I still believe in summer days. The seasons always change and life will find a way.

This will be a short winter for our family.

When our plane touches down in Sydney on New Year’s Eve, we will exit the airport into summer, and a new home. All of which makes this season–winter, Advent, Christmas–especially poignant.

It’s also especially stressful, especially sickness-ridden, especially busy, especially everything.

On Sunday I went to see The Nutcracker with The Sis and The Niece. We weren’t out of the driveway before TS and I were bitching in the front seat about, you know, life, finishing each other’s sentences and speaking in shorthand like we do, and TN piped up from her booster in the back with a giggle. “You two really are sisters,” she said, and I sensed her delight: that she will one day share such rides and conversations with The Niece, Too, her own role in their family having recently changed from Only Child to Big Sister.

As TS and I sat in the darkness sipping drinks from the bar, TN moved between our laps for the length of the show. I peered around her at the dancers onstage, the music flowing from the orchestra pit and the recesses of my mind, which has memorized each note after years of hearing; years of seeing; years of being in the audience and one year of rehearsals and performances myself. I told TN that, how I was in the show when I was about twelve, and she exclaimed, “How COOL!”, and I bit my tongue which would have acidly replied that it actually wasn’t super cool for a preteen to be a gingersnap alongside people half her age because she had gotten a late start while her contemporaries were en pointe in such meatier and prettier roles as Mirliton and Snowflake.

But I had been in those studios, watching others rehearse those roles and then moving into pointe shoes myself eventually, some of the scars still present on my feet today. I watched on Sunday with a knowledge base full of struggle and pain and humiliation and occasional glory, and it meant all the more for having been through it. I looked at their feet, and I spotted the ones who, like me, didn’t have the best feet–bad feet, I believe they’re called, and you can’t get too far in the ballet world with those–but I spotted some anyway and felt a kinship–for those who have to point harder, and work harder, who may never belong but show up anyway.

It was heavenly. I sat for two hours, wine flowing, seat cushioned, TN’s weight intermittently on my lap, and through tears I tried to capture the moment that is, especially this year, all too fleeting: this togetherness, this comfort, this knowing and being known by everyone around me.

I’m crying a lot this month, in case you wondered.

I’m grieving what I trust to be a gift but what, in its grace, still allows space for grief: this feeling of having finally made a home, of having deep friendships with people who know my scariest, darkest thoughts and share theirs; of people who have heard my story and not run away; of people who share life with me in all its ugly beauty. And it seems so unfair, I keep griping to Management, that this is the time when we would be moved ten thousand miles away. It seems rude. Unfitting. Painful.

It’s a huge disruption, is what I’m saying.

Then, during a brief walk on a cold and wet morning as the weight of all there is to do rests on my shoulders and my eye gushes infection and four loads of laundry sit waiting for their turns, the thought breaks through: what is Advent itself, if not a disruption?

This season of waiting, of hoping, of the collective world, believing and unbelieving alike in this whole crazy story of God showing up as baby, holding its breath because it just feels, knows, something is going to happen. If there is a month filled with more built-in anticipation, I’ve never known it. And even as we wait, when the thing does happen–when the dawn does come–it is not at all as expected. It does not fit into our predetermined categories, doesn’t tick off the boxes on our wish lists. It shows up as something brand new, unsettling us from our comfortable spots and notions and asking way too much, only to end up giving it and more.

This is Advent: a breaking in of grace. This is what showing up looks like.

I put drops in my eyes and wait for healing. I do the vomit-soaked laundry, wipe the butts, go to the last dinners and wrap the presents and say the goodbyes. I get an email from a mom whose son got his own diagnosis, and I think that there’s no way I could add one more thing to the pile but I email her back anyway: because I’ve walked in those shoes, I’ve danced to that music, and so I know, and that is what I can give. I look ahead to the next few weeks and think there is no way this is really happening–haven’t I had that thought so many times before?–and I scurry and fret and run and struggle–but most of all, I wait. I am waiting even when I don’t know it. I am waiting, always, for the holy disruption however it shows up, and waiting for it to be revealed as just what I always needed.