Plans In Pencil

Our beach days have been limited by rain this year, as La Niña whips up the wind, drives the waves, and drops temperatures, and even those days with time spent on the sand have been brief forays, short walks instead of long mornings. On one of those recently, I noticed for the first time a craggy shape to the horizon, to the point that I pulled out my phone and checked Google maps to see if there was, just beyond Manly Beach, a land mass I had been unaware of. Any horizon I’d ever seen to that point had been knife-edge straight.

Realising–re-seeing–something anew can be disorienting. A jagged horizon made no sense to me until I understood that the same wind tossing massive waves onto the shore was churning the ones further out, too, turning a straight-edge into a serrated one, and forever changing my expectations upon gazing into the water’s distance. I showed it to the boys (teaching moments!), telling them what it had taken me forty-four years to learn, the world suddenly bigger in a small way.

Expectations, flipped upside down and turned inside out, become invitations. At this year’s cross-country carnival, I expected most of my cardio to come in the form of helping The Kid finish his three one-kilometre loops of the course, the way I did last year, unexpectedly and in a less supportive bra (#liveandlearn). Little did I know that my pulse would raise more in response to what happened with Little Brother.

When he crossed the finish line, I missed it because I was sorting out TK at the starting line–and because he, LB, got to those cones a bit earlier than expected. He ran to me, waving a card that read “First Place,” and I embraced him through my surprise until I heard some of the surrounding kids and parents start shouting words like cheat.

Apparently LB, in his excitement and confusion over traversing the course for his first time ever, had taken a wrong turn and cut out part of the loop, beating the kids who had been ahead of him and leading to their accusations of cheating–accusations quickly picked up and hurled by their parents. LB was quickly reduced to tears, having no idea of the mistake he made and no intentions of cheating (seriously, if you know this kid, you know he’s (a) honest to a fault, and (b) way too afraid of getting in trouble to pull a stunt like that). I approached one of the mums who was freely tossing out insults and asked her what was going on. Quickly, she backed off, but my blood pressure was shot to shit by then anyway, and the rest of the day was spent sorting the situation out and unsuccessfully trying to calm myself down (rather than imagining a world in which my comebacks are somehow both well-thought-out and immediate and leave my nemeses crumpled on the ground).

Long story (or cross-country course) short, it was all worked out in the end and became a teaching opportunity for all of us, I daresay (except the douchebags at the finish line, who will likely continue their Reigns of Asshattery throughout their lives, not that I’m bitter, but grow the f*** up). LB will place and advance to the inter-school level because of his status before the cut-through debacle, and we both learned important lessons about honesty and character and how to construct a shiv using only anger and a stick.

And though it may seem I’ve broken my promise to Get Past It by writing on it now, I also know that Getting Past Things is overrated before reflection (in the form of writing or therapy or both) has occurred. I also know, now, that rather than meeting my expectations, the day turned into an invitation to something deeper: the truth that I am not just one of my sons’ advocates, though that advocacy may look different on behalf of each. That the world is pock-marked with icky moments and disappointing people (including, very often, me) but it’s also full of people who have our backs. That the best stories, and horizons, have dips and rises and twists and turns, which can be off-putting before they are beautiful and leave all the more room for the ministry of the unexpected, or as I like to call it, grace.

Before I became a mother, I had big plans. I had plans all over the place–I was simply oozing with plans. Plans about Raising Children with Patience and Teaching them Respect, plans that would lead them to be resilient, self-sufficient, and well-behaved.

This morning, when another driver wouldn’t let me over as I hauled ass to my sons’ school’s Mother’s Day Breakfast, I got over anyway and flipped him off when he beeped at me. “Well then let me over you piece of sh*t,” I muttered while my children sat in the backseat.

Last night, my older son came into my bedroom after I’d just fallen asleep, and in his semiconscious state he turned on a light. I told him to turn it off. He didn’t. Didn’t even answer me. So I stomped to the light switch and slapped it off myself, and when he apologised, I remained silent, preferring an emotional wall built with bricks of anger and self-righteousness to warmth and vulnerability.

Some people just shouldn’t have kids. My friend lives next door to a couple who yell at their children constantly, shout things like “You’re a horrible person!” and “I can’t believe you’re my child,” and my heart breaks at this and I gasp, then I live through my own mothering mistakes and regret-filled moments and wonder what damage I’m doing.

When we were traveling earlier this year, I had a great idea that would teach the boys independence. I told them I was walking down the hall to the hotel laundry, literally seconds away, to put clothes in the dryer. I told them to stay exactly where they were and that I’d be back within two minutes. They agreed. When I returned, a minute and a half later, they were gone. My husband found them another minute later, wandering the halls crying and looking for me. My experiment had not gone well. They haven’t wanted to leave my side since.

Motherhood has taught me that I am not patient, but petty. That my children are not (yet) all that resilient or self-sufficient. That getting them to sleep as babies should have been the least of my concerns. That I am not the kind of person who will put spinach into their brownie mix (more than once).

That they force me to confront corners of myself that are unrepentant, irritable, dark, and fearful. That they expose layers of my being that would be best left away from the light. That I am not a success story–not the one I’d planned to be–but, rather, a case study in repeated failure. I have failed to model mindfulness, to respond patiently, to get them to love vegetables, to give me the respect of privacy in the bathroom.

I think back to all the plans I made, and how none of them included teaching my children to be kind. And this morning, after I flipped off that driver, they defended me. After I rebuffed my son’s apologies then finally turned to him and we fell asleep clutching each other, he woke up the next morning not remembering any of my harshness. How this morning, one sang to me and the other showed me the heart picture he drew for me that he only “partly rushed through to get to lunch.”

They want to be around me all the time. They want to be around me all the time?! They meet me with forgiveness, with deep reserves of kindness. They are constant evidence of a grace that holds us all, that makes it not about success and failure but love that never runs dry.

I didn’t plan on that.

God’s acts of redemption work forward and backward, throwing fresh light on all our stories. –Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black

As previously mentioned, The Kid’s therapist has assigned him (us) a mindfulness activity to be accomplished every night before bedtime. This time period is, historically and currently, when The Worst Version of Myself takes over, full-force. I can barely form a sentence that doesn’t drip with resentment or exhaustion and, therefore, I’ve learned that the best thing for me to do is remove myself from other people (my family) and watch Rick Steves on YouTube from my bed in the hopes of giving myself the strength to handle my last requirements of the day as a mother.

“It doesn’t work if you don’t do it!” I seethed last night to TK, whose feelings about this new ritual/mandate are perfectly clear because that’s what he does with his feelings: show them. I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a quandary, too, because I’m left wondering how much of that Oscar-level feelings reveal is due to neurodivergence and how much is due to my constant encouragement that the boys talk about their feelings, to the point that sometimes I wish they’d shut up about their feelings, because there are too many damn feelings in this house especially at 8:30 pm.

“Is it worth it? Let me work it,” mused Missy Elliott right before she put her thang down, flipped it, and reversed it, and I wonder right along with her sometimes if the work of therapy, of mindfulness, of talking through everything, of feeling everything, is worth it myself. Like this morning, when Little Brother–on this first day of term two–gazed at me like I was going off to war as I walked away from his classroom with the principal, who asked how he was doing. “I don’t know shit about fuck,” I wanted to reply, even though I do know, because he tells me, because they both verbalise their feelings on the reg, and it can be a lot. Feeling things is always harder than…well, not feeling them. Not facing them.

Or facing them on your kids’ faces.

And yet I highly recommend it, this hard work of grief, of digging through the surface to the reality underneath. Yesterday, the boys and I were watching the first Harry Potter, and I grimaced when Harry approached the Mirror of Erised because we’ve trodden this territory before. Sure enough, TK watched Harry watching his parents, and tears filled his eyes. He turned away for a moment, the emotion overwhelming him–this greatest fear children have of losing their parents being played out onscreen–and then he turned back. Then he turned to me. “This is just so sad,” he said simply, profoundly, and in a moment I was transported back in time to all the emotions I internalised when I was younger because that’s what people did then–how I would more likely have seen the sadness and pushed it away, but how he grapples with it, how they both do, right there on the couch as I sit between them, and we feel it together.

This is not small. It is not nothing. It is everything, this willingness to feel, to face, to grieve well, to sit in discomfort rather than reach for relief. This week I watch through social media as some of my favourite people gather for my favourite event, and the #FOMO is real, and I let myself feel it right there in the middle of the grocery store a day ahead and half a world away. These moments that start out as pain are invitations into something even deeper than that, a joy that includes yet surpasses it, a safety that is imperturbable and hard-won yet a gift, a form of staying that we can only do because of the grace that stays with us.

I die every day! –the Apostle Paul, née Saul of Tarsus

For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-many-years, I battled my ongoing need to stay relevant (as though this blog even accomplishes that, LOL) and skipped a week of posting. Our family was on the Gold Coast, which is the Florida of Australia and no I will not explain further.

We spent Easter weekend there, in the sun and intermittent rain, mostly sitting by the pool; I mostly waited for drinks to be brought to me. It was not the most somber of times, given it was our first real vacation in what feels like years (trips “home” do not count as they include too much travel, vomit, and obligatory events that involve talking). But there was plenty of time to think–a rare luxury these days, afforded mainly by the fact that the boys are now obsessed with reading, Praise be to God–and reflect on what shape Easter takes in our lives right now, after two years of an ongoing pandemic and its associated displacement from formal church and, well, life.

What I came away with, between Citrus Splashes and episodes of The White Queen, was this: I don’t have a hard time believing in resurrections because I see them every day.

I don’t know how it works for people who haven’t repeatedly watched their identity–the self-forged version that is user- and social-media-friendly, polished and pleasing–go up in flames. It’s likely harder for them to buy into rolled-away stones and empty tombs. But I’ve burned my own shit to the ground (accidentally, usually) so many times that, now, I just sit by the fire with sticks and marshmallows and wait to see what emerges from the ashes.

I’m still afraid of failure, which is hilarious because I’ve accomplished it so many times, and when I remember that, I am free. But that remembrance–that re-membering–most often occurs after a dismembering brought on by trying to avoid failure at all costs: to write, or believe, or parent, or live, perfectly. How cute of me. How desperately-in-need-of-resurrection of me.

This week, after the vodka had run dry and the pool was just a memory, we were getting the boys ready for bed. Our routine has, as of The Kid’s most recent psychology appointment (which has turned into a session with Little Brother and me too, #efficiency), been prolonged due to a therapy-mandated mindfulness exercise. In much the same tradition as my sprints from work to yoga class in New York City, which involved me dodging human traffic and muttering under my breath for people to hurry up so I could f*ing RELAX, this new addendum has increased our (my) stress quotient before reducing it. TK was particularly tired after a day in which I dragged them to a magical secret garden and bought them donuts (the nerve of me, making them do real shit during school holidays), and kicked off a complaint session that quickly overrode the calmly-voiced instructions of the Zen woman on my phone.

So I lost it, naturally, and apologised, por supuesto, and was forgiven, thank God, because that is how dying and coming back to life works on a daily basis: these moments of flames and ashes and rebirth scattered just everywhere. I’m trying to avoid the flame in the first place, though you can guess how well that usually goes, but I’ve been burned enough to know what’s on the other side. Might it be that there are no real wrong turns, when all roads lead home?!

Later, the boys and I were in the car and LB began to explain how he thinks TK’s autism works. TK was silent for a moment, then whispered, “Wow. I didn’t know you understood.” And I nearly stopped breathing (another way to die, if you’re keeping count) at the beauty of it. Death, resurrection, death, resurrection–I can’t stop seeing it.

And today, after five minutes spent at a museum exhibit that we paid way too much/waited way too long in line for, we spent the last few minutes of the sunny part of the day walking to the car, climbing in, and making a wrong turn. “Why are we going this way?” asked TK, and I explained that wrong turn I’d taken, then pointed out a part of Sydney we’d never seen but were currently driving through. I held my breath (not a mindfulness technique, FYI) and wondered if this would be the beginning of a tense and regretful exchange.

“It was a right turn,” he said. “A turn for seeing things.”

“Doesn’t the sky look so close?”

Little Brother said this from the backseat on the way to school two mornings ago, the last time it didn’t rain. We weren’t used to seeing the sun–La Niña has made sure of that for weeks now–and his interpretation of that development was a super-close sky. I often notice how The Kid sees light differently, how neurodivergence opens his eyes to other beams, but on this morning LB let me into his particular brand of light-gazing.

We set our clocks back an hour over the weekend, and that’s changed the light too: earlier sunsets ending our daylight hours sooner. Light falling in different patterns at different times as winter here approaches. It’s both disorienting and illuminating.

Tuesday, the day the sun was close, I headed to my harbour beach for the first time in about two months for an ocean swim, the water murky all around me, the rising sun’s shafts barely breaking the surface. I had to raise my head, look up rather than down, to see where I was going.

There is less light, all around us. But it isn’t gone. What remains stands out. It reaches into every spot.

“He never seems to tire of the glorious work of deliverance,” Beth Moore wrote recently on the work of grace in her life. “Sometimes we have no idea how much darkness we’re living in because our eyes have long adjusted to the dark. I just want to remind you today that he is there with you. There is no place so dark he would not enter to bring you into the light.”

I know this form of rescue. Often? It hurts like a bitch. We enter darkened cinemas or bedrooms or caves of our own making, places we sought for enjoyment or rest or safety, only to be rudely expelled from them into the glaring light, where we’re forced to bear the beams of love–the brutal, beautiful beams of love.

My children are so often the conduits of that brutal grace. I don’t know why it still surprises me, that I make mistakes with them that I regret later but that lead to moments of such searing redemption–the Kanye-less version of the wrongs that helped me right my songs. These moments of seeming darkness–expletive-laden exclamations over disastrous morning preps while the plumber sealing the shower upstairs pauses to listen–followed by tears, followed by rides to school drenched in forgiveness and new understanding. There is no light without the dark. When will I learn? I bring one, grace brings the other. Always.

A couple of years ago, for our tenth anniversary, The Husband gave me a necklace and some matching earrings (and a bunch of other surprises, but I already wrote/bragged about that, #sorrynotsorry). In the years since, I lost one of the earrings in an accident (the accident being that I was walking the dog in the rain and it must have gotten caught and pulled by my jacket because when I arrived home, it was gone). I often look at that lone earring and long for its companion.

This week, I was trying to untangle a knot from the necklace and the silver ball on the end of the chain–the ball that prevents the pendant from sliding the hell off into oblivion–popped off. I realised I had two choices-: one was to immediately head out and get a new chain. I opted, of course, for the second choice: to tie a knot back into the chain and return it to my neck.

Which is where it sits now, knot firmly in place to prevent another loss. The silver, twisted seemingly contrary to its nature, keeping it close to me. Keeping it mine.

I’m thinking about these knots as I remember a conversation post-school-dropoff with a friend, regarding issues our kids are having, issues we didn’t expect or plan for. “This part was supposed to be easy,” she said, and I agreed, because I did not schedule any bumps in this specific road and management won’t respond to my calls about it. A knot I’m currently unable to untangle, and maybe…maybe, I’m starting to wonder, if it’s meant to be there?

The boys are getting older, which, it turns out, doesn’t mean fewer problems, only different ones, and I find myself coming to terms with my decreasing ownership of their stories, commensurate with their growing ownership of them. Of their images, which I no longer freely post to social media because they have a right to decide if that’s what they want (and honestly? I kinda hope they don’t buy into all the propaganda and just say no. Opt out). So I’m more in my own head, or in schoolyard or text conversations, working these things out on the ground or over games of basketball with them (we have a solid arrangement with the indoor hoop in Little Brother’s room wherein they shoot running around and I, from a supine position on the bed, heaven) rather than through musings on Instagram. Maybe it will stay this way, maybe not, but it’s the shape of life right now, and I want to fully live it.

When you’ve been on one path for awhile, that course is safe and familiar enough that any deviation feels dangerous, unwise. Until the moment you have to decide whether to replace it with something smoother, less worn, or whether to see the new twists and turns–the knots–as, maybe, part of the plan all along. The knots slowly settling themselves into our stories, these rearrangements becoming repositionings allowing for new vantage points, a slightly altered, different, but wider vista.

These are configurations designed by grace, shapes wrought into our stories by love. There is no other way. And instead of tying a knot onto the end of my rope and hanging on (because who has the strength for that these days?!), I just let go and am held, held underneath and all around by the twist that prevents me from sliding off altogether.

We got out of the car yesterday and they were enlisting me in a game I didn’t really want to play (it didn’t involve lying down, you see)–the “cheese touch” game and, apparently, I had the cheese touch–and they took off down the hill towards school ahead of me. I quickly snapped a photo (from behind–that’s some anonymity, right?), and, through my knots of tiredness, ran toward what was right in front of me.

On Tuesday, I went to the boys’ school for my annual presentation to The Kid’s class about…well, him. About him, and his story, and his autism.

This visit is always preceded by the application of copious amounts of deodorant–because kids are brutally honest, and I am a sweater–that inevitably don’t do their job. This year, I invited Little Brother to join me, because he needs to feel special too, and he took the role of my “helper” beyond what I imagined, transforming it into a cocktail of “Emcee/Warm-Up Act-Narrator-Comedian.”

I tweaked the talk a bit, as I do every year because kids have a way of getting older and understanding more, so I threw in bigger words that they can now handle: words like neurotypical and neurodiverse and concepts like working memory and emotional aura. Some of these I added because I’ve only recently become aware of them myself. Guess I’m growing, too.

But what didn’t change were the things that keep bringing me back to this moment each year despite the pit-sweat and pre-show jitters: the look on TK’s face, a mixture of pride and excitement and joy. The look on his classmates’ faces, of realisation and relating and appreciation. The raising of hands in answer to questions that reveal they understand a bit of what he goes through, may even experience it themselves, sometimes. The way those who have heard it before remember that it took TK twenty minutes to learn to walk with his halo on rather than the doctors’ prediction of weeks.

And the aftermath: the thank-you from the kids. The back-pats for TK from them. The teacher’s appreciation and comments about how far TK has come. The coffee and conversations in the days afterward with moms of other neurodiverse kids, and the plans underway this year for a whole day at school to celebrate the different.

I am tired. This year we”ve had Covid, travelled across the world and back, endured constant rain and floods, and the world is angry and at war, no matter where you live. Either my low iron is back or things are just hard. But like patches of light through the clouds, stories keep showing up to save us. To remind us that there is deep, endurable beauty underneath it all.

“The kids really connect to the story part,” TK’s teacher told me after the talk, referring in particular to the first slides I’d shown back from his early days. I said as much to my friend over herbal tea this morning as we made big plans: let’s connect these kids to a bigger story. So they know who they are. So they know they belong.

After a bread factory in his country was bombed, Ukraine’s president asked, “Who could you be to do that?” What a stunning question–the moral bankruptcy it reveals of the people who inflict death and chaos on innocents.

But also: who could you be to do that? To do whatever your particular that is? To walk into a classroom each year and tell a story? The first year I did it in response to a mean kid; advocacy born of anger. (Hey, we all start somewhere.) Since then, I’ve pushed through the sweat to get to what’s on the other side: on the other side of my fear, on the other side of my anxiety, of my tiredness and impatience and myriad mistakes. In the midst of them. Because of them. Who could I be to do that? I could be a part of the story, a part of this grace that walks alongside me, carries me, to a beauty on the other side of the clouds.

I feel cheated of summer.

We lost a month of it during our trip to the US in December/January, which YES was our choice–our choice to see family amidst the blizzards and reindeer of Park City, the deep freeze of Atlanta, and the comparable balmy temperatures (seasoned with Covid) of LA. Once we returned to Sydney, however, we had barely settled in before the driving rains showed up, sending cars floating past primary schools and flooding our cinema.

Yes, our cinema is ruined. The floor and halfway up the walls, anyway.

And this sounds like such an asshole anthem–“oh no, my private cinema is flooded!” What’s next–will the yacht spring a leak? (We don’t have a yacht.) For God’s sake, there’s a war going on. And a dear friend had, today, a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction.

I’m not into comparative suffering, though, so I typically just focus on my own. And right now, I’m driving around with an emesis bag in my passenger seat, left over from The Kid’s early dismissal from school last Friday due to “violent vomiting” (he sprung a leak from the other side on the way home). I wait as the gastro firing squad assembles, wondering which of us will get hit next (spoiler alert: it was Kevin the Dog, who barfed all over the house all weekend).

Little Brother is going through something with headaches and noise at school that may be a cry for attention, or may be anxiety (that’s what, after visits to the ENT and neurologist when I was his age, it turned out to be for me), or may be something else we haven’t gotten to the bottom of yet.

We’ve sat in crazy traffic three times in the past week due to an exploded water main one day, and environmental protestors the two others (they planted themselves on the road facing oncoming traffic, thereby ensuring that all the cars on said road stayed there longer, emitting their pollutants into the atmosphere. #makeitmakesense)

But. My friend still has a sense of humour. And though all my runs have been tired ones lately, due to who knows what–long Covid? Weather-related depression? The heaviness of living in a war-torn, broken world? The possibilities are endless!–they are hitting that part of the year when it’s not too hot, not too cold, and they start pre-dawn so that the sun rises on me as I awaken more with each footfall.

The harbours are still brown from the floods, but this morning I met a friend at the pool. And the still-lingering, occasional showers mix with a persistent sun to create double and triple rainbows, the kind that you get to stare at for awhile because your running is slow these days, and you notice those sections where the rainbow isn’t just one colour, but a few of them blending together: those less-defined areas that are more than just one thing. There is a moment when red meets orange, blue meets green, to become more than either of them is alone.

Then you notice, after you pause to take the photo, that it shows the rainbow ending in a trash bin. Which feels, somehow, right, that you’d have to dig through garbage to find the gold.

The day of the traffic delays due to protests, I could feel one boy growing silent with anxiety and the other inching closer to yelling because of it. I alternated between those two poses myself, trying to breathe and keep calm and carry on (which was the motto during a war, by the way) before I tried a different strategy.

“Okay, until the traffic clears we all have permission to use swear words,” I told them. And, that valve loosened, the colourful language emerged. We made each other laugh with the words I was so afraid to say as a kid myself, the ones I’d thought would get me sent to hell (or, at the very least, to an endless stay in my room). As war raged and surgeries happened and traffic shuddered, we called things what they were. Slowly, cars began to move. And we pulled up to school just before the bell rang, inexplicably and fittingly laughing the whole way.

We’ll get lost until we’re found
Darlin’ here we go

Feel the blood
Rushing through my veins
Got some brand new wings
No we won’t go back

Last week was the school swim carnival. It’s optional for kids Little Brother’s age, and due to a misunderstanding about race lengths, he opted to stay at school rather than attempt 50 metres alongside about half his classmates. The Kid, however, was required to be there with everyone else his age, and he went into it without any plans to swim, other than the promise I’d made that when his age events were over (and, therefore, his required spectating commitments over as well), we’d leave to collect LB from school then circle back to the swim centre and have our own little carnival at the indoor pool there.

Fate (grace) intervened. The lashing of rain we’d been promised was only a flash flood that lasted long enough to cut off all roads into the centre, which I only mention because it meant more work for me in terms of parking/walking (award, please). When I arrived to the throng of students, TK spotted me immediately and we proceeded to hang out.

Then one of his teachers mentioned that there was a 25-metre “fun swim” he might be interested in. He looked at me, then considered it for a half-second before rejecting the proposal. “But what if…” I said, and watched his brain through his eyes as he entertained the notion.

Still a no. But then some friends encouraged it: one said he’d cheer from the sidelines, another said he’d share a lane and swim beside him. For my part, I suggested then cajoled then urged then demanded, because I could see he needed that extra push, and I could also see a few minutes into the future at the self-pride and confidence he’d feel after giving it a go. Finally, we all convinced him, but not without his protests that “he always has to do this sort of thing” (he hasn’t swum at a carnival in two years) and his eloquent articulation of having “two different feelings at once about it: excitement and nervousness.”

It was time to get in the pool, and he balked. His friends and I all begged. We promised. We bribed. Then I remembered that I was unwittingly prepared (just like Queen Esther) for just this moment, wearing my swimsuit under my clothes for our later, planned swim. But plans had changed, and like a middle-aged version of Superman with a visible C-section belly-flesh shelf visible through my one-piece, I whipped off my outerwear and jumped in beside TK, and we made it to the end of the pool, together. Together with a bunch of other people swimming, walking, and cheering alongside us.

It was horrific, and wonderful, which means it was a moment full of grace: space enough for all the feelings. Before that C-section scar was forged in my skin, I imagined I’d be the mom cheering from the sidelines at various athletic events. Instead, I’m the one who jumps in. Looking to the world like a helicopter mom, the idea I’d always shunned, but knowing I’m more of a submarine: trying (and failing, usually) to be discreet while slipping silently through waters both clear and murky alongside my kid. Not having planned to get into the water, but dressed for it regardless. The joke–and grace–on me.

And now, in the middle of the school day, I’m sitting beside LB, whom I picked up early because he was suffering from a “headache,” and he reads a book beside me, pointing to the word “color” and telling me that’s the American version. We speak a different language in this house–the language of neurodiversity–and also a few other ones: American, Australian, and one that, as an oldest child, I’d never learned but am picking up from LB: that of the youngest child, and its attendant worries of being overlooked or forgotten, and right now that looks like two little feet burrowing into my legs while I type.

Later I’ll go back to my foreign-language study manual and read again about how an autistic person needs to be taught organisation (with a Z if you’re American/nasty) to succeed, and I’ll think about how I wasn’t planning on teaching that particular skill back before that scar in my abdomen appeared but how “lucky” it is that organisation is my jam; how I wasn’t planning on jumping in the pool but somehow ended up dressing for it. How this “job” of loving two small humans into their own personhood is so much, too much, more than I can handle, and how I am still, somehow, made just for it.