I’m approaching my four-year anniversary on antidepressants (Lexapro, if you’re nasty) this October and recently felt motivated to make a change. I sat across from a dear friend I hadn’t seen in too long a couple of weeks ago and we talked about this drug that came at a time when we both needed it: in the throes of postpartum depression, in a valley where we both had lost our sense of joy and felt like searching furiously and trying harder wouldn’t recover it. She asked for help first and guided the way for me to, and as the pill kicked in I felt a space: a space between me and the anxiety, between me and the sadness that hadn’t been there before, or else had just been filled with turbulence and anger and reaction, and was slowly (not completely, but at least partially) replaced by glorious empty space, into which moved an opportunity for me to look across and see myself as separate from the anxiety and sadness. A chance to know that they are not me and do not claim me. It didn’t fix everything, but it helped.

And when we moved to Australia over two years ago, and the walls began crashing in again and I felt, again, like I couldn’t breathe properly if at all, I sat in my doctor’s office and he told me that maybe it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. That maybe it didn’t have to be. So he increased my dosage, and that helped too.

That was two years and twelve pounds ago, and lately, as my clothes have gotten tighter and the space has returned and provided tools for my belt (just kidding, I don’t wear belts, my clothes are snug enough already), I’ve wondered if it might be time for a reassessment.

Self-guided, of course, because you can take the girl out of the controlling, but…anyway, I just wanted to try it. So last week I began halving pills. Back to my original dosage. And almost immediately I noticed an effect: tears.

(Full disclosure: when typing that, I accidentally spelled teats first. Sadly, that was not accurate.)

My tears came closer to the surface and past it. I was more easily affected, and this felt…wonderful. My friend had experienced it as well, once again lighting the path for me. I let the thickened throat and watery eyes take over at a champagne lunch for a foundation telling women’s stories of infertility and depression; I let it erupt at the ballet the next day; during afternoons with my kids when their observations humbled and wrecked me. During one unexpected moment involving the Hound and Arya.

There are times when the feelings are all too much. And there are times when they are the perfect salve, the most welcome old friend coming back.

Now I seem to be in the latter times.

Now is when the days are shorter and the evening cold creeps–or blasts, depending on the day–in, when parenting is hard but also beautiful, when we are all cutting back on our screens, when I’m cooking new things and my running mojo has returned. There may be a new Now down the road when I need the full dosage again or I have to (God forbid) return to hiking for exercise or I just don’t have the energy to be “present” enough to relegate the iPads to the shelf.

And we are waiting, always waiting, to know what our local package is, or where we’ll be in two years, or whether we need to get serious about looking at secondary education in Australia or not. Somehow along the way I had fooled myself into thinking there would ever be a time when we weren’t waiting, though. When we would be settled: into a final house, final city, final plan, where everything around us would be both Now and Future. Where I could breathe in that space.

That’s not the space, but I am breathing. Through tears, and laughter, through the way Little Brother calls us “guys” and the dearness and immediacy of it makes me stop clamouring to look ahead and grounds me in the beautiful and hard Now. Where the way The Kid’s excitement to greet me in the morning shows up in his grin and knowing look. Where I’m halving pills and turning on the heat and waking up in the dark to run and we’re possibly gearing up to sell our first home a continent away.

None of this, really, being in the plan, but in the Present.