Plans In Pencil

There is the moment after the candles are blown out and the wrapping paper is tossed into the bin and the leftover cake is crammed into Tupperware and the presents are stowed in their new spots, after the noise has died down and the singing has subsided, when you’re left with your thoughts. And these thoughts often consist of two questions:

How did we get here?

And where will we go from here?

I am no stranger to accepting flights of fancy, fantastical stories of angels heard on high and shepherds in their fields and men following stars across continents. Yet I’ve somehow gone through much of my life with a blind acceptance of the story highlights that leaves out room for questions, for mystery, for the nuance of all that’s not known.

Ten years ago, grace did a number on me that disabused me of my intolerance for mystery. It was, and is, a long and painful process with moments of searing glory. I am not enough for it–or, as I read recently, maybe I am enough, in the way that the loaves and fishes were enough: not until they were split apart by miracle, into miracle.

The wonders of my children’s minds and bodies never cease, never have since that day ten years ago when the first emerged from me: their coos giving way to conversations, their teeth falling out then quickly replaced, the endless pairs of shoes they’ve outgrown, their why’s that sometimes have answers and often don’t. When The Kid was born ten years ago, his first few years set us up for a deviation from plan, which I should have been used to after a deviation from Alabama to New York, but I still held the developmental milestone sheets in my hand and requested a sit-down with management. Initial defiance gives way, daily, to an acceptance born of the awareness of the gift we’ve been given–twice–in two healthy sons who have their own ways of looking at the world.

What else could matter? Oh, my anxious mind can find plenty.

Especially when it comes to that future-oriented question from above, one that wakes me up at 3 am and fills conversations with The Husband after they’re asleep and sits in the air between me and a friend and our cake and champagne on an unseasonably cool December afternoon. What about high school? What about this camp thing? What about independence? Alarm clocks going off in my brain as I clamour for a certainty that has never been my lot: I left those shores long ago.

Mystery feeds us: bread falling from the sky, darkness giving way to light, salt water surrounding a home ten thousand miles from where we started. The quiet cold of Christmas is what I’m used to and we’ve had a taste of it here recently, an aberration for the natives but somehow, for me, a gift. A mystery. Maybe–a gift because of its mystery.

The winter toward which we are headed, in a couple of weeks, as we fly back east toward our people even as our people remain here, the people who have emerged for us not through blood and DNA but because they see us, and we see them, and we sit across tables and in parks, me sharing champagne with one, the other answering my children’s questions as they converse on a patch of grass. Winter, to which I’ve grown a bit partial with age maybe because it strips down to the bare essence the way naturalist Anna Comstock wrote about trees:

In winter, we are prone to regard our trees as cold, bare, and dreary; and we bid them wait until they are again clothed in verdure before we may accord to them comradeship. However, it is during this winter resting time that the tree stands revealed to the uttermost, ready to give its most intimate confidences to those who love it. It is indeed a superficial acquaintance that depends upon the garb worn for half the year; and to those who know them, the trees display even more individuality in the winter than in the summer.

A life that lays us bare by not giving constant answers but instead feeding us mystery is one that opens us to the sight of those brave enough to venture into mystery themselves. Soon, God and Covid willing, we will fly toward winter then back to summer, our people in both places. On an afternoon when this finally became real to me, I fought waves of anxiety over all the packing to do, all the planning, all the layers needed. I looked up and saw TK walking by, smiled and told him I love him, and he responded by giving himself a high-five. “That’s how I say love,” he answered, this decade-old mystery of mine who makes me believe in all sorts of things I never did before.

What does it take to feel this alive?

Just past the halfway point on my morning run is a spot from which I can see six beaches at once. Six beaches. This is wild–beyond what I imagined back in my single, childless days of hoping to one day live near some water. Now, I’m surrounded by it.

Took awhile to get there, though. First, there was the little matter of landing The Husband and the kids; then there was the minor issue of being shipped to Australia against my will. Then, a sweaty, stress-and-Covid-filled house hunt, and only then did I start to explore the world outside our new front door. Months after that I finally built up my mileage to the point that I reached this point, turned around, and gasped at the view.

We were watching The Grinch the other day as part of my mandated Christmas-movie-every-day-of-Advent schedule, and Little Brother announced at a crucial point: “Here it comes! His heart is about to explode!” I don’t always pay attention during these viewings but I definitely did not remember that. Then I watched as The Grinch’s heart grew a few sizes, which was what LB had meant: this explosion into new dimensions. This taking up of more space and the changes that come with it.

It may as well be an explosion, because it’s usually disturbing and painful, this kind of growth. The proliferation of capillaries and expansion of lung tissue to add distance, the annexing of rooms onto the heart that didn’t exist before to include the kind of love that can only be accommodated by spaces deemed accessible. Accessibility, diversity, disability–these words that were never on my radar before and are now part of my daily parlance. Language, it changes with heart changes. And the world, it’s suddenly bigger.

We went as a family to the Entertainment Quarter this weekend, and a traffic and parking nightmare gave way to a sea of people, the likes of which we hadn’t encountered since before lockdown (the first one? the second one? I can’t even remember). By the time the boys and I left The Husband to hunt for a park and we got to the movie tent, tensions were high. The Kid put his foot down.

“It’s too loud. I’m not going in there.”

Cut to some pleading and promising and a girl who definitely didn’t want to be working on a Sunday, and finally we claimed our seats among the friends who were waiting for us. LB sat between me and his friend, gasping at the view; TK sat on top of me, his hands over his ears and mine over his. I felt the girl at the entrance watching us. When the show was over, she approached us and said some kind things and I accepted them because that had been one of my better moments (luckily she wasn’t there for the birthday party a few days before from which we had barely escaped alive, #blessed).

Then the group of us passed a booth selling balloons and while we waited for the boys’ to be filled, the lady filling them looked at TK and asked if he’s autistic. When she learned we speak the same language, she told me about her similar son. “He’s gorgeous,” she said, echoing the earlier girl.

A few days later, LB emerged from the school gate with an award in hand. Citizenship, which is basically, as a friend told me, “for being a great person,” and in my younger years of academic achievement I’d never gotten one of those, but now? I couldn’t imagine a better gift than having a kid who is known for his kindness, and having people around him who see that.

Sometimes I think about all it took us to get here–all the invisible workings of love and the brutal and beautiful and unceasing hand of grace–here to this view that you have to be taken aside to see, pushed and prodded and pulled and held to turn around and, in your better moments, gasp to behold.

The other day I was stretching in the park after a run and the owner of the local pug (the one who told me about dog therapists) walked by. He asked if I was multitasking, because I was contorted into a pretzel shape while reading from my phone, and I made a joke about being old and needing to stretch for hours after a run and that got us into a talk about a neurological issue he’d had after years of running and skiing and tennis that had nearly sent him to a wheelchair but, instead, relegated him to solely walking for exercise. We talked about all the activities that had doomed his spine, and how those same activities had probably put him in better shape to heal.

I’m imagining what the world would look like if some stories were never told. More importantly, I’m imagining what it will look like when they are.

This is what keeps me writing: the need to tell stories that are true, and that are particular and personal and also somehow universal. There’s an old adage that, when writing, the more specific the writer is, the more relatable they will be. Those who are willing to face all the facets of their own stories will be met with recognition by those brave enough to see themselves there, in those stories too: in their spectrums of love and hate, peace and turmoil, victory and failure, joy and pain.

The Kid, as I’ve mentioned before, has been announcing to people he meets that he has autism. Most recently he did this next door, at a dinner our neighbours hosted, to another family. Per usual, they were taken aback and responded kindly. A few minutes later I was talking TK through a tough moment and afterward, the mom of the other family related to me that her good friend has an autistic daughter, and we talked more in-depth about the particularities that are also universalities: the difficulties of child-rearing and discipline and…well, love.

Later, we were watching Harry Potter and TK and Little Brother were asking for more details on Harry’s scar: how his mother’s love both protected him and led to that lightning bolt on his forehead, but also something deeper than the visible scar, and somehow even more real:

“Your mother died to save you. If there’s one thing that Voldemort can’t understand, it is love. He didn’t realise that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign…to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good.”

I’ve learned that love breeds curiosity. A willingness to ask questions and wait to hear the answers. A patience to watch labels unspool into stories and a humility to see ourselves not outside of, but within those stories. I’ve learned that this world is made more for the people who tell only certain kinds of stories–people of a certain colour, or ability, or preferences–and how I’ve benefitted from being in those groups and having my own story told by default. And I’ve learned that there are other stories that deserve, and demand, to be told: stories that begin with “I have autism” or any other number of introductory lines that may start off differently from what we’re used to but, in their specificity, align with our own stories until they all become one, told and listened to by anyone brave enough to hear.

When I was younger, rainbows always popped up as surprises: the colours appearing in the sky out of seemingly nowhere, spotted by someone who happened to look up at the right moment. They felt rare, and fleeting.

Now, I’ve grown talented at finding them. Hunting them, even. Something inside of me recognises the conditions that make for a rainbow, and when those conditions converge I’m already looking up. I’ve learned to recognise, and look.

This learning does not take place by accident, or within ease. It happens when there have been enough rainstorms for a new pathway to be forged in my brain, and soul, and once the light has shone through the clouds at just the right angles, and once all that has happened, it comes down to me, finally deciding to pay attention. To turn my attention.

There are patterns that are only formed through difficulty and repetition and then, they show up just everywhere, always. Only brains that are different can see them.

I’m reading a book that looks–and at times reads–like a manual, but is actually turning out to be a key. A doorway, into The Kid’s neurology and my own, into understanding and empathy. Things that do this aren’t just books, or manuals, they are new pathways. This one, in particular, is unlocking the barrier between myself and so much I didn’t know, and in this way it is freeing me–and, I hope, TK, and all of us. (If you love anyone who’s different, I can’t recommend it enough. If you love TK, I may require it.)

One of the lines in it that made me laugh, though, was this: “A rigid and inflexible child meeting a rigid and inflexible adult is a disaster.” YA THINK? I muttered to myself, and remembered (not far back, more like…that same morning?) all the times that disaster had occurred in our own home. And how much conversation, and understanding, has unfolded since, and is yet to unfold. Because this is the pathway that is forged: we don’t understand, and there is Different. Then we do understand, and the Different becomes six colours in a perfect sequence against an azure sky, and we know those colours also reside within ourselves. There are no lines between them, only a gradual and glorious blending.

Or there are lines at the bottom of a pool that become musical notes that we sing the words to on our way to school. And once we get there, Little Brother either spots a friend to cross the gate with or sprints in on his own, growing ridiculously too fast but still stopping for a kiss before heading toward his future. And the two of us left, we become the greeting crew, to the point that my friend, who stuck around this morning, said, “Well this is nice. You get to see everyone!” And my post that started in TK’s anxiety is now–well, still that, but also one of connection. And at some point, every morning, there is someone who shows up–a friend, a teacher–and takes the reluctant TK under their arm (even when they have to reach up to do it, as he is also growing ridiculously too fast) and walks him toward his own future, or the next six hours of it at least.

Breakdowns at the school gate are transformed into gatherings, and separations tumble toward reunions, and this new pathway becomes our regular one–a perfect convergence of storm and light.

I took Little Brother to a birthday party over the weekend, and at the start of it I found myself telling a friend, “I miss lockdown.”

I don’t, really, but also, I do. I miss it when there are birthday parties, because I don’t like most birthday parties–only the ones that are Our People, that don’t involve heaps of Other People and seizure-inducing noise and lights and a noticeable absence of alcohol. So I bribed LB with some candy and popcorn and told him that I was going to get his dad, who desperately wanted to watch him jump on trampolines and it wasn’t really fair to make him miss this, and I skidded out of that parking lot and back home and handed off the keys to The Husband.

A few days later I found myself at another post-lockdown, “normal life” event, this one a weekly gathering of a church women’s group, and beforehand I did the thing I always used to do before these meetings, the thing that gets me through an hour of being around a group of people: I walked across the Harbour Bridge and back. And after, as I sat in my chair and mostly listened, I felt the rawness, the new vulnerability that we’re all experiencing upon reentry. It felt like softness, and generosity. And I wondered maybe, as we’re finding our way back to the places we used to inhabit, if we might end up finding better-fitting places than before.

Every morning I seem to wake up like Mia Wallace in that scene of Pulp Fiction when she’s just received her adrenaline shot: a frantic grabbing for my phone to find out what time it is, a frantic search through my brain of what’s on today. Anxiety is my alarm clock. But the thing is that I know this now, better than ever before, and so franticness is supplanted (or at least diluted) by breathing, and other tricks like prayer, and before I’m upright I’ve given myself a mini-therapy session.

We’ve gotten to know each other, and ourselves, during lockdown. There is less fighting, and more recognition.

On the walk from the car to school, the boys and I have a discussion on swear words: which ones are the worst, what they all mean. They say the words out loud, and I imagine what would have happened if I’d done the same as a kid. There’s more room here, where we are right now, and grace has gone before us to make it that way. When The Kid says, as he daily does (while Little Brother scampers off to his classroom) that he doesn’t want to go, he tells me it’s because I won’t be around “to express his feelings to,” and I think about all the failures and therapy and grace that I’ve gone through so that he can even articulate that, and I feel profound gratitude alongside the anxiety and sadness and every other feeling that fills our morning.

That afternoon, while TK is at speech, LB and I walk to the cupcake shop and as we eat outside, I talk to him about what it means when we say TK has autism, and how that shows up in our life. And he nods, thoughtfully, over his cookies and cream, and then says he can’t wait for Christmas, and I think about all the times I used to avoid hard conversations because that was what people did, and how We Don’t Do That Here because of everything that happened on the way here.

When I was younger and our phones stayed at home plugged into the wall, I wondered how my parents knew how to get everywhere. We would just jump in the car and somehow, three hours later, end up at the beach. How did they know?

Now, where we are, it takes less time to get to the beach. But for longer distances, my kids see me with a map: they see me apologise, acknowledge my mistakes, ask for directions, request space, talk about feelings and other hard stuff. There is more room to move around here, to fall down and get back up (or, more likely, be picked back up). Every time we’re lost, we’re then found, and in the finding, we look around and see what is new, and what was there all along. We see the grace, and we see that it means that here, we belong.

My sons landed a plane the other day.

What happened was this: we were offered a move to Australia, I said no, we moved anyway, we met our people. One of them told me that every year, her husband would gift her with a solo overnight stay in a local hotel. I looked at The Husband with stars in my eyes. I got a few years of these stays in before a worldwide pandemic hit. I took two years off.

This year, I went back.

We use points, not cold hard cash (credit) for these visits, so our options are limited to the hotel brand that takes those points. The place I usually stay is being used as a quarantine station, so I picked a new place, in a slightly different location, a place that has a history and multiple renovations within that history and that, I feared, could be haunted. Between my fear of ghosts and my typical anxiety, I entertained the idea of scuttling this tradition altogether. Surely it would be enough to just head upstairs a bit early on my own and watch Netflix from our own bed?

Then I thought of a room service cheeseburger. And I said, No. I need this. Homeschooling was enough to make me need this. So I went. But not before I told the boys that everyone deserves some time alone, and that it’s healthy, and that they should never be afraid to ask for their own space. Because, as a former (home) teacher, I believe in teaching moments.

Then I waved off the Hyundai and headed up to my private room.

Spoiler alert: the hotel wasn’t haunted. Or, if it was, none of the ghosts bothered me, which was polite of them. Instead of paranormal activity, I limited myself to a trip up to the rooftop pool and a glass of Prosecco. Then I had my room service, some rosé from home, and a viewing of The Sound of Music. The next morning I went back to the pool for a short and chilled rainy swim while a couple made out nearby.

The whole thing felt equal parts awkward, hesitant, and wonderful which I figure is the most any of us can ask for these days.

That next morning, the Hyundai collected me and the four of us headed to meet friends at a nearby museum. We raced through it, looking at microcars and eucalyptus trees and fashion and planets. Then the boys queued up for a turn at an aircraft landing simulator. I watched as The Kid handled the controls and found his way, landing the plane seamlessly. Then I took him to the bathroom and came back to find that Little Brother had done the same thing.

It seems that a big part of what defines the second half of life, from a certain common vantage point anyway, is its lack of surprises. The big deals are done and it’s more of a settling-in phase. But this morning, I drove away from my planned trip to the indoor pool and toward the slate-grey skies over the beach, and kept going–past the first few steps into the water that left me rage-filled and freezing and into the strokes that left me warmed-up and calm. Nearly five years ago, no became fine which became home, and now some government official is processing our Australian passports. A second ago, the boys were two and five and now they’re landing planes. Grace is still full of surprises.

I walked across an empty land
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand
I felt the earth beneath my feet
Sat by the river and it made me complete

At age forty-four, I am running more than ever.

It happened accidentally. I’m not training for anything–which is what’s usually required to get me to push beyond my ordinary limits. And the weather is warming up, which typically cuts my runs short (and may still). Also, I run the same route on every outing, which can lead to burnout.

Finally, I am old. Older than I’ve ever been, in fact.

So it doesn’t make sense. Which is usually when, somehow, things make the most sense, upon deeper inspection. Three times a week, I tie my laces and do my stretches and set out from my front door on a path that has been mine for a year and a half now: a path strewn with harbours and boats and hills and beaches; a path that used to end far closer to home than it does now before it loops back to where it began. To home.

I’ve pushed it bit by bit, or maybe it’s beckoned me bit by bit. First, further down the concrete footpath. Then, down the looping hill toward the wharf. Then, to the crosswalk that connects to a side street. Then, emerging from that street onto the beach and its seaside path to the other beach and back again.

I’ve listened to music, then different music, then stories, then other words. I’ve watched the sun emerge, spilling light into darkness until the darkness was gone, and I’ve watched the same sun hang low in the sky but high enough to make me squint until it was at my back.

I’ve seen indescribable beauty, and all of it while I struggled to keep going.

We’ve been here in Australia nearly five years, a half-decade making memories that constitute the bulk of what resides in the boys’ brains now. This morning, one of those memories popped up on social media: the video of when The Kid’s therapist asked him to be in her wedding. Two days ago, she came over so we could meet her newborn son.

Yesterday, I knocked on the door of a house I’d been to once before, for a coffee with several of the school mums. This time, I was meeting with the new owner of the house, the mum of an autistic son who will be starting at the boys’ school next year. We were put in touch by a mutual friend and I told her about our first day, when I hadn’t known anything, and how I’d had to creep back onto the classroom porch to leave the recess snack I hadn’t known was required, and how I’d heard TK crying in the classroom.

I had felt so helpless, so in the dark in those days before the light crept in. I always seem to forget that it never stops showing up, until I remember. Until a memory tells me so. We’ve been here before. And it has always been okay. Eventually.

These revisitations are the language of grace’s faithfulness. “Do I have to go in?” TK asked me on his first day back to school last week. I nodded, reluctantly, and that answer somehow seemed to set him free. He pushed forward, reluctantly. Today, Little Brother bounded off toward his classroom like he always does, then I looked up and he was coming back, hesitation marking his features. He wouldn’t say why–yet–but coming back helped him, in some unspoken way, to push forward again.

You got no time for the messenger
Got no regard for the thing that you don’t understand
You got no fear of the underdog
That’s why you will not survive

We are back to regularly scheduled life, for the most part, and as with most things this is wonderful and hard and everything in between. Reentry paired with warmer weather and longer days? Wonderful. Reentry paired with anxiety and hyper-vigilance? Hard.

We’ve talked about it, the boys and I, about how this is a process and will take adjustments. How we need to be patient with ourselves and the world, that there will be hiccups along the way. And how. A few nights into his return to school, Little Brother woke me up with the coughs of a forty-year pack-a-day smoker. The next day, he and I received a couples Covid test (negative, tks) and he proceeded to bounce off the walls all day and ask what we were going to do next (the answer: watch me fold laundry).

The Kid’s adjustments, like mine, have veered more toward the internal: anxiety (forever and ever amen) and our manifestations of it. My body likes to awaken me sometime in the hour prior to 5 am, then assault me with everything happening in the next week or two until I finally give up on going back to sleep. TK has been struggling with feeling overwhelmed too, which he expresses through outbursts of frustration, loud and emotional. It’s been…a lot.

He had one at the beach last week, at the spot we haven’t visited since before the lockdown, where we met friends after school. Something happened that made him feel slighted, and he lost it. Luckily, we were among people who know us and are in too deep to bail now, so we all rode it out together and soon exited the storm and hit smooth skies. He had, as I’ve told him, endured one of his triggers (feeling unseen)–even during his outburst, he said it: “This is one of my triggers!”

Then we endured one of mine. Champagne glass in hand, heart aching. I watched as the kids all played together, and TK occasionally joined in, and some of the others also popped in and out of the group. But I watched his differences play out socially in a way I hadn’t really in some time, and it hit me afresh–in a triggering way, if you will–how he often struggles to be seen and heard and understood; how friendships that were easy when they were younger have taken different shapes since then and often pass him by or leave him out, without malice from anyone, just because that’s how things sometimes go. And it hurt.

Seeing these truths with open eyes, it pierces us. It reveals our wounds, our vulnerabilities. Our triggers. But I wouldn’t have made it this far (which is to say, alive, and hopeful) if I didn’t believe that these are the exact places where we will also be healed. Where new life will be found.

Because not seeing? Not seeing TK, or others like him, or our own flaws and wounds….this is where I’ve been before, and where I’ve been taken from to be where I am now. It has been brutal, and harrowing, and hard and wonderful. I’m learning that a willingness to be disrupted is essential for a journey through grace. And wouldn’t you know that being disrupted is one of my triggers?

I’m beginning to think it’s also one of my saviours.

My swim this morning sucked.

It was just after sunrise on a day that had been predicted to be rainy. Instead, the glowing orb’s rays bounced off the water and shimmered on top of it and altogether blinded me on my laps headed south, as it blasted my view to the east. Too much sun was my problem.

Also, my goggles leaked. And my ear plugs wobbled. And the water’s visibility was terrible because we’re approaching summer and boats are stirring up sand. But mostly, it was the sun.

Is this what five years of living on some of the most beautiful beaches in the world gets you: an assumption that every swim will go smoothly? Views that you begin to pass by on your morning run or drive without even seeing? All the things that enamoured you upon your arrival now becoming just white noise in the background of your life?

It’s been a hard week. LB has loved plunging back into school, but he’s tired–and TK and I, we’re anxious. Anxious about the dropoffs and pickups that are back to being part of our days and the elements of traffic and timeliness and social interaction they reintroduce (and that we’re rusty on). Anxious about his own return to school next week and the mixed feelings it will bring, the adjustments it will require. For his part (and mine, and Kevin the Dog’s), he’s missed his brother and playmate.

All of this has led to a week of Big Feelings, culminating yesterday in an Epic Tennis Lesson that ended up being more about emotional regulation than hitting shots. We were all ragged and weepy at the end, and I had my usual “I’m not cut out for this” doubts about my own parenting, about my own choices in life that led me here and not to some solitary existence on an Italian shore, writing from an apartment overlooking the sea. In my best moments, I come through for my kids with all I’ve learned from therapy and personal growth and meditation; in my worst, I resent all they demand of me that I struggle to give and that doesn’t involve handing them an iPad to numb their–and my–feelings.

We’ve had breakdowns. Meltdowns. Undoings. Rage-filled screams and apologies and all the emotional rollercoasters over everything from the existential pain of being fundamentally misunderstood, to being told we’re going to the beach after school (I wish I had a photo of LB sobbing at the school gate after TK delivered that devastating news. #privilegedAF). Which means that after I read this quote from Alain de Botton, I felt seen:

“A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real–albeit very inarticulate–bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development that it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well–properly well–through a stage of falling very ill…In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.”

Let’s give it up for breakdowns, for without them (according to de Botton, and me, now) we’d be gliding along to the white noise without even living.

I’ve found this to be undeniably true. So often, I have to be shaken awake from the safety I’ve constructed around myself. I have to be decimated to be rebuilt into something new, something better. I have to be moved from where I was to where I’m meant to be. I would almost never make these choices myself; life (grace) makes them for me. And I hate them, until I don’t.

I stopped my laps early this morning because it was just too hard, all the sun and water in the spots I didn’t want them to be, and instead of continuing, I stayed. I stayed in one spot and treaded water there, floating where I was, turned toward the beach. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James writes in the voice of the governess narrator regarding her charges–the children she now loves–“Instead of growing used to them…I made constant fresh discoveries.”

It’s so much easier to get used to things/people, then demand they stay that way. So as not to upset the status quo. Then you’re stopped, or moved, or decimated, and you look around and finally, again and maybe anew, see. I floated in the water this morning, finally and forcibly disconnected from my goal, my plan, and felt the blasting sun at my back. William Blake’s words rang in my heart:

Look on the rising sun: there God does live…

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love

There in the water that assaulted and held me, I turned toward the sun.

The other morning I finished a run in the usual spot, an off-leash dog park near our house. I was waiting for The Husband and the boys to show up with Kevin the Dog, and while I waited I was treated to an appearance from the local pug and her owner. We started talking, and he told me about a friend of his who has been taking their dog to a dog therapist. I’m all for therapy, but this just sounds like flushing money down the toilet, right?

Or…it’s the most brilliant subterfuge ever! The pug’s owner went on to say that it sounded, from his friend’s description, that the therapist was dealing more with the issues of the dog’s owner than those of the dog itself. Immediately, I began thinking of all the people I could refer to “dog” therapy.

The Kid is, as they say here, “going well” with his own psychologist, and I realize that I’m benefitting by proxy. Last session, we worked through some strategies for settling ourselves, and she emailed a book that I read through with TK and Little Brother. Strategies meant to ground us in our bodies in the present moment, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t been giving them a test run.

The first was to look around at your surroundings and locate two blue things in your line of vision. The second, close your eyes and identify two sounds. The third, take two deep belly breaths.

We’ve been trying these with TK to varying degrees of success, and I’ve found the same success rate with myself, but…it’s something! It’s something to be both grounded in what my body is experiencing, and at the same time to observe my body’s experiences. To be within and without, together and separate. This is the groundwork of meditation, and it’s also been the mechanism of action of Lexapro, and I find prayer does that trick as well. In fact, it seems to me that sanity itself involves some balance of these apparent extremes–of many extremes, actually. My sanity, at least.

I’m beginning to understand that I don’t live life so much in the middle as a function of being even-keeled and…well, just being balanced already, but as an alchemy of various extremes: depression and euphoria, anxiety and calm, fire and ice, what have you. “Happiest and saddest, inside and out,” writes Miranda Cowley Heller in The Paper Palace, and don’t I know it.

The feelings book sent by “our” therapist made the point in kid-friendly language: that it’s hard to be angry and curious at the same time, or mad and able to laugh. The boys and I agreed, because it’s true: how many times in my life have I been so committed to one extreme that I lost the ability to be curious, to explore other ideas, to ask questions, to not take myself too seriously? These days, I think, I spend more time vacillating, travelling–recognising that I’m on one extreme before seeking to balance it with the other. Maybe this is some form of health, or at least adventure: wandering purposefully from one side of the see-saw to the other instead of sitting all balanced and pristine in the middle of it.

It makes for stories, to be sure. And apologies. And forgiveness.

And so it is with children who have been in lockdown, from LB who travels from tears one second to proclamations of love the next; from TK who–when we’re at the beach one cool and cloudy morning that doesn’t make for warm swims yet somehow, in its extremes, leads to the best wave-riding I’ve done in awhile–complains grievously about the toddler who’s interrupted to “help” build his sand castle; a few minutes later, I see TK reach out and give the boy a pat on the belly and a big grin. And his mother and I start talking, and I tell her about my boys, and TK tells her he has autism, and within minutes we are telling each other our stories. The day has gone from sun to clouds, calm to wind, in a matter of minutes, and we have travelled within it, and sometimes these unlikely ones are the best beach days. Then we say goodbye, and as we walk to the car I notice my two blue things: ocean and sky, always there.