I finally cried in church this week. That hasn’t happened in a while; specifically, since we were back in Atlanta in our home church on Christmas day. I’ve missed the tears that come with heartfelt experience, that attend a weekly re-membering, the stark awareness of a grace that transcends my daily worries. The tears were welcome; they reminded me of home. They made me feel like we are getting to be at home here.

True to my nature, I’ve taken to adopting several routines here in Sydney: the repetition helps me adapt and relax and gives structure to my days. To the boys’ days. Most of the routines are centered around cupcakes and wine, but there are a few others. Some are carry-overs from back home in Atlanta: my nightly epsom-salt-filled bath, the morning and evening liturgy that mercifully remains the same across oceans and continents, God himself unchanging in the face of everything else feeling so different.

But is it that different?

The end of the day is, in so many ways, and that’s one of my favorite new rituals: after putting The Kid to bed, while The Husband remains with his allotted child, Little Brother, I head out to the balcony off our bedroom (I KNOW, but someone’s gotta do it) and take a look at the setting sun, since this is the season–summer–for it to set around 8 pm every night, the days long and often hot, the evenings splashed by the western glow of fading light. That light is more scattered and glorious when clouds are paired with it, filtering the beams and painting them purple and pink and orange, leaving me wonderstruck at the artistry of it all. Then I turn to the harbor(u)r on my right, the boats bobbing in the blue-gray water. I feel my blood pressure lower, and often TH appears beside me, taking it in too even though he’s had longer to get used to it over the visits he paid before we all moved, and he tells me about those weeks when he watched alone–how there was a different sunset every day.

So yeah, that’s not quite the same as the occasional day-enders I’d catch from the window back home, when I’d pull the boys out the front door and onto the porch to witness the setting sun through the trees of our neighborhood. We have a different view now.

But so much is similar. There was the moment in a local (and now favorite) pasta takeaway shop, after I’d heaved the stroller through the doorway and placed my order and waited in a rare moment of quiet with the boys then heard a familiar crying sound and saw that it wasn’t my #preciouschildren but those of the woman who had just entered with her stroller, out of which had clambered a boy who was now throwing himself onto the floor in a fit of passion. She sighed deeply, the same sigh I emit several hundred times a day, and glanced at me with exhaustion in her eyes. “That sounds just like my two,” I told her, and she smiled ruefully, pausing to think. “I mean…” she began, and I waited. “I mean, it’s hardly worth it sometimes, is it?” I think she was referring to leaving the house with small people, though she could have meant more and gotten away with it in the moment, sweat running down her face as it was mine, goodwill evaporating with the day itself. She said it, and I felt less alone and told her so: “I know exactly what you mean.” The language of kinship, of CS Lewis’ “What, you too?”

And there’s church. The place that, outside of our actual house in Atlanta, felt most like home there, surrounded as we were by so many who know our story and embrace us because of and independent of and in spite of it, who prayed us all the way here and haven’t left just because we did, whose messages light up my phone alongside other friends’ and family members’ and carry with them an awareness of those moments that define us, that solidify our existence. You can’t replicate that; it will not bear re-creation. But maybe it can be echoed, transformed, so that it is both similar and different, its own thing here yet not without familiarity.

This week before the Sunday service the boys bounded into the old building with its arched ceilings and stained glass windows, and they ran to the front where the musicians were practicing. They bobbed up and down in their rhythmless white-boy dancing, then chased each other through the rows and around the pews, and the pastor–new to them and yet known from long ago to me–laughed as he approached. He mentioned gin and tonics, getting together, and it was like the pieces of life that I had felt were disappearing were suddenly just being rearranged, falling into their new places. The “for now” part of “home for now” falling away…for now? Or for good, for no matter where we are, this new place will always be a part of us too. A part of our story the same way New York is, never to be unfamiliar again. What a gift, to be scattered around in so many directions like the setting sun.

And when the music played later, the kids in children’s church with TH because it was his week, I heard an old song in a new arrangement, and it was the same but different, and I felt new yet familiar tears fill my eyes in a kind of baptism into this new yet forever the same life. Later, before the sunset, our house made its sounds and instead of frightening TK, they felt familiar: “That’s just the fan turning on,” he told me. As he drifted off to sleep beside me, more peaceful this night than the last and still more peace to cover ahead of us, I thought about how it’s the different sunsets, the different colors, the different places and people and experiences that tell the whole story and make us part of something bigger than ourselves. That mercifully take me out of myself and the tiny world I’d inhabit if given the chance–that choice denied me by a love that won’t let life be so small. The next day, the boys and I turned in our new car onto our new street, and as I grabbed for the new garage door opener that feels strangely similar to our old one, TK spoke to me from the backseat: “Mommy! We’re home.”