There has been some…concern. Which I expected; you can’t write a whole post about how depressed you are without the people who care, and about whom you care, checking up in one way or another.

But there have also been improvements. And, maybe more importantly, there has been communication. Identification. Messages sent along invisible wires, appearing as voices and words, saying–as CS Lewis knew they would–“What! You too?” Which is the whole point, isn’t it? Our seeing each other, finally. Finding our way home together, even as we are led there with each step.

Let’s just be honest: the heat hasn’t fucking helped. You want to get down to brass tacks and that’s where you start. I mean, who wouldn’t be down, at least a bit, walking around in drenched underwear? Showing up with a perpetual sheen on the upper lip? These are not good looks on the best of days. But this is life in the bottom hemisphere in February…so I am told. (I am also told that this has been one of the hottest summers on record. BETTER BE.) But there’s been a lifting of that lately, in between rain storms, and the effect is palpable. For me, weather is a trigger, I suppose. Most focus on the dull grey of winter and its biting cold, and yeah–that can suck. But summer, in its sneaky, sunny way, can be just as painful for a contrarian like myself. And I have never found an anti-perspirant that lives up to its name. So there’s the practical side of it.

There are also the cloudier, murkier, more complicated and insidious territories of hormones, emotion, post-pregnancy and post-relocation life. Of…well, life, period. Which always seems to be changing, whether your address is or not. You would think that this would make me press in, voluntarily and desperately, into what never changes. Which is actually a Who. Into the unfailing grace offered there. But I forget. I always, always forget.

Grace doesn’t. It never leaves, even when I do.

There are some, by the way–and I don’t know, maybe you’re one of them? If so, welcome, and hope you don’t mind the profanity; it’s a permanent part of the decor–who are politely frightened by such extremes of emotion. Who would rather avoid that drama altogether. And there are days when I would, too. Those days would best be filed under the heading “Denial,” because on those days I try to pretend I have it all together and things are easier or better than they are. But here’s the thing, which I can say as I’m now seeing glimmers of light around and ahead: I kind of like being this way. (Remind me of this the next time things go pear-shaped. So…tomorrow. Depression and anxiety are so annoyingly non-linear.) I don’t know how well I would wear evenness anyway. I like that I see bruises in sunsets, that the colour spectrum is vivid and piercing for me. I like that I feel things deeply, even when they hurt. I like that walking around with open wounds is making me more aware of others’, and making me a safe space for them to talk about it. I like the particular brand of community that is built among those who used to feel alone. I like living with my whole heart.

But damn, is it hard. And I have to say “I’m sorry” a lot, which I hate.

I like that my weaknesses are also my strengths, like two sides of a coin that is never enough on its own, but always sends me back to grace. That presses me into it. Which is what I and one of mine were talking about over email, I think, recently: how I feel like I’m being pressed uncomfortably down into that never-changing love that won’t let me escape it, no matter how many hatches I try to locate. I first felt it on the track of my old gym back in Atlanta: a nearly-physical sense of pressure upon me, and the recognition of it matching that pressure I feel on my hands every week when I open them to receive the blessing, after the bread and wine. And now, she wrote about how our children teach us about grace, and how this season is making way for another one. I thought about that, and about what I’d told her about feeling pressed into love, and how depression–that word–it sounds like the opposite of press. About how it all, though, is delivering me deeper into the pressed love that never lets up.

I don’t know. I’m still working on that one.

Anyway, there’s this: we already know The Kid could read, but now he’s showing other people, at school, and every night he demands to read the bedtime story, so that Goodnight Moon is now recited to us, TH and I looking at each other over two smaller heads and it is always a balm, no matter the day. There is the way Little Brother tries to read now too, how he’s recognising some words, how he wants to be like his brother. There’s the way TK loves babies, how it connects us to people everywhere, from his schoolyard and his classmates’ little siblings to the strangers on the ferry, and our playdate this week is with a girl in the class whose two-year-old little sister asks after him.

There’s the haircut and colour I got on Friday that, not for nothing, helped me feel lighter in more ways than one. There is grace in salons–don’t you ever doubt it. There are the cooler evenings on the beach with picnic dinners not on the sand with the birds (WE’RE LEARNING!) but on the grass in the shade of a tree, and the walks along the water after. There is the chair from IKEA, a piece of redemption from an awful afternoon of tantrums and humiliation, and now that TH put it together it sits in our bedroom and whenever I plop down on it, two little bodies always end up beside me. There are the little things that help sew you back up after the little things that started to undo you.

There was the moment at the salon when a motorcade full of sirens drove by, helicopters overhead, and they said Netanyahu was in town, and I thought about how one of the hardest things about being here is the feeling of disconnection. And here history is happening outside the window–I LOVE HISTORY!–heads all turned right, and I realise: I am not disconnected. I am just connected differently.