When The Kid’s first school therapist decided to move on to another job at the end of our first year here, thereby wrecking my life (kidding…kind of), he wrote me a long and beautiful email detailing how much he valued his experience with TK and our family. Included in his words was a description of how TK works really hard to hold himself together at school, to the point that (the therapist believed) TK often falls apart upon leaving the school gates to head home. I think this was mentioned at least in part because the therapist had observed several of these falling-apart episodes, which had occurred when TK was being handed off to me, and he had also likely observed my frustration during the episodes. He was encouraging me by explaining TK.

He may well have been explaining me, as I too am a perpetrator of that first-world, time-honoured virtue of Holding It Together in the midst of life’s daily struggles, and my own personal ones. When I saw a counsellor here in Sydney during that first year, after my IKEA meltdown and during a depressive period, she told me (in the first of three total sessions because, reader, I ran away) that, for someone experiencing depression and anxiety, I looked to have it together–meaning, she explained, I was wearing makeup and my hair was under control and I wasn’t in a dressing gown (that’s what they call a bathrobe here).

I guess I should have shown up with head lice and rampant armpit hair and general stank? I don’t know, but the comment left me annoyed. Annoyed…and thoughtful. Especially when a legitimate friend told me she is often surprised when I describe myself as anxious because she doesn’t always see it.

I think that I put a fair amount of effort into appearing to be something I’m not.

This discovery is shocking to me, since I spent the first couple of decades of my life doing this on a grand scale: trying to be the “sweet girl” everyone seemed to think I should be; following the rules until they broke me and my quarter-life identity crisis sent me into a bad relationship and, then, New York, to escape. Old habits die hard. Maybe my efforts aren’t as epic now, but some days all they might consist of is putting makeup on a face whose natural state, in that moment, would be Tearful and Blotchy. Or slapping jokes and laughter on a social situation that I’d do better to exit completely. We all pretend, after all. You sort of have to in order to function in society. If I had, say, swept the legs of one teacher who actually deserved it, I’d be writing this from an allotted quarter-hour at a women’s prison desktop. We put on faces. We fake it. It’s what we do.

I’m just trying to figure out how much of it is necessary, and how much is bullshit that keeps us from real connecting.

Last week, I took Little Brother and his mate to their weekly sport camp and LB decided he’d rather sit with me, during my designated Thinking and Being By Myself Time, than participate. He began to perform “tricks” for me and demand my attention: “Mom, check this out!” on repeat. I felt the anger rise in me: I needed to not have to attend to anything. I needed space. And also? I needed for one of my kids not to have trouble entering a group and doing what the other kids do because the journey of that with TK has been both beautiful and also very hard. I needed to not go through an emotional crisis with LB because all my energy for that was reserved for TK. I needed him to hold it together, as he so typically does. I needed him to make life easy for me.

This is so unfair.

I felt myself wanting to withdraw from him, and ignore his “check it out”s, and shut down. And I felt gutted by self-hatred over it. I can’t allow one kid the room to fall apart and not give the other that same space. I can’t reserve all my empathy for only one of my children.

It’s easier, of course, to deal in ratios than uncertainties, in black and white than shades of grey. This is why parenting, why life, is so exhausting: despite my efforts to find a manual, it doesn’t work that way. What a crock.

I don’t have an easy child and a difficult child. At least, I can’t see it that way. I have two boys, each with huge hearts, who express themselves differently. And this is a gift that wears me down and breaks me apart. Especially in a week when one is sick and at home and I’m falling apart already because I have a 60k hike tomorrow and no space in the meantime to just breathe. There is, instead, LB asking me to play soccer and TK needing constant cuddles and me, cracking into pieces.

There is also the pair of them telling me how much they love me, unbidden and unbribed. There is LB curling into me at bedtime, throwing his arm around me like I am his (I totally am). There is TK, surprising me by writing out all his spelling words while I go to my room for thirty seconds to put on my comfy pants, his sneaky and proud grin meeting me when I return. There will be the bottle of champagne meeting me at the finish line tomorrow, no matter what time it is. And there will be the hotel room to myself the next night, meeting me for sorely needed writing and recovery. There is also some guilt about that. There is everything, whether it shows up on my face or in my clothing or is just here for now, words that spill out because they have to, because there is just…so much. Too much to hold together, but so much that when it all does fall apart, the pieces manage to gather in a new, somehow better, way.