Plans In Pencil

“…he has developed the capacity to simulate deep calm while experiencing none of it. In his core, Mervyn Glass is a frantic man.” –Damon Galgut, The Promise

There are some things you don’t learn, would never suspect, about other people until you are thrown together by life in a way that is more collision than cocktail party; multi-car pileup than Pinterest. And there are similar things you don’t learn and would never suspect about yourself until the same sort of “accidents.”

I have always been able to fake it (ie, live politely in a world that demands constant positivity), but such pretensions lead unfailingly to frustration/anger/quietness/eventual shutdown. I retreat to the more honest part of myself and hang out there until I find the people who will join me and talk about digestive issues or heartbreak or devastating disappointment rather than the weather. This is where I’d always rather be (unless sitting on my own couch alone is an option): digging deeply into the rubble of life’s experience and, sometimes (read: always) being surprised to find hope, and company, there.

Last week I met a couple of friends for lunch on a beach I hadn’t visited since before Covid, and for four hours we sat there, talking about our shared experiences delivered through our quirky kids. Roads, not identical but close enough, that we never expected to walk but on which we found each other. And this is what I’ve never stopped finding to be true: that there are people I never would have known were it not for the things I never would have chosen. And people I did know, but came to know in an entirely new way.

Mark that for the “This Is Everything” pile.

Tomorrow (though when this posts, it will be yesterday), The Kid goes to a two-night sleep away camp with years five and six from his school. They’ll stay in cabins and bring sleeping bags and eat camp food on their own mess kits and it is all just too much for me. (Don’t ask about my digestive issues in response.) Two friends–mothers of their own quirky kids–and I will be renting an airbnb nearby in case we are needed, because we know how things like this can either end triumphantly or go tits-up within minutes. My face looks calm but my entire body is a live wire, but then I sat down this morning and read this:

“He is not simply telling us to get over our worry. He is reminding us of the way the world actually works. Worry and anxiety take us out of our present moment and into a world that does not exist. When we worry, we put our feet on the shaky ground of a future (or past) constructed in our own mind.”

I have definitely done some world-building through worry. But…

The other day, Little Brother was asking if other countries besides the US have Independence Day holidays–he was trying to equate that with Australia Day (which is…not accurate? And also, kinda problematic). When I explained to him how America came to have an Independence Day to celebrate, light dawned on his face and he said, “So you don’t get to have one unless you weren’t free and then you are?”

There’s so much there. So much that you don’t get to have unless you were first not who/where you are now.

After I dropped the kids at school this morning (complete with a pre-camp rundown with TK’s teacher), I headed to the beach and stuffed myself into my wetsuit. The pain of the first minutes gave way to the rhythm of my strokes which gave way to a series of waves that upset that rhythm. I gazed downward toward the sandy floor that never moves because I did not create it, and kept swimming until I reached the end: the end of one small story held in a bigger one whose ultimate ending is kept safe no matter what.

I’m always running from something
I push it back, but it keeps on coming
And being clever never got me very far
Because it’s all in my head
And “You’re too sensitive”, they said
I said, “Okay, but let’s discuss this at the hospital”

On a walk the other day, I passed a couple walking a small dog. Their pet was wearing a jacket that read, simply, NERVOUS. Clothing with an ID meant to warn others to take care–and I thought to myself, I need a jacket like that.

I run to the song above, its chords sounding through my headphones as I pass by our corner of the Pacific Ocean and its harbours, and in this I feel seen too: musical strains that put notes to my particular form of…whatever you want to call it. Brokenness. Flaws. Challenges. Shortcomings.

Or maybe, as I told the boys this morning on the way to their basketball camp: design? Since, as we happen to believe, God doesn’t make mistakes.

This was harder to believe when I was younger. I walked around the world out of place. Like my “papers weren’t in order,” Dani Shapiro writes in the book recommended to me by my own co-author. “Wherever I went I felt like a foreign correspondent on the sidelines of my own life.” This feeling marked my own wanderings and, against others’ better judgment but not my own, drove me northeast until I hit Manhattan, where everything began to fall into place, or into the place those particular pieces–faith, friends, husband–were meant to be.

While there, and when only the corner pieces of that puzzle had been assembled, I moaned over my singleness and listened to a lot of music from the Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack.

I let the day go by
I always say goodbye
I watch the stars from my window sill
The whole world is moving
And I’m standing still…and the world spins madly on

Maybe it didn’t hit me while I was traversing those streets on repeat, but at some point, because of New York and the feeling of otherness that drove me there–the being an observer in my own life, my differences relegating me to another corner of the country than the only one I knew–I realised that, within the hand of grace, what’s wrong with you becomes what’s right with you.

Now, instead of the world spinning madly on while I watch from a window, I find, like Shapiro, “a day that holds me, connects me to the spinning world.” Days that start with ocean views and end with bodies piled on a couch, a dog at our feet, and in the middle of these days are all the tears and triumphs that come with working our ways honestly through ourselves: the brokenness, the flaws, the challenges, the shortcomings. The designs.

It’s Little Brother’s greatest fear: getting lost. Or, more specifically, being left behind, forgotten. I don’t know if it comes with the terrain of being the youngest, but it’s a pressing concern for him–an off-limits topic of jokes for one who loves to joke.

Yesterday, we met friends at the stage show of Mary Poppins and for an instant (real time: three seconds) as I approached the concessions stand with The Kid in tow (he is not one to wander when popcorn is involved; neither am I, when it’s champagne), I turned and couldn’t see LB. “Where’s Will?” I asked his brother, who only had eyes for buttery salty goodness, and in that second I spotted him: LB with his furrowed brow, eyes in panic mode. He saw me, ran over, buried his face in my side. Found.

Sometimes you just have to look around. It’s good advice that’s hard to follow when the walls close in on you: look around. The trick is knowing whether to be still or move while doing it.

Last week The Husband and I saw Top Gun, and the nostalgia was almost as good as the popcorn (and champagne), and a couple of days later I listened to a podcast about a plane that went missing in the 1940s. Dead reckoning as a strategy was mentioned: using your previous location, plus factors like speed and direction, to determine where you are now. In biology, it’s called path integration. In Moana, Maui describes something similar–wayfinding: knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been.

All of this is only helpful, of course, if you admit that you don’t know where you are. That you’re lost. Thankfully, I lost all my dignity (feigned or otherwise) associated with knowing where I am and what I’m doing long ago. Shrugging my shoulders is both a perpetual act of honesty and a great way of relocating them from their anxiety-positioned home around my ears.

I remember stepping out of the subway in New York and just moving before I figured out which corner I was on because I didn’t want anyone else knowing I didn’t know. This led more often than not to backtracking, repositioning, circling a block not to be seen. Kind of pathetic. Sometimes, moving isn’t the answer.

It strikes me that these tactics–reckoning, way finding, path integration–well, first of all, they don’t always work. But also? They require information beyond what we know; a source of guidance outside of ourselves. A reorientation of our own position, or someone else’s.

Also in New York, I found home in TH, about a year before he figured out the same of me. It’s not always the lost who have to be still and wait. Being found doesn’t happen on our own time.

But it does happen.

The boys did a basketball camp last week. It was TK’s first camp ever, and there was much to discuss after. And before, like when he ran up to the coaches at check-in to enquire whether they are nice to autistic kids. Or the next day, when he asked the coach not to touch him while teaching him. We give our kids a home, a place, so that when they’re out in the world they know where they are by knowing who they are. His teacher told me the last day of term, how adept he is at advocating for himself, at saying what he needs. I think of this one thing I’ve done right that I never could do for myself when I was his age, and in that moment I am found: I am right where I’m supposed to be.

“No one could distinguish the sound of the shouts of joy from the sound of weeping, because the people made so much noise.“

I realised recently that I haven’t had much to complain about of late. This is alarming, as I have always been adept at negativity, and beyond that, deep dives into what’s wrong with everything/one around me. Am I out of touch with reality? Is a wrecking ball headed straight my way, some horrible news about to decimate my entire existence once I’ve been lulled into this relative contentment? (Come to think of it, I did get that “atypical cell” report in my last cervical exam that will have to be followed up next year; maybe I should be obsessing over that…)

No bottoms have fallen out recently, though, at least not personal ones–there has been the whole “watching-democracy-die-from-a-distance” dumpster fire that is America right now (yes, I am #obsessed with the January 6th hearings). So either a nuclear winter of some sort is on my doorstep, or I’ve just gotten used to the typical ups and downs of our existence (allowing for a meltdown every now and then over having to make dinner again): lunches made, psychologists seen, homework done, school camping trips planned, sibling fighting matches refereed, class excursions chaperoned.

Boring.

Last week, I rode the bus with Little Brother and his year two mates out to a national park, where we were all educated on the Aboriginal history of the area (this was after one of the kids on the bus hurled and the rest started dry heaving at the smell, #goodtimes). We hiked around the bush and to a lookout to view some tens-of-thousands-of-years-old carvings. The guide pulled out a spray bottle of water as he pointed out the carvings, which I couldn’t see until he used that water to fill in the depressions in the rock and they darkened before our eyes.

On our hike back to the bus, during which one of the teachers flipped down a set of steps (okay, maybe things are rougher out there than I’m giving credit for), I thought about the latest book I’ve bought, Susan Cain’s Bittersweet with its subtitle of “How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole” (I like to buy books when I’ve already got about a half-dozen I’m waiting to read so that I can stack them up and see how many it takes before the tower falls, then I wonder why The Kid has this same trait).

I feel, because of therapy, and faith, and a lot of ruminations on the importance of grief, that Susan may end up telling me some things I already know (and I also know enough to know that I’m likely wrong about how much I think I know). But I have lived on that knife-edge line between sorrow and joy, watched how often they mingle together and become One Thing, the tears and laughter at times indistinguishable, one not what it is without the existence of the other. One not existing without the other.

I dreamed the other night of a parent going through a hard time with their kid. And the message that seeped through my sleeping brain, the thing that has been passed down to me and that I can now pass on to others, is that truly facing life–facing the pain and letting the tears soak through–is a harder way to live. And it cuts deep. Also?–(and I truly cannot believe that grace is ministering to me even in my dreams, though why shouldn’t I?)–I remember the way the dream ended, with my certainty, expressed to this parent friend, that there is no joy like the joys that come after, and through, deep sorrow.

Those who experience much and feel much live much.

The boys and I headed to school the other day, a day of learning showcases and school reports sent home, and each of these things, and each of my kids, brings its own echoes of my (much-mentioned-in-therapy) stuff–achievement-as-identity, anyone? How about some approval-as-worth?–and the very specific ways my children face the world with their own strengths and challenges. Watching them navigate a world that both will see and appreciate them, and won’t, a world in which there is much exploring to be done before they find their place (and even then, it can move), and all of it is just so much, when one takes the time to feel it.

But the rainbows. They keep showing up, and on this morning, one arched through the air before us and remained there as we parked and entered the school. It remained while one boy went to play basketball and the other went to play soccer. They’d each come home both bruised and built up by their days and so would I, but for the moment there were the six yet infinite colours, this recurring promise of grace that only shows up in that perfect mixture of sun and rain.

I do not like to leave the house after dark. I do not like to leave the house, period. But I’m well acquainted with the fact that I have to, and that it benefits me not to remain indoors for all of my life even when I want to because that’s where the Netflix and wine are.

Last Friday, the penultimate day of Sydney’s annual winter light festival called Vivid (back after a two-year hiatus and, honestly, the only thing to live for in winter since Christmas here is in the summer), I had to decide whether to live up to my Big Talk from earlier in the week of taking the ferry into the city to see the lights. Problem was, the lights came on at 6 pm. After dark. And Little Brother? He was leaning into the introverted side of his personality pretty hard, begging not to go. I sat by the fire with my Kindle and wondered if we might just skip it this year.

Luckily, we had The Husband and The Kid to force us into the car. Also, there was the promise of burgers and fries that we would eat on the boat, which we did as we were slung across the waves toward the harbour. Once we disembarked, we headed through the teeming throng toward Baskin-Robbins, since apparently food is our sole motivator because it works, and while we finished our cones we stood, shivering, in front of the Customs House to see Ken Done’s installation.

And then? Home, via boat again, the lights of the Opera House and several booze cruises that I may or may not have thought about jumping ship to join illuminating our path. This is winter in Sydney, with its lack of Christmas and insulation in homes leading to a singular experience of cold that you just don’t get until you’re wearing three layers in front of a fire while it’s 65 (18 Celsius) and sunny outside.

Our first Vivid here was during a visit from my cousin and her husband, and since then it has felt like a beacon, a midwinter life raft, a celebration reaching far beyond the lights themselves. I remember, from my first winter (and every one after) in New York, how the cold and short days can catch you unaware, how one evening you realise you’ve sunk into a seasonal depression (unlike, but often mixed with the regular kind for fun!). How dangerous the dark can be, but also necessary, because without it there’s no light.

I’ve narrowly missed branches and plummets during pre-dawn runs; have had near-collisions with cars in the dark; have sunk to the bottom of a psychological pit, all because of a lack of light. But I’ve also watched dawn creep in, slowly sometimes and sometimes all at once, the golden rays of sunrise never failing to return. I know that we have to have both: that to be fully alive is to feel, deeply, the dark as well as the light.

The family we passed on the street the other day, having not seen them for years, and when I uttered that to them and the boys–how much older they all were, how long it’s been–it struck me that we’ve been a family ourselves longer here than we were back in Atlanta. The “you are precious and loved” mantra/promise I repeat every morning to the boys in the car and how, now, they tell me I am too. The arm slung around me in sleep, the acknowledgment of hard-fought victories over the dinner table, the bursts of light in the winter: little sunrises everywhere, if only I look.

I spent some time watching the sunrise this morning.

It was only a few minutes, because people got places to be, always and also…anxiety, but I watched it, this winter spectacle with its array of orange fanning across the clouds. This is the secret: winter sunrises–the most painful to leave bed for, the hardest to get to, the darkest before they’ve dawned–they are the best sunrises.

These days, I choose to see winter sunrises. But so much of the beauty in my life I have witnessed by grace’s coercion. It just won’t take no for an answer when there’s life-altering, breathtaking beauty involved.

“Why do we do this to ourselves?” a friend and I commiserated over text before we convened with a group of other moms on a winter’s night over pizza and wine and felt grateful we had done this to ourselves, marvelling at friendship on the way to our warm beds, and after I dropped her and headed home alone I watched the nearly-full moon hang golden and low in the sky.

“Why do I do this to myself?” I cursed as I stuffed myself into the wetsuit inside my car while the heater blasted and the water churned, waiting, and only once I was in it and my face unfroze did I remember the singular clarity of the sea in the winter.

“You have to be his inner voice,” the book on autism instructed in a way I would have heard as overwhelming law not too long ago, but in that moment I laughed at the recognition of the way I was told to do that before he was speaking–to narrate everything–and how I’m still doing it, and how we are all made to do things we never expected but are somehow being prepared for even when we didn’t know it.

“I felt I had been brought into the world,” Lucy Barton narrates about a moment in New York and, reading the words, I knew I’d lived them too, in that same place that I felt driven to when I’d run out of other options and, once there, had come to life myself. How many had told me not to go and how much would not exist if I’d listened, and how later her mother says to her, “Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and…did it,” and I think about how it’s the same for me except…I was kind of pushed into it, by relentless grace that forced me into every place where I’ve been brought into the world, into life: relationships, cities, countries, waters, moments.

And today, both kids are home sick, and they’re dancing around the living room while I try to think and write and we all sniffle our way through this part of winter, and I’ll wait as always for the beauty of the moment to show up, now or later or much later, whenever the sun finally rises, and I can finally see.

So much of my younger life was spent oriented to a finish line of my own creation: finish high school. Get into college. Finish college. Secure a career. Get married. Have kids. One by one, I ticked off these finish lines as I passed them, the journey to some longer (and more fraught) than others. The way my therapist described the academic/professional one in particular as I was graduating from my postdoc program and trying to figure out what to do next, my life had been a triangle, and I had travelled from base to apex, everything coming to a point. So what was after the point?

At that time, it was a new triangle, a new wide base and journey that took me to New York, a new narrowing of purpose toward a more specific faith and a certain person and a rooftop proposal and a move and a wedding day.

And then…yet another base. Domestic life, a new home, two kids. The ideas narrowing to actualities. To people. To a different, but more real, reality than I’d envisioned. I admit I lived to get past certain things, to check off a box or cross a line and turn life into events, into achievements, to put behind me for the next thing.

I’m learning that if I look at it in terms of finish lines, they don’t move as much as become starting lines. But that’s exhausting, really, because who has the energy to go from one race to another? To turn life into scenery to pass by?

Yesterday, Little Brother ran in the area’s school-wide cross-country event. He woke complaining of a headache, then a fever, neither of which were particularly true but as a former kid who faked being sick, I recognised the symptoms for what they were, avoidance, and talked through it with him. “The one thing you have to do,” I told him, “is have fun.” I went on to make some jokes about blasting farts along the way, none of which made him smile or laugh that hard. Only when we got to school and his friends admitted they were nervous did I see him begin to relax, his signature smile finally making an appearance.

This is the kid who puts all the pressure on himself, who says he knows he doesn’t have to be perfect then proceeds to try anyway, who is still learning that his worth is not tied up in what he does. In other words, he’s me for most of my life. And I’m running alongside him, trying to slow him down so he can breathe.

His nervousness reappeared when he got on the bus, and only when we met him at the track did that smile come back as he described the fun ride over, but still with eyes scanning the area, looking for the next thing. At one point we sat together to watch the girls’ race and one of the Voldemort-adjacent adults from The Event Previously Discussed appeared in front of us, talking to his kid: “Are you a winner? Yeah, you’re a WINNER!” LB looked over at me, I said, “Gross,” and we both laughed. He was ready.

And so he ran. Two loops, two kilometres, somehow ending up keeping pace with and running alongside one of the kids who had previously accused him of cheating, which I think is because life is hilarious and he’s a better person than I am, so all the photos I have of the race itself have that kid in them too. I ran between two points on the loop to yell for him, and The Husband and TK were stationed at another point. We had him covered, as much as possible, but he still was on his own most of the time. Such is life, I guess, when you’re keeping up not only with your own “finish lines” but those of your kids as well.

He ran the whole way, and I knew how he’d feel at the end because I’ve been there too: the exhaustion, the euphoria, the relief…and then, the next thing, all of life one thing building on the next, with barely time to breathe unless you stop and make yourself do just that: breathe. Look. Live.

He neared the end of the second loop, and I ran toward this finish line as he did, meeting him there, giving him a place not just to finish, but to rest. To breathe.

“I once was lost, but now am found,” reads a framed canvas on our bookshelf. I bought it back in 2016, before we left Atlanta, when I thought we had found our home–the first house we bought as a couple, the doorway we crossed with the boys when they were fresh from the hospital, the rooms in which they cried as newborns and between which we shuffled, half-awake and -coherent, as new parents.

That canvas was packed for our move across the world a few months later, and now it sits in the soft winter sunlight while I glitch over whether I should put on some Christmas music to enjoy in front of the fire in June.

It’s not so much how we found ourselves here, but how we’ve been found here.

Because those moments don’t go away–the glitches, the double-takes, the recognitions that this is not what we knew, but it’s what we know, and it’s where we are known. Driving down the (left side of the) road, realising half of the people I know are asleep because it’s the middle of the night of a different day where they are. Translating (poorly) the temperature from Fahrenheit to Celsius. Hearing an accent, wondering why they’re talking like that, and remembering it’s not an accent, not here.

A few weekends ago, we voted in our first election. I geared up for long lines and boy whines and, instead, was greeted by sausages on the barbecue, a bake sale in progress, and a line that was shorter than our explanation to the boys of what was about to happen. We headed home the way we came–on foot–a few minutes after we headed there, heads spinning at the ease of it.

Sometimes it feels like things should be harder. And they are, sometimes. But I’m so grateful for the many ways in which they are not.

For Little Brother’s Saturday morning soccer games, populated by our own little family of families who’ve met on these pitches for over two years now. For the same group convening the next morning for a birthday party, discussing the school’s light show from the night before–one of my very favourite nights of the year, where we’re all bundled together on blankets, gazing up at the sky together.

The Kid came home from school the other day, detailing his “problems and benefits” as he always does, with a big benefit to tell: they finally passed the ball to him during a class netball game and he went on to score four times, cheered on by the kids who only thought they knew what he could do before but are clearly still learning. I think about how long that process is, really knowing someone, how it can go on forever, filled with tiny moments of surprise, confirmation, growing comfort.

I think about how what I loved about New York was the ability to walk several miles without seeing one face I knew; the anonymity I craved that comforted me then. How now, all I see are faces I know. How belonging is never complete, and I sure haven’t felt it most of my life, but how, here, in the most unlikely of places, we’ve been found by it.

Yesterday, I went to my church women’s group for the first time in over a month. Many things have kept me from it lately, primary among them Little Brother’s desire for me to read with his class (and who can say no to that face?), but yesterday I did both and even squeezed in a walk across the Harbour Bridge in between. Upon arriving, I found only one member of my group there, so we were combined with another group, this one consisting of ladies all my seniors–most by a lot–and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t just pull a Charlotte and bust out of there.

I stayed, though, and what a gift these ladies were; how wrong I was to think the next hour would be anything but the romp through their sassy attitudes and constant stream of jokes that it was. People, and life, can be surprising. I forget that.

One of the ways life has surprised me is by showing how wrong I can be, to the point that I spend most of my time shrugging these days, wondering what I really know after all, and sort of gleefully admitting I’m probs no better than Jon Snow, which is so freeing. But it doesn’t keep me from having an opinion! About everything! It just means that I’m now open to the idea that I don’t have all the information, and that other people are worth being listened to–especially if they’re from marginalised groups that I used to shun but now live in glorious proximity to.

“What if heaven’s not real?” The Kid asked me on the way home from school yesterday, and instead of firmly telling him it has to be, there’s even a book with the title, he and LB and I had a conversation about doubts and choices and kind of everything, and I felt the space around us expand to make room for all that, even as we drew closer together within that space. This is what it feels like to make room for questions, for differences, for possibilities that I used to shut out in fear but now know there is room for in the perfect love that holds us.

Because here’s the thing: we haven’t been to church in awhile, because pandemic, but also because I’m tired of being gaslit by messages of what we should be doing and lists of places we should show up and, really, by anything other than a message of rest and grace and all that’s been done for me. I’m tired of politicians who claim to be Christians but vote to redirect funds away from the most vulnerable among us (and don’t give me any BS about how the church/private sector should be taking care of them because they’ve had hundreds of years to try and it hasn’t happened yet). I’m tired of kids dying at their desks and of churches sweeping abuse allegations under their patriarchal rugs (fun fact: integrity demands we examine systems that prop up our own power, so pass me by if you’re a man who unblinkingly accepts complementarianism).

What I’m here for, what I’m being kept alive by, are the million little ways grace shows up outside of four walls on Sunday: how ANZAC biscuits taste like the cookies my grandmother kept in a glass jar on her countertop when I was a kid; how swimming in the rain is definitely a thing; how my fortnightly zoom movie group is its own form of church; how it’s cold outside but that means it’s also fireplace season; how LB tells me about his “nervous days” and I get to know–and tell him that I know–exactly what he means, and my entire life can make sense in a moment.

How I still have blind spots, but grace doesn’t, and so it may sound like an excuse, but I am so thankful that God and that grace aren’t limited to the places and parties and people I once thought they were.