gave the following lessons: “peepee comes out of a penis and poopoo comes out of a butt,” and “if you pour Baby Magic on your house then the rain will wash it clean.” I recognise in the moments of being taught, in the way the math works out, what self-protective BS my planned method of parenting would have been, how I was headed toward a path of agonised addition and subtraction, molehill-enlarging.
During TK’s playdate, I walked down to the reserve and sat on a bench in front of the water. It changed constantly, reflecting sun then clouds, staying calm then moving, placid then rippled. These changes making it what it is. We’re planning LB’s birthday party and so TK, naturally, is talking about his. “Who do you want to invite?” I ask him, numbers and logistics running through my brain until he answers, “Everyone. I want everyone.” And I look down at him while also somehow, always, looking up to him, this boy of a set of two who never stop teaching me.
Last week included a day left uncovered by The Kid’s shadow therapist; she was away and the backups were otherwise occupied. So I made the executive decision to call it a “Mommy and James Day.”
“I’m spending some time with my mum today,” he told everyone from the shopkeeper to friends, and we started at the oval next to the beach, he on his bike and I on my feet, one of us alternately chasing the other, my “run” more of a “bouncing around on my calves” until he transferred to the playground and I jogged in circles around it, periodically calling his name and waving while he kept watch for my location. This will be the illustration they one day use for helicopter parenting, but whatever. #mylifemychoices.
After that we headed to the indoor swimming pool, where we each grabbed a noodle and bobbed around on them until his teeth chattered (Australians have a different definition of “heated pool” than Southerners do) and we stopped by the house before moving on to the mall and its cinema. There we watched a crappy animated film while scarfing down McDonald’s and popcorn. Success.
Today, the day his therapist was meant to return to school, she sits stuck in the snow in New Zealand and I sit under the shade outside his classroom, typing on my computer and listening out for signs of distress. One of the learning support teachers “happens” to be in his classroom today, and she is lovely, and so I’m sweating slightly less than I would be. I didn’t break the news to him until after we’d dropped off Little Brother and I snuck my laptop into TK’s backpack and we headed out the door, walking the couple of blocks while I chose my words carefully. They were littered with phrases like “red toy shop after school,” “give it a go,” “I believe in you,” and “trust me.”
Oh, that last one. That one was uttered by both of us: he meaning it in the “I can’t do this so take me home” sense, I meaning it in the “I could be totally screwing up here but I’m going to fake it for your sake and we’ll see how we come out on the other side PS has anyone seen my Xanax” sense.
The words we choose leave other ones excluded; often we opt out of language altogether. That’s what TK did for the first four years of his life, his silence belying the intricate thought process underneath the surface, language being measured and analysed and gathered until he was ready to present it, whole and sure. Now I find myself constantly measuring my words, typing them here and doling them out to the boys, confidently and shakily in both settings.
(I take a break to text a friend about what I’m hearing from the classroom, the shouts of the teacher and yet the absence of distress from my little fighter within; the harbour glistens below me and I am suspended in the tension that words can assuage but not remove; all this and I’ve sworn off wine tonight and tomorrow. #jesustakethewheel.)
It occurs to me that words have been the great measuring stick of my life, my most constant currency and signifier of meaning, but they are far from its full embodiment. Not the little-L words anyway, I think, as the teacher screeches for the children to write their words and I’m trying to capture the whole thing here both for posterity and therapy.
I am meters away from one of the biggest chunks of my heart and I need more than words to tether us. There are more than words that tether us.
And yet they are so much. They have to be; sometimes they feel like all we have. “Use your words,” I tell TK and LB when they are reduced by their emotions to puddles of tears on the floor, arms flailing at some transgression the other has committed. TK’s therapists call this functional communication: giving him the tools that provide an option other than melting down. This morning, stuck in traffic and already anxious about what lay ahead, I pounded the steering wheel, my own functional communication reduced to a meltdown, and TK asked it from the backseat: “Are you angry?” This recognition of an emotion that, I see now, he has learned from me to name, and just like that the student becomes the teacher. “I’m frustrated,” I respond, then attempt to describe the car that has backed us all up by trying to turn from the wrong lane, and the words don’t fix it but they do help defuse: I remember that I don’t have to hold everything myself, that I can share.
We’ve been reading Psalms to the kids at bedtime because I remember The Mom reading them to The Sis and me as we grew up, and the words took root somewhere deeper than I realised because it turns out I still carry them with me. I want this for the boys, and I tell them that this part of the Bible, it’s poems. Poems written by people who knew no better way to talk to God about how they felt, and one day I’ll also tell them what I’ve learned about the words of poetry: that they are the opposite of summary; that they are the recognition of how little we can control ourselves and the surrender to the mystery that life really is. Not the figuring out, but the entering in.
And words can’t describe it, but poetry can try, these moments that populate our days now: the Aussie-American hybrid that the boys are because we said the word yes. The “I love you”s that the boys utter so frequently now. The sound of LB’s voice as he quotes the psalm along with me, his memory already at work. What TK’s Scripture teacher tells me–that they read The Lord’s Prayer in class and he raised his hand: “But what does it mean?” The poems at night and the prayers in the car and the exit from the classroom in the afternoon that, for so many reasons, has become a victory walk–that will be one this afternoon. How much more of it than I ever expected has turned out to be poetry.
“IT’S NOT A RACE!” one of them will invariably yell, these boys who make everything a race lately: getting dressed, getting undressed, brushing teeth, running upstairs to yell at Daddy to hurry up in the shower (I may have put them up to that one). The protest over rules that were made long ago always comes from the one lagging in second place of the two, the one no longer wanting those rules to apply. Usually, tears ensue. Life lived in a hurry surely is a tragedy.
I should remember this. You know, since it’s only every day that I engage in my own races against time: adrenaline- and anxiety-fueled marches through my moments, a constant look ahead to what’s next. And in the bigger picture, waiting impatiently for something, always. Currently: issues with a teacher…nighttime toilet training…knowing for certain where we’ll spend the rest of our lives and planning our children’s education accordingly. You know, the little things.
I read back over something I wrote two years ago (!), when we were preparing to move to Sydney, before any of the life we have now was fleshed out before us. I wrote about how The Kid is a story told in more than one sitting, and aren’t all of us? Isn’t life? Yet I constantly try to distill it into manageable doses where the ending is already known, if not accomplished outright.
Last week, on Father’s Day, I benevolently repaid The Husband for my own break on Mother’s Day and took the boys to a movie. Christopher Robin was playing at the local cinema and it was a rainy afternoon, which meant everyone in the general area was there, every seat taken. Considering it was a live-action film with several Serious Adult Conversations, the boys made it through a respectable amount, but when TK announced he had to go to the toilet we stumbled over everyone in our path and headed home. Later, of course, I went to my favourite movie spoiler website because that is how I roll. I wanted to see the ending I’d missed, and I read the quote from the last moments of the film, when Pooh asks Christopher Robin what day it is. “Today,” he replies, and Pooh says, “My favourite day.”
I wish I could be more like a stuffed bear. I wish I could enjoy each moment for what it is, and not out of guilt or obligation but because of the beauty inherent in each one–because of the gift they all are. Instead, rather than resting in these gifts, I feel more like Little Brother as he learns his way around the monkey bars, which for right now looks like him being suspended uneasily in the air, yelling “HELP!” right before I come to grab him.
For his part, TK doesn’t like the suspension any more than I do. “I used to be American but now I’m Australian,” he often announces lately, his dividing lines always so black-and-white and ever-present, his way of making sense of the world riding on clear divisions and Befores and Afters. I know it’s not that clear, no matter how often I too wish it was–that who and where we are is more of a complicated mixture than a linear path. But even his demand for clarity is its own gift in all its moments, like when he was in Scripture class and they were saying the Lord’s Prayer. “But what does that mean?” he asked the teacher, and when she recounted it to me at church this week, she said she realised what a great question it was–how it made her slow down and really think about the words anew.
This suspension with which I am so uncomfortable, this constant between-ness–between countries, and people, and moments–I suspect I would enjoy it more if I’d remember the simple truth that I am held. Held by a grace that doesn’t swoop in at the last moment like I do for LB on the monkey bars, but that is always there, enveloping me though I can’t feel it, can’t always see it either. This morning the boys and I walked to the car and LB gripped my hand in that awkward way kids do, fingers splayed all over it, and I thought it to myself, that I should enjoy this moment. That he won’t always want to hold my hand. Drops of guilt and fear mixed in with the attempt at gratitude. He’ll probably even drop it any second now, I thought, preparing for what I thought was next. Instead, he didn’t. We walked across the front yard, to the car, and he climbed inside, somehow holding me in his grip the entire time.
I believe in grace, but I live by karma. This distinction is only one of a few thousand contradictions that define me, but hey–at least I’m aware of it, right?
I constantly prefer the tit-for-tat method of living, the “you be nice to me and I’ll be nice to you, and vice versa” brand of social interaction. If there’s a petty or passive way to resolve (i.e., not resolve) a dispute, I’ll cling to it like a life raft unless/until forced to be a bigger person. Usually, annoyingly, by The Husband, who–though I’ve known for awhile is a better human being than I am–keeps providing opportunities for the lesson to be hammered home, this ever-returning drumbeat of grace.
Were it up to me, the school playground would be (as it is for so many, AHEM) a battleground for deep-seated insecurities to play themselves out as a drama amidst the backdrop of blissfully unaware children. Recently, at the annual fundraiser for one such school that my son may or may not attend, TH and I were engaged in a bidding war over a birthday sign. It was a repeat of the year before: same sign, same bidding war against the same person. I retreated to the dance floor but kept an eye on TH, sitting at the table in his Cast Away wig, pecking at his phone screen. While I threw my hands in the air like I just didn’t care (I SO DID CARE), he secured our son’s future delight/my pride. After a minute, the silent auction was over and he raised his own hands in the hair and I screeched in victory.
Later, he was so awful about it: he suggested we share the sign with the other bidder as a token of goodwill and peace. BARF.
I don’t want to share, I thought. I want people to learn their lessons and pay their debts and be completely levelled by the side-eye I distribute to them on the playground for not inviting me, excuse me my child, to whatever the event-du-jour is, and this is the kind of fairness I prefer thank you very much.
Meanwhile, I sit as the recipient of a grace I don’t deserve and could never earn and I squirm uncomfortably each time this is revealed.
“UNDERSTAND ME!” The Kid yelled recently from the backseat, as I struggled to do just that. His speech is rapidly improving, but most days our 10 is still everyone else’s 5 and I hate being reminded of that–almost as much as I hate his feeling misunderstood. Because I know that feeling, that need to be comprehended and how closely it approximates (is) the need to be validated, to be accepted. How it feels so much like being loved that it can become a substitute for it. How misleading that can be, when it comes to bids and birthday parties and crusades for justice.
It’s the feeling I got while sitting beside my friend after a rough week for both of us, as Ronan Farrow talked in the Opera House about doing what’s right even if you feel all alone while doing it, and we turned to each other in glee over the unintentionally personalised message that met us where we were at that exact moment, in our own little crusade. It’s the feeling of being seen, and known. And it’s intoxicating, but it’s not always love.
Love is deeper and more profound. It’s not the guy ahead on the stage but the friend sitting adjacent. It’s the other friend, from the sofa, laughing as TK orates incessantly over our own conversation and saying, “Tell me again about how he used to not talk,” because she wasn’t around then yet somehow she was, because she is now. It’s not the lady at the outdoor market picking a jumper for me because, as she says, she “knows my style” (she does, and I buy it, but come on, she’s running a business). It’s later that day, when TH pushes an unwilling Little Brother on his bike and I have to run to keep up with TK on his, this TK who used to be just as unwilling as LB but with more reason (talk to your local occupational therapist about bilateral movement and crossing midlines and dyspraxia, thanks for coming to my TED talk about our 10 and your 5), and now he grins as he shoots around the oval that lies next to the beach, shouting, “I’m WINNING!” into the wind, the same wind that carries LB’s cries that will one day turn into shouts of their own. A minute later, TK takes a soft tumble to the ground and I cheer, telling him it’s time to celebrate his first fall because it means that he gets to jump back up from it, and he goes along with it: “Dad, I had my first fall!” Around us, similarly-aged children are riding without falling, without training wheels, and part of me wants to tell them our story, just to be understood. Another part wants to shoot them some withering side-eye and tell them I didn’t want to come to their event anyway.
And another, buried deep within where only good counselling and wine and grace can reach, sees this oval as a circle that, for now, is punctuated with falls and fives but held in all its broken places with a grace that will one day make it whole.
When Jason and I dated, we bonded over a variety of shared interests, but our favorites were the holy trinity of tapas, Jesus, and camp horror. The two of us were among the dozen viewers who kept Harper’s Island on the air for an entire season. (He figured out who the killer was by the second episode, thus cementing his status as the Smart One in our smart ’n sassy combo.) We shared nightmares over The Strangers. (Okay, I had the nightmares and he listened to me complain about them. Don’t nobody kill Ben Covington on my watch!) And when I heard whispers of a show called American Horror Story, which was premiering just a few months after our wedding — and a few weeks after I found out I was pregnant — I emailed him trailers and we set our DVR.
