A couple of weeks ago I picked The Kid up early from school for his Monday speech therapy appointment. I told him, as we drove, about a book I had gotten him and his brother about kids who are different and do cool things: profiles of men and women who started out a bit unusual and went on to change the world.

From the backseat, he pondered this briefly then asked something I didn’t understand–hence, the speech therapy–and, as is often the case when I need him to repeat something, he grew frustrated. Finally I comprehended him: “Are the people in the book autistic?” he was asking.

I inhaled sharply. It was the first time he’s used the A-word, as we usually call it his Apple Brain, a phrase that seems more personalised and descriptive of who he is and feels less like a label. He went on to ask several more questions about autism, including whether individual members of our family are autistic “I wish my brother was,” he mused). I asked what made him wonder about all this: whether someone had mentioned autism lately outside of my talk to his class, and he responded that it was that talk that led to the questions. Later that day, he mentioned casually, “I’m an irregular kid.”

Cue the heartbreak. I had told him earlier that I was glad he and Little Brother are different because they can teach each other and us their own things. But this irregular talk–I didn’t like the sound of that, and I wondered if someone had called him that. No one had, he replied–it was just his logic making sense of his differences. He attached no negativity to the word, it was just how he saw it in the greater scheme of things. Dare I say he even sounded a bit proud of the distinction?

I of course analysed this…well, up to and past this very moment of writing it. But no matter how many ways I look at it, he seemed okay with it. And for all my fretting and searching, there’s a growing part of me that is too.

Because I am irregular. I write this from a hotel room in New York City, cranes churning and buses honking outside my window, a place I sought out because I didn’t fit in any longer where I was. Here, I found friends and The Husband and grace. I grew up. I found home, so much so that the streets are imprinted in my memory and on my heart: odd numbers west, even east. The layout of this island is a map of me, ten years ago and somehow forever, a barrage of memories pummelling me as I ran along the East River this morning, as I picked up a bagel and coffee from my corner shop, as I stood before my old apartment building and the fire escape where I thought and wrote, as I walked past TH’s old building where he proposed on the rooftop. It still fits and it doesn’t, restaurant fronts changing over and my old gym disappeared, so much changed and unchanged, like me.

I would never have come here if I had been regular.

If I had been regular, I never would have had the precedent set in my mind and soul that home can be a thousand miles away, to set me free to let it become ten thousand. I never would have flown across oceans and hemispheres or met the people I now call friends. I, my children, never would have had the stamps on our passports, would never have seen kangaroos up close, would never have descended over the mountains of the south island of New Zealand, would never have stood on an island off Tasmania with the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. There’s so much we never would have seen, felt, done.

And in a text from TH as I was dragging my jet-lagged ass to bed last night, scenes that I’m missing across the world, from the backseat once again:
LB: “James, ‘Sit Still Look Pretty’ is a girls’ song.”
TK: “Well sometimes boys like girls songs.”

YES. My irregular kids, schooling each other on the way HOME from McDonald’s, sharpening and teaching each other as I, ten thousand miles away yet always right with them, split my heart between homes and time zones and all the irregularities of my own path. Just the way it should be.