Sometimes the thought of writing again, of trying to find beauty in the past week, feels like undergoing a massive turd-polishing endeavour. There are days when the walls close in and the hormones spike and the kids are screaming and I’ve snapped way too often and I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to look for the good. I want to bitch about everything.

So I do. I do it with my “Oh, You’re an Asshole? ME TOO!” contact list. And they nod their heads from across the ocean or street or table and agree that yes, we are privileged beyond measure and yes, this shit is still hard. Every. Single. Day.

She’d sent it in a voice text, this message that had me nodding my head, and messaging back YES YES YES, that she keeps being brought back to the same place, the same lessons, even though a part of her thinks she’s already mastered this basic stuff and moved on to the next level. But what we’re learning, what we already suspected and have to keep finding out, is that there is no next level. Not this side of eternity. There is this: live, screw up, get forgiven, repeat. There is no ladder, no glorious Arrival to a life less messy, less plagued by brokenness, less life-y. There are only different problems that expose the same things about us: we’re not enough. We never will be.

It’s so f-ing depressing I could jump off a bridge. There’s a big one down the street. I’M TEMPTED.

But here’s what would happen in that scenario: I would see the view. I would remember their faces, the ones that drove me to that bridge and the ones that save me from it one and the same. And I would go back to them. And I would appreciate them for five minutes before heaving another sigh and learning another lesson. GOD IT’S EXHAUSTING.

The Kid is an endless broken record of “Why”s these days. Yeah, THAT kid, the one who didn’t talk until he was four, he won’t stop now. And one of his primary modes of communication is to ask about everything. OVER AND OVER. Why does his brother do this and say that? Why did the lights turn off? Why are they on? Why were the kids loud at school? WHY about everything that happens, everything that is, all day long from waking up to drifting off to sleep, with no interruption. I’ve shifted to telling him to ask his brother or whichever person he’s wondering about; short of that, I repeat the phrase “I don’t know” almost as much as he utters his “Why”s. I don’t think I can overemphasise how insane this whole process drives me; how the endless questioning from my formerly nonverbal child sets off a fuse in me that threatens to blow me to the bridge or bottle (the bottle is closer, luckily…?). Then I remember asking my own mother, and grandmother, my own endless “why”s and being gifted something called The Big Book of Questions one Christmas in an apparently kind-hearted but firm way of getting me to shut the hell up. And so my temptation to believe in karma kicks off again, which renews afresh my impulse to be in control, which just ruins everyone’s day.

Just when all hope is lost (AGAIN), something happens. Among those things that have happened: I’ve stumbled upon a garden in the downtown park across the street from where The Husband and I spent a kid-free night while my parents were here; I’ve stumbled across a man kneeling for his morning prayers in that same park; TK tells my mom he loves her for the first time; TK’s therapist cancels their session and the two solo hours I had clung to like a life raft immediately vanish, so I spend the morning with TK and we run into one of his teachers, who greets him lovingly, then the cashier at the book shop recognises him too–“There’s the lift operator!”–and yet another person has gone from stranger to friend; TK and I eat lunch at his favourite restaurant and he smiles at me from across the table in between a million questions.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m currently writing this from the couch, where TK sits beside me emptying my wallet and asking me about each thing within it. I AM VERY CLOSE TO THE EDGE. But I’m realising, or at least choosing to believe, that just like TK has the same questions over and over, and just like I keep being brought back to the same places over and over, there are breaks in the action, in the war that life sometimes feels like in which the beauty, or a hint of it, peeks through. Sometimes it’s barely a glimpse, a whisper that gives me one more breath. But it’s enough to make me think that maybe this whole thing isn’t actually a war; maybe the war is just happening within me. And maybe what’s happening around me is actually setting me free. I keep expecting the breaks in action to be the bulk of life, but life is happening in all the moments. What a bummer; I wanted to get past the shitty ones.

I want answers for all my questions too; all my unspoken “why”s that I utter with my frustration over things not going the way I planned or being within my control. What I am being told, in the absence of a direct answer, is that I am free from having to reach a goal. Knowing I will never arrive liberates me from having to achieve anything. And so I am brought back to the same places–the questions of my childhood echoed in the questions of my son’s; gardens in the middle of cities; forgiveness after not enough-ness; friends among strangers; endless echoes of faithfulness stretching across this life, the sameness of it all somehow becoming its beauty.