The Greatest Shows

It is the calm after the storm, and I’m just trying to find some level footing.

The “storm” is the chaos of a weekday morning, and the “calm” is the period of time after which I’ve dropped both boys off at their school, prying their arms off my legs/gently pushing them toward their classrooms after a two-hour stint of a thousand why questions paired with several trips to the bathroom for me and them, together, always together. They’ve climbed all over me, kicked me with spindly heels, demanded changes to their breakfast menu, yanked on my arms enough to have lengthened them at least by a few millimetres. I am stretched and weary and emotionally spent, and it’s barely 9:30 am.

I felt the need to get that out before I talk about how much I love our life here. Because it is still life, which means it is messy and hectic and full of death and resurrection.

But Sydney has been good to us. It has been, it is, home to us. We have a life here. We have so much life here.

To wit: a couple of weeks ago the boys and I went to dinner for the birthday of one of their friends, which was really just a chance for the parents to get together at a BYO establishment and toast said birthday with bottles of bubbles. While we toasted, the kids danced (and an elderly couple nearby grimaced and groaned, and I grew anxious and angry, and they complained. Life and death.). On the way home, I explained to the boys that not everyone likes dance parties in restaurants and some people just aren’t very happy, so in a rare moment of frivolity in spite of my anxiety anger, I suggested we have a dance party at home. As “The Greatest Show” blared from our speakers, we bounced around our dining table and displayed what I can only imagine were pretty sick moves. These are the moments I pray they remember, rather than the gritted-teeth responses I grant to their nonsense questions in the rushed morning hours.

To wit: I woke up Saturday morning in a hotel room by myself, not because I’d run away, but because I was celebrating my annual leave, a Mother’s Day gift from The Husband that involves a staycation at the Sheraton. I’d read chapters and chapters, drunk glasses, and watched a movie. I’d luxuriated in a bath and woken up without feet in my face or anyone asking, “Why don’t trees have butts?” I’d gotten a massage and gone for a run. I’d heard about a school shooting in Texas and grieved and grown angry. Life and death. And then I’d come home.

To wit: after hearing about that school shooting, after seeing the faces of the dead yet again and hearing the arguments for and against yet again, and imagining those I love in that position yet again, we went to The Kid’s school for their annual fireworks night. We lost Little Brother at one point for a couple of minutes until he was returned to us, tear-stained and wailing, “That was scary.” We spread our blanket on the ground among friends. We looked up at the night sky as lights pierced and illuminated it. My friend’s daughter sat in my lap, and the boys sat in TH’s. “HAPPY VALEMTINE’S DAY!” LB yelled as the lights exploded above us. “Cheers to living in Mosman,” my friend turned and said, clinking her wine-filled coffee container to mine. “They look like fairy dust in the sky,” said the girl in my lap. Death and life.

Later, I watched the royal wedding with a group of friends I never would have made were our lives and home not relocated here. Were my hopes not dashed, then shipped across the ocean, then pieced back together over the past year and a half, relocated themselves from my own misplacing of them in myself and my comforts to their true, rightful spot: within the unpredictable safety and death-defying life of grace. In the Mockingbird, Ian Olson writes of Abraham and Sarah (who knew a little something about relocation)–and all of us–“When the Lord of creative mercy interrupts our presumptions, it is an invitation to genuine hope: ‘Leave the impossible to me.’ The acceptance of our inabilities isn’t a resignation of our yearnings so much as it is the relocation of our hope to another…Someone else has taken responsibility for this pair’s misbegotten schemes and sealed them with hope.”

Sealed with hope. Through mean and angry old people misunderstanding my children, through fears wrought by the tyranny of weapons, through losing children and finding them, through chaotic mornings that stretch the limits of sanity, through moves across the world, through nights exploding with lights that boom with beauty. And as those lights continued above us, I snuck a peek at the crowd, all looking in the same direction: up. “This is AWESOME!” LB yelled. And it was. And it is.

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