Be forewarned: some of the following content will make it sound like I recently graduated from the Debbie Downer School of Life Management. Read on at your own peril.

When I moved to New York in the summer of 2005, a few people remarked that I was brave. While flattered, I knew the truth: I wasn’t brave, I was desperate. What’s brave about a person who exhausts every possible option of safety before finally, like Jonah, accepting her fate and heading to the big city? Home no longer felt like home. It was time to leave, and so I did. Nothing felt brave about that–it felt more like resignation: no husband, no ring, no prospects? GET THEE TO THE ISLE OF MANHATTAN, SPINSTER! (I was twenty-seven at the time. It’s possible I was a bit melodramatic.)

When The Husband came home with the news that moving to Sydney could be in our future, I issued a hard pass. Contrary to over a decade ago, when I felt run out of Birmingham by bad choices, Atlanta had grown to be home. I didn’t want to leave. “God’s going to have to make it pretty clear if he wants to move our lives across the world,” I said smugly, knowing he would never do such a thing after we’d become a family there and were surrounded by more family and friends that felt like it. Meanwhile, God looked up from his heavenly knitting pattern, smiled sweetly, and proceeded to love me right out of my comfort zone anyway.

We’re here now.

I wrote in an email to a friend that I tend to front-load all the hard stuff when a big transition comes. There is no “honeymoon period” for me at times like this: I drop into the new comfort-free zone like I was issued from a war plane and land with a thud, laden with maps and strategies and luggage, and immediately upon touching ground I curl into the fetal position, paralyzed by my trees-for-the-forest mentality, undone by the weight of all I’ve determined there is to do RIGHT NOW. I take some medicine, say some prayers, check in with people who understand. Eventually (a day, this time), I start to uncoil from myself, look around like a baby seeing the world for the first time, realize maybe it’s not all a threat. It’s not all bad. The nausea subsides a bit. I’m able to eat and poop again. Inch by inch (or centimeter, if you’re Australian/nasty), I come to life.

In case you were wondering how NOT to manage change.

As big a fan of grace as I am, I tend not to be so solicitous with it in the way I treat myself. (Or, often, others, though that’s a post for a different day.) When our plane touched the ground I was relieved, and thrilled. The boys had performed magnificently on the flight, and–again–though I’m a big fan of grace, I still thrive on a great performance, especially when it is mine or reflects well upon me. Both The Kid and Little Brother had slept for the greater part of our transit. TH had held LB for hours and I had spent some serious cuddle time looped around TK, spooning like it was our job. The fourteen hours were the opposite of the drudgery I’d feared; instead, they were fuzzy-edged with sepia overtones, a testament to our family’s deepening bond and maybe even TK’s and my growth away from anxiety. A grandfatherly type seated behind me pointed to TK and said, “You have a great boy there,” then told me how TK had tapped him and whispered hello while the man was sleeping (thankfully, the man found this endearing). I watched four episodes of a disturbingly fantastic show. I ate and drank without expelling it through either main orifice. THE TRIP WAS A SUCCESS–MARK IT IN THE BOOKS AND POST IT TO INSTAGRAM.

Then, to reiterate, we landed.

Shit got real.

We got to our house–our home?–and ALL THE PLUGS ARE DIFFERENT. I had known this, of course, and we were even materially prepared for it, but that didn’t take away the sting. The layout was different from the house we’d just left. The drawers were in DIFFERENT PLACES. We had to unpack. The grocery store was small and had DIFFERENT PRODUCTS. We got back to the house and I remembered that PEOPLE HAD LIVED HERE BEFORE. I wondered about skin cells, if the tap water was drinkable. Our shipping containers had not arrived yet (they weren’t supposed to have). I felt…unsettled. TK started freaking out about the red-light-laden motion detectors and as his anxiety grew, so did mine. I felt tired and unmatched to the task(s) at hand. I wanted to go home, or for this to become home immediately, and neither was an option. I considered the fetal position, or escaping to the airport while my family slept.

Instead, I stayed.

I started counting moments, trying to treasure them in my heart. There was the gift from my newest friend waiting on our doorstep when we arrived: Matchbox cars for the boys that made them grin hugely and feel special, a bottle of wine (hell yes), a bracelet engraved GRACE (perfect). There were the continuing messages and understanding from friends back stateside. There was the time the boys and I had had on the deck earlier, they quietly playing while I lay on the couch and smelled the beach air that is just EVERYWHERE here. There was the sunrise through the plane window that I’d watched with TK, how I’d told him we were chasing the sun to our new home and he’d smiled, whispering it back to me: chasing the sun. There was his approach of the ocean–a brand new ocean–when I’d thought he would have run. There was every faithfulness in every second, even the ones when I didn’t feel it, the commitment of grace to me and to our family beyond our comfort and certainty and into a foreign country, to ten thousand miles and beyond.

I am not as adventurous as an escape to New York and a cross-world move may make it appear. I like to have my stuff where I want it and for no one else to touch it. I like for my plan to materialize the way I dictate it. I like to drive my car on the right side of the road and not nearly have diarrhea every time I make a turn. I like to hit the turn signal on purpose instead of the windshield wipers accidentally like some kind of DUMBASS. I like to not feel like a dumbass. I prefer, instead, to look put-together and adept. And maybe a little adventurous. And I’m none of those things, not really.

BUSTED.

I like for things to be easy.

And when I told one of my people this, she said the perfect thing from across the ocean, sixteen hours behind me (because sometimes you need reminders from the past): she said that if things were easy for me, for TK, for us, then that wouldn’t fall in line with all we’d been through. That’s not our story.

This is.

And because we sometimes need reminders from our past, Facebook showed me pictures from four years ago, when we’d spent New Year’s Eve helping TK recover from a surgery that ultimately wouldn’t work and would lead to another. I remembered that there are hard New Year’s Eves, and spending one in a beautiful new place feeling unsettled isn’t the hardest. Because of grace, I’m allowed to feel it, though–the pain of transition, the very real grief of reaching for things that aren’t here now, yet. But I’m also allowed to–no, get to–wait in that now and not yet and know that it won’t always be this way, that the waves that led us here will also make this home, even as part of our home will always be somewhere else, hearts broken and healing at the same time, the only thing unchanging being the grace that never lets us go.