The other night I had a dream that our family was packing up the house we’d lived in since the kids were born: the home they were brought to from the hospital, the one that contains a marking of their various heights through the years, the one in which they spent their childhoods making memories.

I woke up and realised this house doesn’t exist.

What a strange thing. I have a house like that, one that had a dent in the wall in the bedroom my sister and I shared for years where she threw herself on the bed and skidded across it, knocking her noggin into drywall. It’s the house where we bicycled from in the mornings and where we returned at sunset after hours spent roaming the neighbourhood. It has the pool where my sister gave me a scar on my forehead after a stainless steel bowl slipped from her grip when she was filling it and dumping water on me.

My kids don’t have that.

Sure, we have the house in Atlanta where they came as babies from the hospital. The Kid spent five years there and Little Brother, two. They now call it our “Holiday House” because (a) they are under the impression that we own more than one house and are, apparently, some kind of real estate moguls; and (2) they now associate it with vacations because, much like Carrie and her 73rd Street apartment on the penultimate episode of Sex and the City, “WE DON’T LIVE THERE ANYMORE.” This is a strange thing to me, and bordering on the unacceptable: my boys have lived in four houses over the past four years and will surely live in a different one after the current year.

It would be completely unacceptable were it not for the fact that we didn’t ask for this; we were pushed off this cliff by grace.

I mean, we’re not even a military family. We can’t justify this wandering by saying we’re serving our country. And it feels wrong, in some ways, like when I dropped TK off for his first day of daycare as a baby and came home to sob. But it feels less wrong when I watch them run down the beach. When I carry them through the waves, literal and figurative, of our new life. When I’m carried myself through them, because I know we wouldn’t be who we are now were it not for a grace that moves us all over the map and goes with us.

We have gained so much more than we have lost. In fact, I’m trying to remember (besides proximity to some family and friends, of course) if we’ve lost anything.

Well, TK has. Last week, he lost his fifth tooth. In many ways, though, it was like the first. It was the first one he trusted me enough to let me pull–and I could see the weighing of options, the trepidation in his eyes. (I wonder if I ever look at God like that. Of course I do.) It was also the first upper tooth, which means that his smile his now changed.

“You have a new smile!” I told him, and he considered this–he, so resistant to change, but also strangely attracted to new things, to growth. I relate. He’s been playing with the new space, and verifying that it will soon be occupied by a “grown-up tooth,” and this is only one of the million ways that he, that they, that life reminds me of what I already know but always forget: that the empty spots are places to be filled.

That “home” isn’t a house for us because it’s the four of us, this equal-sided square bouncing around the world and growing ever closer, ever tighter. Sometimes painfully so. (See: trips to the bathroom.) That so much of life is spent in the tension between old and new, in the old leaving and the new becoming old again and over and over it all goes. That my children are learning to let go, and embrace. And so am I. (It’s not the easiest exercise.)

That we have front-row seats to watch, to participate in, what grace is constantly doing: new creations.

It’s exhausting. And wonderful. And awful. And messy. Just like so much, if not all, of the real parts of life are: the “beautiful moments through the tears” that a friend just texted me; the sunrise I woke up early for that was covered by clouds–clouds that allowed just a few rays through; the pain and blood followed by a gap followed by a tooth.

Yesterday I took the boys to the beach and we chose a spot right in front of the junction of a tidal pool on one side, and the ocean on the other. The boys stepped gingerly into the tidal pool, complaining of the cold water and wanting to leave. After awhile, they wanted to get into the ocean. And they didn’t. I hiked one up on each hip and we made our way through the waves. They protested; TK in particular felt his growing weight slipping down on me and said to stop, to turn around. I put him down and asked him to trust me, then held out my hand and turned back to the waves, fully expecting to be packing it in and heading home within seconds.

Then I felt a small but growing hand in mine. I hiked him up again–it was easier, because we were now deeper–and we got past the breaking waves to the place where we could ride them. I think we’ll stay there awhile.