I’ve never been a huge fan of my name. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.) It’s always rung 80’s alarm bells in my ears, and I get tired of repeating “IT’S WITH A P-H” to everyone who has asked throughout my life. I remember, though, finding out that names have meanings by way of a plaque that hung in my childhood room, which told me that mine meant “crowned one.” At the time it felt as about as ironic as it does now: If I were a princess I’d surely have less child poo under my fingernails, and if I were an angel I’d manage not to say fuck so frequently.

But the idea that names had meanings imbued an awareness within me to look for the meaning in all of them. In all words. In all things. It’s exhausting, but it has its perks.

Lately the boys are having back-and-forths that play like unintended comedic sketches, invented words and gestures tossed between them resulting in furthered banter, laughter, or tears. (They love to put each other in time out no matter how often I assure them neither has such authority. It’s almost like they don’t listen…) They were thrown together–we ALL were–even more tightly than usual last week, when our family took our first South Pacific holiday to Fiji. The Husband and I (he gleefully, I with tears and reticence and, later, glee) took advantage of the nanny service and kids’ club offered at our resort for a few of the mornings we were there. The Kid and Little Brother took advantage of their parents’ absence to eat only dessert and throw sand at each other. Everybody won.

When the kids’ club closed, as it always does, we collected our genetic belongings and took them to the family pool, decidedly less serene and more urine-soaked than the adult pool, and watched them enjoy their newfound comfort in the water, the product of their recent swimming lessons. At one point I was standing between them in the shallow entry as they stomped around. LB likes to announce himself these days to anyone who will listen: “I Will. Will Phillips,” as though he’s recently acquired MI6 status, to which TK will usually reply either, “I’m James Phillips,” or the more inflammatory, “NO! You’re gossy gossy!” which makes no sense but never fails to enrage LB anyway. This particular afternoon LB was tossing out his ID even though I was the only one within earshot, so my lips, loosened by a lunchtime pinot gris, uttered back sassily, “I know that! I named you.” He looked up at me with wonder, as if such an idea had never occurred to him.

The boys have been interested in their origin stories recently (I blame Facebook memories), asking about the time they spent in my belly and how they “came out” (which has me feeling grateful for C-sections and their less, ahem, intimate form of arrivals). When LB can’t sleep I whisper to him about the late-night rush to the hospital; TK loves to hear about his kicks (which persist to this day) and how tiny he was. Meanwhile I think back to us at that time, TH and I, sweetly stupid and planning for what can never be planned for, choosing names we liked then learning how suitable they were only later: TK as the supplanter, uprooting what had come before (sleeping in, for example, and small, predictable dreams) and LB as protector, the meaning playing out like prophecy as he comforts TK when he’s troubled: “It’s okay, James, there’s nothing to be scared about.”

But the best part has been watching them stretch beyond their names and try on each others’ for size, TK patting LB in the backseat when he cries as only a two-year-old between naps and no naps can: “It’s okay, Will. I’ll make you happy.” LB reveling in the sounds he makes that entertain his older brother and distract him: “I make James laugh!”

The last few weeks have been rough. It’s seasonal, hormonal, everything I guess, anxiety dogging me even when vacation beckons, reminding me that this is a condition, not a mood. And I wonder, in the midst of it, which problem runs deeper, my anxiety or my distrust: distrust in the meaning of my name, in my identity within the realm of grace, in the promise that all will one day be made new? The answer matters little when I know the alchemy will always be there, this mixture of both pulling my eyes away from what is changeless and true. But it can be so easy to look away, to want to run even, when grace’s movements feel so aggressive, when they seem more like interruptions than rescue: TK’s constant questions after years of speechlessness, LB’s unceasing desire to be held. While we were all piled in bed one night on our trip, the kids had a hard time settling in the new environment. Suddenly I felt a piercing stab right at chest level and realised TK had, in his excitement, chomped down on my boob in a way he hadn’t since they fed him over five years ago. “WHY?!” was the question I was now asking him, the physical pain competing with the frustration of my body never feeling like my own space, not for years now.

I really do want so many answers. Some days, all I seem to have are questions.

And yet there aren’t enough answers, not often. Not reliably. There are words, though, and names, and the hardest relationships I have are with the two whom I have named, and with the one who named me. The one who calls me beloved even as I call my children that, often through gritted teeth as I’m about to crawl out of my skin if they touch me one more time. These two who protested as we dragged them down to the sand bar I’d escaped to the day before, a bed of shells and earth right there in the turquoise water. I want them to know what I know–the beauty and healing of salt water–even more than I did, the Gulf becoming the South Pacific. So we taught them how to ride the waves, and for a moment the anxiety leaked away, and yet remained, their tiny bodies bobbing along with the rhythms set in places we can’t see: the terror mixed with euphoria, the fear mixed with ecstasy, the alchemy that occurs only when life is being fully lived. Yet another question entered my mind, but it was as though from a poem written on my heart, unforgettable even when I think it’s disappeared or I’ve been lost from it–“Who is this, even the wind and the waves obey him?”–and the answer to it being the answer, the changeless and unrelenting answer, to everything.