Plans In Pencil

Somehow I see
Who I could be
Just being with you
That’s the view from here

What do we have to go through to meet the truest version of ourselves?

I was listening to one of my standard podcasts the other day, and the episode was a retelling of Jack London’s short story “The South of the Slot,” about a man leading a double life who has to make a choice. My own existence hasn’t been so ripe for retellings (although I do that, here, every week…) or dramatic, but multiple personalities aren’t, I think, so pathological as they are common. What I’m saying is that we are all more than one person throughout our lives, in different times or to different people or in different places. Luckily for me, I’ve found a version of myself that’s worth settling on–not without flaws or revisitations by past selves, mind you, but worth settling on nonetheless–and I think of how close I came to never meeting her. To never knowing me.

Because at one point, she had a choice to stay or leave: to try her hand in her comfort zone among everyone she knew, or to roll the dice on a cross-country move to a place she’d visited once but had somehow connected with instantly. Out of desire and desperation and a touch of insanity, she chose to leave, to go, to come to the place where–after spending her years becoming a professional–she learned to be a person. Which set in motion so much of everything else, beginning with a proposal on a Manhattan rooftop (or was it a boozy late-night confession a year before that?).

The next time the chance to stay or leave popped up, she was sure it was time to stay. She was wrong. Just like she had been about so many things, including that her son’s diagnosis was incorrect or that some people are more valuable than others or that home is singular. It was by way of being wrong that she was afforded the grace to a better, truer, path–but she had to be curious (and desperate) enough to take it. Luckily, she was.

The other night, we were playing a family game and everyone had to vote on who was the happiest then point to that person. In a strange turn of events, the three males in our house all gestured to me, leaving me wondering what was wrong with them. If they knew me but at all. I am not the happiest person! I kind of pride myself on that! And yet, here they are listening to me sing my way around the house and laugh with them and play soccer in the garage and it’s almost like they completely forgot about the times I’ve lost my temper or raised my voice or been a Petty Bitch (patent pending)…

Or maybe I’ve forgotten–forgotten all the moments that have added up to who I am now, that have brought me here. Here, where I no longer have an orderly and clean car, but one littered with sand and crumbs. Here, where I run my way around multiple beaches before watching Little Brother play soccer on Saturday mornings. Here, where I listen to LB sing “Amazing Grace” not because he learned it in church but because his class sang it at their phasmids’ funeral (all the phasmids were named Kevin, btw). Here, where the best conversations are had in the car because it’s then that I can trick the boys into sharing the most without their realising it. Here, where I work with The Kid through not winning the class leader election because 30 people went for 6 spots and he’s disappointed but still knows who he is apart from all that (and I battle my sudden urge to embrace conspiracy theories when it comes to voting processes). Here, where I find myself more at home on a beach than in a pew on Sundays. Currently. Here, where I often come home sandy-haired and salt-covered. Here, where I’m learning from people I never expected to teach me because it’s so obvious that discrimination is just ignorance mixed with hate and fear, and disability has more to do with how we treat people than what they are capable of, and there’s always time to learn new languages.

Here, where I almost got into a fistfight with two seniors over a stolen parking place yesterday, because here is also where there is more work to be done. Or, I should say, always more grace to be had.

For three years now, we’ve celebrated Thanksgiving in our Australian home in a manner some back in the US would call “Friendsgiving.” As of last year, I got wise and found a local restaurant to throw money at in exchange for an entire cooked turkey, rice stuffing (not nearly the same as Southern dressing, but we make do), and gravy, and everyone else takes care of the sides. The kids get the inside table (by the Christmas tree, and some Christmas crackers, because we like to blur lines between the two holidays) and the adults sit outside in the waning sunlight, food piled high on the fine china I found just this year and was therefore making its Aussie debut atop the red tablecloths I use/dry clean annually.

This year, we were #blessed with a performance by some of the younger kids of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and, for the second year running, all of the kids set up an upstairs spa with my foot and back massagers and booked us in all evening for appointments.

It’s pretty effing magical.

It’s also a change from the way I used to celebrate Thanksgiving (aka The Last Day Before the Official Start to Christmas Season). Absent are the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and Westminster Dog Show in the background; there’s nary a sausage ball in sight; football doesn’t make an appearance until the next morning; it’s more sundress than sweater weather. You could say, also, that the family element is missing, though at this point, I think it’s just a different kind of family.

I’m thankful for all of it, deeply, because I’ve been here for all of it and I know the faithful hand of grace that has carried us here, so far across so much. I’m thankful that, for some reason (personal growth? therapy? grace? all of the above and more), I didn’t have a breakdown in front of the oven this year but instead just steadily went about the business of planning and baking and pulling things out of said oven that didn’t taste like shit. I’m thankful for emotional regulation, for neurological integration, for high-sounding concepts that become realities over time and increase quality of life almost as much as the dog currently lying on my feet does.

I’m thankful for what isn’t. E.E. Cummings wrote, “the Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself,” and I have unlearned some things. I’m thankful that the world is wider than I ever knew, that the unexpected and unplanned for can be gifts beyond compare, that the ocean is not just my favourite metaphor for life but also a part of our every day. Tangible love, tangible grace.

Just in time for Christmas.

Recently I entered a Twitter thread on the benefits of cold water exposure, ie subjecting oneself to uncomfortably frigid water. I had heard of some of the advantages before–faster metabolism, improved immune response, better sleep, raised libido (!)–but this thread focused on the neurological reasons for cold water being such a draw: the low temperature prompts a panic response in the brain, and the body breathes through the panic to reach the other side, adjusting to the cold and coming to a place of calm.

Metaphorical, I know. Exposure becoming therapy and all. I think of all the panic responses my brain/body have endured throughout my life (too many to count; the threshold is low) and the varying times it has taken me to reach a place of calm. Longer than a plunge in the South Pacific in the winter, that’s for sure. Life is full of this kind of exposure therapy, I just haven’t often seen it as such.

On Sunday, upon my incessant demands (and after cajoling the kids to be “on my side about this”), The Husband finally descended into the garage and brought up our Christmas tree and boxes of decorations. He would refer to this as work, but it was only once the boxes had been delivered that the real labour of love began. I had done the prep work: bought and lit a piney Christmas candle, turned up the volume on a Spotify playlist, retrieved the sugar cookies from the oven. When TH dropped the final box on the floor, I–with barely contained glee–announced, “IT STARTS NOW!” The kids dived into the boxes, most of which were ornaments that couldn’t be dealt with until the lights had been strung on the tree per my instructions. So they looked through some of their old Christmas artwork, threw it on the shelves as decor, tossed the ornaments on the table, and retreated with TH to the couch to watch football.

This was not the family fun I’d had in mind. Over the next few minutes I wrestled with the damn lights, stringing and unstringing them, my back twisting in knots and my patience wearing razor-thin, casting death glares back at the trio relaxing on our new sofa. Finally, I threw the lights to the ground. “I’m DONE,” I announced, adding under my breath, “Since I’m the only one who gives a shit.”

I folded laundry upstairs, then approached the living room again but, seeing the lights on the floor and the males (still) on the couch, knew it was too soon. So I went upstairs and lay on the bed for awhile, stewing about the patriarchy and unpaid labour and how it’s always like this, “it” being both my family’s loss of interest in decorating and my own best- and rigidly-laid plans falling into disarray. Tis the effing season. EVERY season.

Eventually, because it’s also always like this, I came back downstairs and worked out the lights. And when I had, the boys jumped up and, gusto renewed, hung the ornaments. TH still slept on the couch, but I didn’t kill him or post a photo of it to social media (progress). Then he went out and picked up takeaway dinner, so I think it’s clear I ended up being the real winner, back pain notwithstanding.

It’s the up and the down and the all over again. The shock of cold water, unplanned interruptions (another word for life; I tend to see everything unplanned as an interruption), emotional breakdowns, unexpected loneliness, followed by a restoration of some sort of homeostasis, or a new form of it altogether. Reset expectations (or libido?), renewed gusto, reforged understanding. The next morning, I returned from a run to see a wallaby bounding across our front lawn, then came inside to see Kevin the Dog nabbing a hunstman. Six years ago such a scene would have sent me to the psych ward; now it’s just a Monday.

After the decorating had ceased, all I wanted was to retreat to my bed and Netflix. Alas, Little Brother had other plans. He surveyed “our” accomplishments and grinned. “FAMILY HUG!” he announced, and even TH got off the couch as the five of us (you thought we’d leave out the dog?!) gathered, joined on the other side we’d reached together.

Back when we lived in Atlanta, before Little Brother came along, I was in the throes of first-time newborn motherhood with The Kid and would preserve my sanity by wheeling his ass all around our hilly neighbourhood day after day. Certain familiarities emerged over time: the Area Where I Saw a Dead Snake, the Man Who Walked Around While Reading a Newspaper, the Frantically Driving Tennis Players Late to Their Matches. In particular, there was a woman, maybe in her twenties, who had a bouncy gait just slightly off from coordinated. She wore big headphones and, after the first time we crossed her path, greeted me and TK with more familiarity than I felt was due. An awkward conversation would ensue (awkward for me, because I am awkward at conversation; she seemed perfectly at ease)–she had a bit of a speech impediment and her topics seemed to wildly veer across myriad subjects. I would beg off as quickly as possible, citing naptime as an excuse, and wheel TK back home where I didn’t have to talk to anyone. Back to my comfort zone, where it could be just us and no them.

In the years since, I’ve thought of that woman and how I tried to avoid her; how our own lives have veered wildly across myriad topics and territories; how it’s likely she faced some of the same challenges that we have faced alongside TK since he graduated from newborn status. The more topics and territories we cover, the more I realise there is no them anymore, only us. All of us.

The insane grace that dragged my diarrhoea-plagued ass to a New York City stage year after year. That pulled me through denial and into the spectrum and onto an Australian primary school stage last week. That threw us across the world to Australia. That opened my eyes and ears to the point that, from residing on one side of the political spectrum, I now get emails from the DNC and think that maybe Rush Limbaugh wasn’t such a paragon of perfect wisdom after all (GASP). That led me to wonder if maybe people whose preferences were different from mine might still be humans deserving of rights (GASP GASP).

This grace that brought me from writing a research paper on autism (thinking I therefore knew everything while actually knowing…nothing) and into actual life with it, my heart enmeshed with its intricacies and difficulties and beauties. That took my older-child sensibilities and threw them in with a younger child whose awarenesses and humour both contradict and mirror my own.

We are all over the place, flung around by grace into wild and unpredictable landscapes among people with whom we never would have identified with back when we resided solely in our comfort zones. The fringes, the marginalised, they are no longer they, they are we.

There’s a reason the cross was located outside the city gates.

The other day, TK was trying to get The Husband to buy him something (classic TK), and he decided flattery was the best approach. “But Dad is the head of the family,” he said, ‘He holds the pillars up.”

Reader, I GASPED. I balked. I reared back my head while TH laughed and I said, “Oh I don’t think so. We are partners,” thereby negating everything I grew up being taught in well-intentioned but incompletely-exegized Sunday School lessons, flung wildly as we have been across (and out of) church spaces.

Travel is a privilege–I get that. Not everyone can do it. But virtual travel? As in, being open to visit and even inhabit spaces different to your own? It is life. It is grace.

On Friday, TK goes with his grade to surfing, at a local beach. Last week, the boogie-boarders made up the bulk of his class, so he basically had an instructor to himself for an hour. After about a dozen trips to the ocean, they came in and the instructor and I started talking and it turned out we speak the same language: words like apraxia and dyspraxia and speech delay. We traded stories as TK recovered on the sand next to his friend. All on a beach ten thousand miles from where we started. That’s so us.

Last Friday I found myself standing on an empty windswept beach on a day that should have been warmer (and later was; as they say, if you don’t like the weather in Sydney, wait a few hours). I watched the grey waves batter the shore and wondered if I was in the right spot. So I called the school, and they told me I was. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a parade of kids with surf and boogie boards crested the dunes and spilled onto the sand. Among them was The Kid, holding one end of a yellow surfboard while his friend held the other.

For the next hour I watched as he and the other kids were instructed and guided, on the shore and in the water. I talked to the lead surf teacher and gave him the TK Bio, Brief Version, and watched as he proceeded to take TK under his wing, surfing with him four times.

A few days later I was at another beach, sunny one this time, just down the road. I only had a few minutes to spare because Little Brother wanted me back at the LEGO birthday party ASAP so I could…watch him build things? Or eat cake? Both of which I did when I returned, but until I did I trudged through the sand among the countless other Saturday beachgoers. Another day, another beach, another view.

Monday, my view was from a stage. Armpits soaked, looking out at an audience of mostly familiar faces, talking about a subject I’d thought I was an expert on until life showed me I wasn’t. I told a story, our story, Brief Version, and watched over the minutes and subsequent days as people regarded me with a new recognition, seeing their own story in what I’d said. Which is really the whole point of telling stories, isn’t it?

A couple of days later, The Husband and I were walking through the city–not the one where we met and were engaged, but our current one. The one that celebrates Christmas in the summer sun, the one where the department store windows were shiny and glittery and blasting “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” while we wore sunglasses and sweated our way down Market Street, toward a lunch to which I’d been invited after landing on a writing award shortlist. Once we made it inside the venue, skewing the average age and gender by our mere presence, we sat among six other people and drank wine and sort of ate lunch (we don’t like fish or lamb) and watched as older ladies tried to work a zoom connection and pushed walkers around the room and one got lightheaded and proceeded to spend the lunch lying on a couch with her feet propped up but made sure they filled her red wine glass and one speaker said she thought she might not make it onstage but Mylanta had done the trick and TH and I just kept looking at each other trying not to laugh. I did not win the award but the husband of the oldest writer at our table told me it was clear I wasn’t old enough yet and then dessert came and I couldn’t help wondering and knowing how I’d ended up in yet another place I never could have imagined. A place with just a shitload of wigs.

We get the life–and the kids, and the views, and the rooms–that we’re given, not the ones we ordered from the catalog. How inconvenient. How startling. How beautiful, that on a Tuesday night, I’m standing beside a friend at a venue filled with five hundred people singing the same song–which is sort of the point, isn’t it?

The inmates are running the asylum.

Lately I’ve felt limited in what I can write because the kids are getting older and their stories are less mine to tell. In other words, if I wrote about them ad nauseam the way I used to here, practically reporting on the colour of their poops (Will had a green one this morning, by the way, and called me in to see, #blessed), they would shake with rage at the violation of their privacy. They’re already saying things like “Don’t post that!” when I snap photos, displaying an awareness of social media that I’m simply not ready for (but also, to some degree, an aversion to it, which I am totally on board with for, like, forever).

So now, more than ever (in this realm at least), what they say goes, autonomous and privacy-deserving individuals they are. Which hobbles me a bit when it comes to (over)sharing–or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I just haven’t found a way to venture back into vulnerability with my own story. I’ve gotten used to skipping around moments that I might’ve dived into here before, and in so doing have become satisfied (until I realised I was dissatisfied) with a more surface-level reporting style.

There’s also the fact that, as kids grow and our family becomes more cemented, there’s less of the rawness that defines life with babies and young children. The newness of diagnoses gives way to self-education and the daily putting-into-practice of that education, which undoubtedly has its fraught moments (the other morning, I told The Kid that I love everything about him, to which he replied, “I love everything about you, too. Except your temper“), but most of those are vented to friends at school drop-off or over text, then give way to the next item on the to-do list.

I guess that’s the thing–there’s more doing, less reflection, in this stage of life. Especially when I’m OD-ing on podcasts on the reg and trying to keep up with just all the shows.

But I am aware that the point of having this blog is to explore the truth of my/our story, not some polished-and-branded version of it. I never want to get to the point where my well-being relies on my life looking a “certain” way, unless that way is, well, a bit of a mess (to wit: the other morning I met a friend for coffee, by which I mean half of that coffee ended up on my white shirt, then went through the self-checkout at the grocery store and complained to the staff it wasn’t working and she quietly let me know that I was putting the groceries on the wrong side. Again.) There are enough people covering the Fabulous Life territory while ignoring the dumpster fire of actual existence. I’d rather stick marshmallows in that fire and tell ghost stories beside it with a bottle of wine.

In The Body Keeps the Score, a book on trauma that I’m reading because I do love a mess and, as Taylor might say, “Hi! I’m the mess, it’s me,” psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk writes about veterans with unprocessed trauma who nearly always fashion more publicly palatable cover stories that explain their difficulties without delving into the horrors they actually faced. “These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience.”

Yeah, that’s what I don’t want to do–a cover story. I want to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth–as long as it doesn’t violate my kids’ privacy/dignity (forget the poop story I told above, tks) or venture into fetishistic oversharing. Balance, amirite?

So I’m sure next week I’ll be here writing about how Neurodiversity Day at the boys’ school went (with in-depth descriptions of all the water weight I lost sweating through my fire-hydrant armpits), or telling you about how maybe I’ve overcompensated for the rigid swearing policies from my childhood as evidenced by a certain Little Brother who has a bit too much fun with colourful language (when The Husband pulled him up on it last week, LB replied, “FINE, I’ll use your fancy words“).

It’s just a matter of figuring out how to shift with the sands of our story, how to ride the waves of life, how to please the new management. They run the asylum, after all, but what we forget is that long before asylum meant “an institution for crazy people” (btw, crazy is ableist and we don’t use it anymore), and long after such institutions are a distant memory, the meaning of that word–asylum–was, is, and always will be, refuge.

I turn everything into homework.

To wit: I’ve been compiling podcasts like it’s my job and the rent’s due tonight. One show leads to another, and before I know it (and right now) I’ve got a year’s worth of listening on my phone. Last I checked, podcasts are not something I have to do. But ever since discovering them back in 2015 (thank you, Serial), I’ve committed myself to a growing list of hosts and subject matter, dutifully listening according to their weekly or fortnightly schedule, anxiety growing within me when I can’t find the time for a latest episode.

Podcasts are supposed to be for enjoyment. And I do enjoy them! I also listen to some because I feel obligated to finish them, as if the host’s feelings will be hurt if I don’t, or some Podcast Overseer is grading my completion rate. I turn everything into homework–into a marker of productivity, which is just so upside-down because I’ve recently realised that the more I listen, the less I think, and the more my imagination slowly dies. Which, I think, is a call to some sort of balance. Which I’ll get to right after I figure out what happened to the princes in the tower. In 1483.

There’s also this: the weather is warming up (finally; for now) here in Sydney, which means Christmas is approaching, which is an upside-down fact that I’m weirdly becoming used to. Which also means that I’m feeling an urge to curate lists: lists of Christmas music to listen to, movies to watch, activities to book, presents to buy. Ways to turn Christmas into homework. Methods of converting Randy and Cousin Eddie into cogs in a machine. The shitter is so full.

The best things, though, seem to happen without my help at all: the way the jacarandas are finally bursting forth in their purple glory; the way the sea carries bobs me around gently when, after finishing a swim (productivity alert!), I lie on my back and float; the way Kevin the Dog makes a perfect footrest when I decide to sit still. The other day I had to shave a kilometre off my run (#hippain) and grew frantic over whether this would lead to the collapse of my fitness regimen, and guess what happened? Nothing.

In fact, nothing seems to often be the circumstance in which some of the best things happen. So in between moments of movement, I’m looking for opportunities to be still. To, as a therapist I follow on Twitter says, witness rather than react. To listen in the quiet spaces and watch the glorious burst forth without any help from me.

Yesterday, the boys’ school started back their ethics classes for the term. Last night, I zoomed into a meeting to speak briefly about the Neurodiversity Day a friend and I are planning for the school in a few weeks. All of which is to say I am now rehydrating after losing all that water through my armpits.

Some things never change; among them, my propensity to sweat profusely when speaking in front of people, no matter how large or small or young or old the group. No matter how many times I’ve done it before. My underarms have always been, are now, will always be, fire hydrants in these situations.

After I gave a rundown as to what the upcoming day will hold, my friend jumped in and asked the rest of the group if they were familiar with some of the words I’d used–neurodivergent and neurotypical chief among them–and we were met with some shaking heads and blank stares. I forget, often, that this language I’m learning is still foreign to so many. Which is really why we’re doing this–so it won’t be.

I can remember a time, not long enough ago, when “inclusive language” and pronouns and such would have sent my eyes toward the ceiling, maybe paired with an exasperated sigh for good measure. When the world seemed inclusive enough already because I had a reasonably comfortable spot in it. Then the boundaries between that world–the one where I am often centred, where my story doesn’t have to struggle to be heard–and a different one, those boundaries blurred, and I became used to inhabiting two places, in more ways than one. Geography aside, there is the world of those who can blend in, and those who stand out–and, in so doing, occupy the fringes.

Psychologically speaking, I am a fan of boundaries. I will throw down boundaries all day long to protect my mental health. But interpersonally? When they become walls to keep people on the outside? Well, they’re bullshit, and I’ve got a sledgehammer.

I mean, sort of. Figuratively. It’s made of words, and it sits next to my deodorant because I usually need both tools simultaneously. Inhabiting worlds besides the one I’ve always known requires learning a new language, and teaching it. “If we learn each other’s languages, I think that’s better,” says Hannah Gadsby, and I understand the reticence to do so. More than that, I recognise it: the glazed-over eyes, the patronising nod, the unfulfilled promises to “read up on that,” the nearly-audible bless your heart when I mention The Kid’s mental acuity.

Then there are those willing to learn, of which I was not one until I ran out of other options–until I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it, and crawled upon a new shore. The people who end up here are learning and fumbling and even sweaty like I am, but most importantly, they are willing. They are curious, and open, which means they’ve endured some bruising and some growing. They’ve got stories.

Learning this language, like all languages, requires repetition until the new becomes familiar. Until disabled becomes, as Little Brother says it, just different, and DUH, everyone knows that different means the opposite of BORING. Until Christmas can mean cold or hot. Until swimming means salt, not just chlorine, and church can happen in front of an altar or at the dog park. Fluency in languages spoken on islands that you never knew existed until you saw they were closer than you ever realised.

The children persist in getting less little every day.

Little Brother just celebrated his 8th, and The Kid is shucking teeth left and right, and they both have become wise to the truth about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, et al this year. LB and I sat together for a spell the other night and watched videos of him as a baby. When those very videos and photos pop up as memories on social media, I’m reminded of how tiny and arguably cute they used to be.

But this stage, with their growing awareness and independence and involvement? This stage I prefer, mostly: the way they get involved when I’m planning presents and activities for The Husband’s birthday (even if the candy they pick is just the kind they want–and demand–him to share with them). They’re easier to talk to when they aren’t spewing out both ends of their bodies (usually); easier to see them as allies when I’m not bashing my head in trying to figure out what it is they want. (Of course, now is the time when we have to teach them how to articulate it.)

There is loss, but there is so much gain. Like losing the middle (wo)man and haggling directly with each other over how much a tooth is worth.

Life moves in one direction–the direction of grey hairs, sore hamstrings, TH on the phone making a dinner reservation for six and me screaming from inside that that’s too late; MAKE IT FIVE-THIRTY! But it’s not always linear.

A friend just returned from visiting her family and hometown overseas, and I asked if she was glad to be back. “Yes,” she began, “I was ready to be back…but it’s sort of sad, isn’t it? You always feel split between two places.”

I sort of don’t trust anyone who doesn’t. Whether it’s a matter of geography or chronology or circumstances, who can’t know ambivalence in this life? Anyone who’s perfectly settled is to me, as the kids would say, SUSS.

I’ve been working on an online application to get my dental license here in Australia and the process is offensive for so many reasons, primarily because it’s not what I most want to be doing anyway, and I find myself revisiting choices I made when I barely knew myself and was way too young to know the direction my life would take, much less how I should spend each day of the next few decades. I’m suspended between the then and now and even yet of it all, wondering if there’s a place, a role, that fits who I currently am, rather than spending time and effort trying to fit into old shoes that are too small but pay well.

And then there’s the looking ahead, like when I asked TK if he wants to try to be a school leader next year, and he sits thoughtfully for a moment before saying, “Maybe. It would be cool to be the first autistic kid to do that.”

We are all suspended somewhere. For me, with my kids, it’s usually between exasperation and wonder.

I asked them the other day how we might work out a way for them to fight with each other less, and they both–as if trained for this moment–told me, “But Mom, it’s normal for brothers to fight.” And I realise that no matter where else they’ve heard this, it’s also been from me–from retellings of my own story, of how sisters can be so close that they fight constantly until one day, they don’t, they just talk constantly, and they rely on these narratives to know they’ll be okay too. They remind me of these stories I’ve lived and told, and they push me up against my own ambivalence, my own incompleteness, my own panic at things not being “okay” or “enough”, which is right where the more always shows up, where grace appears and scatters us in all the directions we were meant to go.

The boys are going through a phase, lasting about twenty-seven years now, of “needing” one of us to lie down with each of them until they fall asleep. This means that, while our progeny drift off (or not, depending on the night), uttering delirious, exhaustion-fuelled thoughts about Minecraft, The Husband and I are engaged for varying amounts of time doing something decidedly other than watching Netflix or going to sleep ourselves (my personal favourite).

TK’s psychologist helped us put together a plan for independent sleeping (ed. note–she put the plan together; we agreed with it) that we enacted a few nights ago. It has not gone well. Which is to say that while progress is being made, regrets are too. Last night, TK was particularly wound up (why we decided that this plan should coincide with the beginning of the time change due to Daylight Savings is, at best, an oversight; at worst, a mistake of epic proportions). At one point, he called out, asking me if LB was asleep yet (it should be noted that step 1 of the plan involves TH and I each lying down briefly with one of the kids, after which we’re just outside their rooms in the office/landing area, not on a plane to Myanmar like you might think from their reaction, and my stories about how my own parents would send me to my room for the night about 57 miles down the hallway from where they were do nothing to assuage their fear).

Anyway, after he called out, I answered with a “no” that was just seething enough to make TK cry, which led to an intervention being required along with attendant/effusive apologies and assurances (and enduring regret/guilt on my part; ain’t no trip like a guilt trip because a guilt trip is A REQUIRED FEATURE OF MOTHERHOOD). Eventually, with the help of TH’s patience and some melatonin, both boys were asleep and I retired to bed myself, with my guilt and book to rock me into unconsciousness.

It doesn’t help that bedtime occurs in the dark. LB’s favourite NBA poster hangs in pride of place opposite the head of his bed, in perfect viewing range to provide dream material; instead, it becomes the stuff of nightmares, as last night he told me it’s “creepy” and he “hate[s] it.” Great. It also doesn’t help that TK’s (and everyone’s) anxiety ramps up in the shadows (mine comes into its prime around 3 am; #blessed). We are waging war here not just against a routine, but against fear itself, and endless assurances as to the safety and coolness of their rooms aren’t going to just make fear disappear.

I remember our last church service in Atlanta, that Sunday before Christmas, when our pastor/friend called us by name and echoed the angel who appeared to Mary: be not afraid. I’ve been relieved to learn since then that this doesn’t have to be an imperative, not a command so much as a description of the state available to us when we trust in something bigger than ourselves, bigger even than the dark surrounding us. We can be there; we often won’t be, as the waves rock around us, but we can be. Better yet–we will be.

Rilke, whose poetry featured themes on “the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety” (so he knew), wrote, “Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, beyond the reach of one’s intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.”

Which is to say a couple of things, to me at least: that the scariest part of the dark is feeling alone in it; and, that this is all totally necessary if anything new or real is going to happen.

This morning, the rain kindly abated (despite the 100% forecast) for my swim, but the wind and waves most certainly did not. I approached the water, cap and goggles in hand, muttering “oh she’s angry today” because sometimes jokes/talking to yourself are necessary when you’re a bit afraid. I took the plunge, which always happens whether I choose it or not, and started paddling. At one point I gulped a mouthful of sea water and almost barfed. Trust me when I tell you I stayed close to the shore–oh I hugged that bitch. The waves threw me around the whole time–until they threw me to the shore, and I was home. Which is what always happens.