Yesterday was The Kid’s birthday, capping off a ten-day celebration that started on the 1st and would, were he to choose, still be going on. He woke up to balloons scattered throughout his and Little Brother’s room–both of them bounding up the stairs to announce, “Guess what?! There are balloons all over our room!” (yes, just like every year)–and a donut breakfast replete with Cars candle. I took more of those donuts in at the close of the school day and his class sang happy birthday to him while he grinned so hard I think his face stretched a bit.

We went to therapy afterward, because what kid doesn’t want that for their birthday, where we heard that he’s progressing so well that his sessions will be scaled back considerably next year, as will his school shadowing. Then we came home to a takeaway dinner with Oreo mousse dessert included. He fell asleep upon a pillow of questions as usual.

Meanwhile, I headed upstairs feeling like a Grade A asshole as usual.

It’s a broken record that I keep playing anyway: I want to be more patient. I want to answer questions enthusiastically and winsomely and in a way that encourages their curiosity. I want to stop, when they ask questions, picturing that kid at the beginning of Home Alone who follows the van driver around with queries until he’s told to get lost. I want to stop saying “because that’s the way it works.”

Christmas edition: I want to slow down. I want to stop transforming what should be a season of rest into a season of constant doing, or at least stop buying into a culture that does that. I want to stop turning everything–including viewing my favourite holiday movies–into a To Do List. I want to be still.

Meanwhile, the dining room table is covered with chocolate and cookies and Christmas cards that I will stand over TK and beg him to sign so that people will feel appreciated, dammit.

I remember one winter in New York, when I trudged up the steps near 42nd Street and 2nd Avenue toward Tudor City and the preschool there, where I was due to give a talk about teeth to the kids. Once I emerged on level ground, I saw the snow that had been my nemesis on the stairs–but here it was carpet, perfect and white and still falling in flakes. It felt like I’d been given a glimpse into a dream, into a scene to which I alone was privy in this moment. It was quiet, still, magical. Another world.

I want to see Christmas like that. But it’s SO HOT HERE.

And this is the deal–this weighing of the demands and realities of life, this day-after-the-birthday depression alongside beginning-of-Advent joy. The difference between complaining and recognising–recognising that it sucks that I won’t see my parents and sister this Christmas for the first time in years. That I won’t laugh with my cousins when the uncles make wonderfully inappropriate jokes. That I won’t see the marathon of A Christmas Story on TBS.

Unless they show it in Hawaii, of course. Because that is where I’ll be–poor little me–alongside my three male companions. It’s not a shitty deal, but it’s also not everything. I’m allowing myself a little space for the parts that are missing.

This morning my run was short. Because heat. But instead of turning around, I kept walking: over the bridge, down the stairs, and through the woods (“bush” here) to a private beach at the beginning of a hiking trail. I stood in front of the water, looking out for snakes, and felt it–what I had felt in Tudor City, but now years later and dozens of degrees warmer–the sense that I had been brought here. Led here by a love, a grace, that wanted to get me alone to show me something. To show me the magic that can happen in snowstorms and on beaches, in New York and in Australia, after Christmas and during Advent. The magic that has a name–Grace–that leads, and carries, us through hospitals and diagnoses and heat and cold and birthdays and day-after-birthdays and Christmas Day and Boxing Day and across bridges and past snakes (I assume they were there, hiding) and through days in which we are assholes and days in which we are…smaller assholes?…and through everything to moments like this: scenes of stillness and quiet, Nativities and the like, where we are singled out and loved and reminded that it’s not about the cards we make or the surprises we pull off or us at all, really. Advent is bigger, because grace is.

Anne Lamott writes, “This is how most of us are–stripped down to the bone, living along a thin sliver of what we can bear and control, until life or a friend or disaster nudges us into baby steps of expansion. We’re all both irritating and a comfort, our insides both hard and gentle, our hearts both atrophied and pure.” I’ll try to remember this tonight when the kids ask me a hundred questions starting with “Why?”–seriously, sometimes they sit on the toilet and just say “Why” and don’t even have a question prepared; I think they like saying it for the hell of it–and I struggle to maintain my sanity. I’ll remember what my friend CR said, that one of her Advent words is expansion, and that my kids sure do love to expand me–always have–and, mercifully, so does grace, which holds them and me both.