I know, honey, and you’re so good at trying.

I am a goal-oriented person. This is, of course, a #humblebrag, because who doesn’t want to sound like they have plans and achieve them? But what I’m saying is that I’m a goal-oriented person to my detriment. As in, take a harmless or even positive thing and twist it into a nightmare. Because here’s a funny story: I’m a goal-oriented person, then I had kids and they shat all over the goals I had for them and myself. They just showed up, pooped everywhere (literally and figuratively), and shredded my carefully-curated lists with their tiny hands, then did a dance of triumph during which they knocked over the remainder of my plans and dreams, and left the room laughing.

That may not have actually happened. But sometimes it feels like it did. Like it does. And it is one of the most awful and wonderful things to ever happen to me.

Left to my own devices (which I am NOT, #grace), I treat life as a project. And I include “people” in “life.” I treat my family as a project. I treat an across-the-world move as a project. I treat making dinner as a project. I treat my children as a project. I had so many plans for them, y’all. And none of them included a spectrum diagnosis, or potty-training at age five, or being hit in the face by the little one because he thinks it’s funny. My children, before I had them, were the most well-behaved little angels (robots) you’d ever seen, and didn’t complicate my life a bit! In fact, they put away all the dishes after dinner! They certainly never attacked each other in the shopping cart at the IKEA checkout until I nearly had a panic attack/aneurysm.

I’m rolling with the punches, though, you know? When life knocks me down, I get back up. When the going gets tough, I get going.

Except…not. I’m tired. I’m living in a foreign country ten thousand miles from everything we know. I battle anxiety and depression. My older son faces his own challenges, and my younger son…is two. Often terribly so. Some days, the goals I used to have feel more like the punchline to a mean joke and the only realistic goal is to make it to bed without drop-kicking anyone. So they’re changing, those goals. And so am I. And not, I repeat, NOT, by trying harder.

I’ve been trying to get The Kid off his sippy cup for years. He is even less a fan of change than I am, so all my efforts were to no avail: letting him shop with me for a new cup (I want that one! SO I CAN NEVER USE IT), picking out cups with his favourite characters splashed all over them, hiding his sippy. Then, a week ago Sunday, he dropped his cup on the ground by Mosman Bay. In slow motion, I saw it bounce on the sidewalk then arc through the air and land in the water. I turned to The Husband, panic in my eyes. “His cup!” I yelled. “HIS CUP!”

TH kind of shrugged, threw his hands up. I mean, the cup was ten feet below us and bobbing away. Nothing could be done–which is exactly when most important things happen (and maybe should be the name of my memoirs). By that evening, TK was drinking out of a grown-up water bottle, and not due for a second to all my efforts. Later that week, he informed me one morning that he did not want to wear a pull-up to school. He hasn’t worn one during the day since. Has he pissed his pants since then? You betcha. Has he shat them? Um, does a bear do so in the woods? But much like Pat and Tiffany in the closing moments of Silver Linings Playbook, I will take what everyone else (including my pre-kid self) calls a “5” and look at it as a 10, because This Is Us/Progress, and it is a triumph. Just like the forty-five minutes of Moana that we made it through at the theatre a couple of weekends ago. Or the moment last week, when TK and Little Brother and I were walking down Spit Road to TK’s school and his classmate’s mom slowed their car down so we could greet each other, then outside his classroom she told me about how her son spends time in the mornings picking out toys to bring to school, turning them over in his hand and murmuring, “I bet James would like this one.” There’s the girl at his table who spontaneously hugged him goodbye yesterday. There’s the boy in the other kindergarten class who also has a shadow therapist and whose mom I ran into the other day, and we shared their nearly identical histories with each other. There is the self-labeled “Team James” group of therapists who really see him, who love him.

There are the moments when LB hits me and I want to scream, to hide under the bed, to engage in a vengeful game of “Why are you hitting yourself?” with him, then I realise that I have enough air in my lungs to take a breath, and enough sanity left in the tank to see what’s going on, and I give him the attention he so desperately aches for, and we are both changed by it.

It’s not every time, but it’s getting to be more of them. And none of it is what I had planned. That’s what makes it a gift: I didn’t earn it.

I’ve been drinking too much lately. I cut myself some slack after we moved because I needed to. There were little wars on all fronts and survival was the endgame. But now we’re all calming down and, you know, air in my lungs and sanity in my tank and all, and I can finally look around and really see: see the answered prayers, the grace on all fronts that’s actually fighting the wars, that is bigger than they are. And I can see how I’ve allowed wine to go from a gift to a form of replacement therapy. My glasses were getting bigger and more frequent, and the bottles were taking fewer nights to disappear. My problem isn’t a physical dependence; it’s an unwillingness to stop overindulging. We went out on Saturday night and before we left, I was already dreading my Sunday hangover as if it was something unavoidable. I haven’t been enjoying wine, I’ve been using it. And I don’t want to turn it from a gift into oxygen; I don’t want to twist something meant to be beautiful into something ugly; I don’t want it to become an object of resentment for me or my kids. I don’t want it to “get me through the day” any more than I want caffeine to be the only reason I stay awake, or Likes on Facebook to be my touchstone of self-worth.

Grace does not demand that I make arbitrary, sweeping changes that don’t hold true to how I’m made; it shows up in my life less as the humanly-skewed ideas behind accountability partners and altar calls and more as someone sitting beside me, saying “Me too.” Its kindness is what changes me rather than my own self-will could, or a demand for publicly-advertised Service for the Kingdom ever would. Grace is quiet. It doesn’t lead to me smashing all my good (average) wine into the rubbish bin in some misdirected and loud attempt to earn my way back into its…well, good graces. Here is what grace does: it provides reasons to mourn and celebrate together, with or without wine. It shatters my old goals and gives me a new reality. When it denies, it does so to make room for greater gifts. And it fills the space that, until recently, I was demanding wine fill, and softens the edges that I was trying to get wine to soften, and it pours me a smaller glass than the night before so that I can really taste it this time. Then it leads me to the couch on our deck while TH chases TK and LB, their shrieks no longer keeping me from a bottle but now showing up as bigger and more beautiful than it, while the sun sets here and rises ten thousand miles away, and both places are home. Cups always overflowing.